Research that teaches, listening that (trans)forms: the NEPSO program from a freirean perspective

Abstract

This article examines convergences between the Nossa Escola Pesquisa Sua Opinião program and Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, showing how student-led opinion surveys can constitute critical, dialogic practices. It is a qualitative essay that brings Freirean categories into dialogue with a documentary analysis of the program’s guidelines and records. The findings provide a systematic account of the operational stages, articulate axes of convergence, and identify four educational dimensions: epistemological, communicative, sociopolitical, and ethical–collective. It argues that the proposal establishes a pedagogy of questioning and listening, recognizes students as subjects capable of interpreting and transforming reality, and reaffirms the school as a site of citizenship education oriented toward social justice and democracy.

Keywords
Nossa Escola Pesquisa Sua Opinião program; Paulo Freire; critical education; opinion surveys; student agency

Resumo

O artigo examina convergências entre o programa Nossa Escola Pesquisa Sua Opinião e a pedagogia de Paulo Freire, mostrando como pesquisas de opinião conduzidas por estudantes podem configurar práticas críticas e dialógicas. Trata-se de ensaio qualitativo que articula categorias freirianas à análise documental de diretrizes e registros do programa. Os resultados sistematizam as etapas operacionais, explicitam eixos de convergência e identificam quatro dimensões formativas: epistemológica, comunicativa, sociopolítica e ético-coletiva. Argumenta-se que a proposta instaura uma pedagogia da pergunta e da escuta, reconhece estudantes como sujeitos capazes de interpretar e transformar a realidade e reafirma a escola como espaço de formação cidadã orientada à justiça social e à democracia.

Palavras-chave
Nossa Escola Pesquisa Sua Opinião; Paulo Freire; educação crítica; pesquisa de opinião; protagonismo estudantil

Resumen

El artículo examina las convergencias entre el programa Nuestra Escuela Pregunta Su Opinión y la pedagogía de Paulo Freire, y muestra cómo las encuestas de opinión realizadas por estudiantes pueden constituir prácticas críticas y dialógicas. Se trata de un ensayo cualitativo que articula categorías freireanas con el análisis documental de las directrices y los registros del programa. Los resultados presentan de manera sistemática las etapas operativas, explicitan los ejes de convergencia e identifican cuatro dimensiones formativas: epistemológica, comunicativa, sociopolítica y ético-colectiva. Se sostiene que la propuesta instaura una pedagogía de la pregunta y de la escucha, reconoce a estudiantes como sujetos capaces de interpretar y transformar la realidad, y reafirma la escuela como espacio de formación ciudadana orientada a la justicia social y la democracia.

Palabras clave
Programa Nuestra Escuela Pregunta Su Opinión; Paulo Freire; educación crítica; encuesta de opinión; protagonismo estudiantil

Introduction

Although historically associated with the social sciences, communication, and marketing, public opinion research finds its most emblematic expression in the political sphere (Lima, 2017). Since the mid-twentieth century, this instrument has been widely used to gauge electoral trends, evaluate public policies, monitor voter behavior, and guide institutional communication strategies. In democratic regimes, it has become one of the principal forms of mediation among the state, the media, and civil society, occupying a central place in public debate and influencing social perceptions, collective decisions, and forms of political participation (Bourdieu, 1981; Lima et al., 2010).

Although opinion surveys can strengthen democratic practices by broadening public listening, bringing a diversity of perspectives to light, and fostering informed debate, they also require critical reflection on their uses and limitations. Pierre Bourdieu (1981), for example, warns that, in certain contexts, they may be appropriated in technical and depoliticized ways, reducing the complexity of social positions to statistical rankings or serving to legitimize power asymmetries. Educating people who can understand how such surveys are produced, which methodologies underpin them, and what symbolic and material effects they may generate is therefore an unavoidable educational task.

This ambivalence, however, does not diminish the pedagogical value of opinion surveys; on the contrary, it reinforces the need to engage with them in ethical, critical, and educational ways. They should therefore be incorporated into everyday school life both as an object of study and as an educational strategy, foregrounding their potential to investigate reality, produce knowledge collaboratively, and develop analytical, communicative, and civic competencies. In particular, they foster practices of listening, dialogue, problematization, and critical positioning in relation to issues that cut across the community and the lives of its members (Andrade & Araújo, 2014).

It is against this backdrop that the Nossa Escola Pesquisa Sua Opinião (NEPSO) program emerged. Created in 2000, it grew out of a partnership between the Instituto Paulo Montenegro (IPM),¹ then affiliated with the Instituto Brasileiro de Opinião Pública e Estatística (Ibope),² and the civil society organization Ação Educativa.³ The program guides students in conducting systematic opinion surveys on topics that interest them, which become socially relevant through the curiosity they generate about how different people position themselves in relation to those topics. As Kalil (2012) observes, the resulting discussions and a methodical interest in a group’s opinions tend to foster the collaborative construction of knowledge.

