When a Freirean team of educators enters a community, they begin by identifying key social issues and the emotion-laden words that call these issues to mind. Makeshift housing had been constructed on steep hillsides, and with no streets or stairways, people were literally slipping and sliding through life. One of these, certainly, was Nicaragua. With Freire as consultant, the Sandinistas planned a national literacy campaign as one of their first priorities after coming to power in 1979. These new teachers, largely urban and middle class, would in turn learn from their students about the lives of the nation's destitute majority.
Freirean methods are very influential in Latin America and are used in many U.S. literacy programs.
But Klaudia Rivera's work shows that liberatory education , too, can make the sometimes difficult transition from the so-called developing world to our own.