ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the author's point of view on Paulo Freire's writings. Freire wrote and taught actively during 1980s period. The author was assigned to teach kindergarten in a school in a high-poverty area. The program introduced her to Paulo Freire's writings. Continuing to adopt Freirian-inspired perspectives on education, literacy, and pedagogy, the author goal has been to expose, challenge, and change institutional practices, policies, and patterns of participation that function to conceal and to maintain illegitimate and repressive relations of power and domination in the social order of US schools. Patterned illiteracy, from Freire's point of view, was a direct consequence of political policies and an oppressive social order. Literacy, Freire claimed, can provide the knowledge, dispositions, and skills for the redistribution of power and income among the oppressed masses. Many principles of Freire's educational theory and methods of participatory learning were applied to the CREATE program.
