ABSTRACT

Throughout his life, Paulo Freire affirmed the revolutionary power of teaching as an act of love. In Teachers and Cultural Workers, he provides a rightful place for this engagement of the body in the classroom, encompassing an integral view of students as multidimensional human beings. Freire repeatedly affirmed in his work that the perception of our students as embodied human beings is paramount to both a liberatory classroom practice and the development of critical consciousness. He often spoke of teachers as cultural workers, for in every way that teachers engage or do not engage students, they are teaching values—values about what it means to live in this world and what it means to relate to other human beings. It is impossible to forge a revolutionary practice without the willingness of teachers to grapple with the dialectical tensions at work in negotiating power and authority in the classroom.