Carlos Alberto Torres, Distinguished Professor of Education at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies (GSEIS) has been honored with the Cyril O. Houle Award for Outstanding Literature in Adult Education for “First Freire” (New York: Teachers College Press, 2014). The book is about Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, who authored, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” Torres, who founded and directs the Paulo Freire Institute at GSEIS, is considered the foremost biographer of Freire.
Receiving the Houle Award, given by the American Association of Adult and Continuing Education as the most prestigious book award in adult education in the United States, “humbles me and invites me to continue my research, writing and teaching a pedagogy of struggle," said Torres. "’First Freire’ is the culmination of 30 years of research, studying how Paulo Freire, in exile, managed to write one of the most fundamental education books of the 20th Century. I wanted to discover the narrative threads of his intellectual tapestry in building an education for social justice.”
Torres said that “First Freire” was “a labor of love in the middle of my own exile from Argentina, from a country not so different from [Freire’s]… from an Argentine dictatorship that, like the Brazilian dictatorship that expelled Freire, made me, like him, a globetrotter and a world citizen."
Read the complete story in the GSEIS news magazine, Ampersand.
