ABSTRACT
Perhaps Paolo Freire’s most important insight is that schools often inculcate a certain intellectual passivity in students that serves to preserve unjust social structures by rendering them invisible. A significant challenge for teachers is to find a way to wake students from this passive acceptance of things as they are and encourage them to imagine how they might be instead. This case study looks at an attempt to awaken critical consciousness through the act of student journalism. It examines the "Life in Kochi Project", an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) composition course taught within the intensive, semester-long English Program for International Communication (EPIC) of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science at Kochi National University in Kochi, Japan. The focus unit of this case study, the "Life in Kochi Project", began in 2010 to give EPIC students experience in EFL composition for an audience beyond the classroom.
