The organization of the Thematic Dossier "Paulo Freire and Popular Education: culture, methodologies, places and subjects", aimed to place in dialogue unpublished researchers’ productions from various regions of Brazil and from different academic and institutional affiliates, inspired in the IV Thematic Seminar of GT 06 - Popular Education of Anped, in September 2020.

The above-mentioned seminar was held remotely at Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos - UNISINOS, from a resilient partnership between UNISINOS and other universities in the South of Brazil, such as Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul - PUC / RS, Universidade de Santa Cruz do Sul - UNISC, Universidade de Caxias do Sul - UCS and Universidade Federal da Fronteira Sul - UFFS, among others. All, with a strong political and academic tradition regarding Popular Education in their Teaching, Research and Extension works. The IV Thematic Seminar of GT 06 strongly maintained the tradition of promoting an annual exchange in the period preceding the Anped national meeting.

Based on these brief considerations, we point out that this dossier has as its thematic axis three fundamental and constitutive dimensions of Popular Education: culture, methodologies, places, and subjects, as well as the GT 06 Seminar. Thus, they complement and define the dossier scope.

From the organizational point of view, the dossier is made by eleven texts, with eight articles from different regions of Brazil, an international article, an interview, and a biographical review. The texts include a great diversity of thematic approaches, revealing how up-to-date and fruitful is Paulo Freire's thinking in the Brazilian social and educational field. Through them, his work is reinvented in the present, providing critical reflection and confrontation with many challenges displayed in contemporary times.

The first article, Between the Origins and Now: Memories and Paths of Popular Education is written by Carlos Rodrigues Brandão and Valeria Vasconcelos. It develops a historical analysis around the popular definition that complements education: popular education, conceiving it as a process of coming-to-be, and becoming permanente.

The second text, written by Orlandil Lima Moreira and Jaime José Zitkoski, is Popular Education in Paraíba: memory and SEDUP history. In it, the authors investigate "the Popular Education Service (SEDUP) contribution to the popular education movement in Paraíba, evidenced by its history and memory in two periods, resistance to military authoritarianism and the democratic transition."

Next, About different and antagonistic: Popular Health Education in times of denialism, an article by Ana Paula Massadar Morel, develops an instigating problematization about the denialism growth in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. She also reflects on the legitimacy of popular knowledge based on health education, placing herself critically in front of the knowledge colonization.

The fourth article, authored by Ana Maria Baldo and Elisete Enir Bernardi Garcia, addresses the consciousness in Paulo Freire issue. It is an investigation in which the authors seek to demonstrate the existence of a direct relationship between education, the transition to the level of critical consciousness, and human and societal transformation. The article is entitled Intransitivity, naive transitivity, and critical transitivity of consciousness in Paulo Freire.

In Popular Extension: theoretical-methodologies, article written by Pedro José Santos Carneiro Cruz, Renan Soares Araujo, Celany Teixeira Mélo and Ane Flávia Souza Rodrigues, fifth article in this dossier, we find a theoretical-methodological approach on Popular Extension. Evidencing extension in its dialogic and popular dimension as a starting point for university action, the text presents questions about a reflection on extension practices in interface with decolonial thought.

Entitled Everyday Research: action, participation, and transformation in public education, the sixth article is authored by Fabiana Eckhardt, Fabiano Soares Silva and Renato Simões. Everyday Research is presented as a participatory methodology, which finds in the dialogue the methodological and epistemological principle capable of conceiving the everyday as an instance of "demand, response, reflection, elaboration of concrete reality and knowledge production." Reinforcing, therefore, the emancipatory research role on / with the everyday.

The seventh article, Public and Popular Early Childhood Education Challenges: necessary dialogues by the authors Carolina Silva de Alecar, Nayara Alves Macedo and Fabiana Nery de Lima Pessanha address, from popular education, some challenges of Early Childhood Education in contemporary times. Anchoring in Paulo Freire and his writings, they invite reflection on tensions and conflicts involved "fostering children and families from popular classes in Public Infant Education."

A song for Being More: music and resistance in the Vale do Jequitinhonha, corresponds to the eighth article of the dossier. In it, Pedro Augusto Dutra de Oliveira, and Maria Wldenez de Oliveira, in dialogues with Enrique Dussel, Paulo Freire and Anibal Quijano present and analyze the Trovadores del Vale choir, active for 50 years in the Vale do Jequitinhonha-MG, aiming to identify educational processes triggered by their actions, involving songs, as well as dances.

The last article is about an international text, authored by Marco Raúl Mejía, a Colombian popular educator, entitled Popular Educations Paradoxes and its actors in times of progressists governments and coronavirus. The author presents a paradigmatic understanding of popular education, analyzing its historical background, practical and conceptual foundations, beyond other aspects that constitute it, encouraging its paradoxes, as well as its subjects "in times of progressists governments and coronavirus."

In A Life in Defense of Popular Education: Interview with Danilo R. Streck, the organizers dialogue with Professor Danilo Streck about his story as an educator and researcher with popular education. Throughout the interview, he analyzes and develops in depth topics such as: the multiple popular educations, a plural movement of an educational conception that is not fixed, and is recreated in front of the reality challenges; the role of popular education and science in the current historical moment; his meeting with Paulo Freire and the Freirean influence on the international scene; the importance of popular education and of Paulo Freire for the emergence of a South epistemic matrix; as well as their projects, in the midst of the “pandemic lessons”.

Finally, the review Paulo Freire and I: learnings, transformations, and an encounter with the Pedagogy of Hope, in which Nize Maria Campos Pellanda recovers "affective memories mixed with significant learning" resulting from her encounters with Paulo Freire. Encounters such as those of the “great adventure” that was “the trip to Bagé (RS) to visit the MST camp in Hulha Negra”, narrated among feelings of perplexity and hope in the face of the events witnessed. In her conclusive statement, the author highlights that “Paulo Freire was never as necessary as in the dark days in which we live. For this reason, let us remember the utopia and the great teacher dream to accompany us in the fight for a Liberating Education”.

This is how, reinvigorated in the enabling hope, radically supported by Paulo Freire, we invite you to read this dossier, published during the innumerable and well-deserved commemorations for his centenary of birth (1921-2021). Reinventing Freire's thought and popular education are tasks that challenge us, daily, in our reading of the world, fighting to make it more just, supportive, and welcoming of the diversity that defines us, as human beings.

Good Reading!