Carlos Alberto Torres, UCLA Distinguished Professor of Education and UNESCO Chair in Global Learning and Global Citizenship Education, has been honored with the Cyril O. Houle Award for Outstanding Literature in Adult Education, for his book, “First Freire” (New York: Teachers College Press, 2014). Torres is considered the foremost biographer of the Brazilian educator and philosopher who authored, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.”
The Cyril O. Houle Award for Outstanding Literature in Adult Education humbles me and invites me to continue my research, writing and teaching a pedagogy of struggle,” says Professor Torres, who founded and directs the Paulo Freire Institute at UCLA. “’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 20 Century. I wanted to discover the narrative threads of his intellectual tapestry in building an education for social justice.”
Torres says 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 Brazillian dictatorship that expelled Freire, made me, like him, a globetrotter and a world citizen.
“It was a journey that taught me enormously about the struggles for justice and revolution in Latin America, and helped me understand why Freire became an icon, a guru, a beacon for social change, and his work a classic in the field of education. It also reaffirmed my conviction that critical studies in education provide some of the most insightful answers to the many conundrums we find in our schools, classrooms, and popular adult and continuing education sites.”
The Cyril O. Houle Award for Outstanding Literature in Adult Education is given by the American Association of Adult and Continuing Education (AAACE), and is the most prestigious book award in adult education in the United States.
Professor Torres is the president of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES). He is the author of 70 books including “Dialogue and Educational Praxis – A Critical Reading of Paulo Freire” (São Paulo: Edições Loyola, 2014. Print), and co-editor of “Comparative Education: The Dialectic of the Global and the Local” (With R. Arnove, S. Franz, eds. 4th ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2013). Torres is the co-founder of the International Paulo Freire Institute Network, which includes colleagues and institutions in more than 90 countries throughout North America, South America, and Europe.
Photo by Todd Cheney, UCLA