Through the production of outreach materials and the development of implementation strategies grounded, on the one hand, in research expertise and, on the other, in experience with education and the promotion of citizenship, NEPSO came to be adopted in public and community schools in Brazil and other countries in Latin America and Europe, integrating teaching, inquiry, and social action.⁴ The planning, conduct, and analysis of student-led opinion surveys seek to foster dialogue with the territories, critical data literacy, and listening as a political practice. In this sense, significant connections can be identified between NEPSO and the foundations of Paulo Freire’s liberatory pedagogy.

More than rhetorical affinities, this convergence is expressed in methodological choices, procedures, and forms of coordination that support transformative pedagogical practices. This article aims to analyze these convergences, showing how a proposal in which students design, conduct, and analyze opinion surveys can serve as a tool for critical, dialogic, and emancipatory education.

To this end, we draw on central categories in Freirean thought and analyze publications by the Instituto Paulo Montenegro and Ação Educativa that support the program’s implementation in classrooms, schools, and school networks within different education systems. The approach is qualitative, theoretical, and reflective, and rests on the premise that listening, research, and young people’s agency are essential educational dimensions in reinventing the school as a site of social transformation.

Foundations of Paulo Freire’s pedagogy: Conceptual choices

Paulo Freire’s pedagogy is one of the most influential formulations of critical and emancipatory education, radically committed to transforming social reality. Conceived through his work with adult workers in Northeastern Brazil, developed during his political exile in the 1960s and 1970s, and further elaborated over the course of his political-pedagogical and reflective trajectory after he returned to Brazil in the 1980s and 1990s, his proposal goes beyond the didactic and methodological plane to take on ethical, political, epistemological, and ontological dimensions. For Freire, no educational practice is neutral: “education is a political act” (Freire, 2019, p. 83, our translation), which always entails taking a position, whether to preserve the existing order or to overcome it.

A popular educator, philosopher of praxis, and radical humanist, Freire proposes a pedagogy grounded in the recognition that people educate one another, mediated by the world (Freire, 2013). This means that the educational process is both relational and situated: it unfolds through encounters among subjects and is nourished by a critical reading of lived reality. From this perspective, education is a historical practice oriented toward the possibility of overcoming oppression and building a more just world rooted in solidarity.

By affirming that human beings are beings of praxis—that is, of action and reflection upon the world in order to transform it—Freire maintains that to educate is to foster the capacity to intervene in the world with awareness, intentionality, and responsibility (Freire, 2013). His pedagogy is therefore constitutively linked to the notion of freedom, not as an individualistic liberal abstraction (Bauman, 1999), but as a collective project built through the problematization of reality and critical participation in historical and social processes.

This understanding requires overcoming vertical relationships between educators and learners, valuing listening, fostering openness to dialogue, exercising epistemic curiosity, politicizing everyday experience, and committing to social transformation. To ground the discussion developed here, we next present the conceptual axes of Freirean pedagogy that will inform the analysis of the connections identified between the NEPSO program and this pedagogical perspective.

Liberatory education: Critiquing the banking model and moving beyond the transmission model

One of the most emblematic strands of Paulo Freire’s work is his critique of the banking model of education, through which he denounces a pedagogical model centered on the mechanical transfer of content and the denial of learners’ active role in the learning process. In banking education, “instead of communicating, the educator issues ‘communiqués’ and makes deposits that learners, treated as mere receptacles, patiently receive, memorize, and repeat” (Freire, 2013, p. 59, our translation). Drawing on the metaphor of banking operations, Freire argues that, under this model, learning tends to be reduced to accumulating information, with little room for creation, reflection, or transformation.

The logic of accumulation undermines the dialogic nature of education and is expressed in the very configuration of the relationship between educators and learners, which is marked by a rigid asymmetry of roles: educators possess knowledge, whereas those to be educated are placed in a position of silence and subordination. Figure 1 summarizes the roles that, according to Freire (2013), are assigned to educators and learners in the banking model of education.

Figure 1
Roles assumed by educators and educational institutions, and by those who are to be educated, under the banking model of education

This assignment of roles contributes to the reproduction of relations of domination by constraining critical thought, naturalizing inequalities, and making it difficult for students to recognize themselves as subjects of their own educational process. To break with this logic, Freire (2013) proposes a liberatory form of education (also termed problem-posing education) grounded in curiosity, listening, and the collective investigation of reality.

Liberatory education, therefore, stands in opposition to the banking model. It begins with concrete experience and values reflection, fostering critical thought; it does not reject curricular content, but requires that it be addressed in connection with the subjects’ lived world. What is taught must be meaningful, engage with everyday life, and prompt questions. From this perspective, teaching also entails learning, and the classroom is affirmed as a space for the joint production of knowledge, listening, and transformation (Freire, 2013).

Dialogicality as method, ethics, and politics in education

In Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, dialogue cannot be reduced to a methodological procedure or a neutral communication strategy. It is an ontological requirement of human existence: a way of being in the world that brings together action and reflection directed toward transforming reality. Thus, for Freire (2013), “there can be no true word without praxis” (p. 52), meaning that dialogue is intrinsically bound to a commitment to social change.

More than an exchange of ideas, dialogue is an encounter among subjects who recognize themselves as unfinished, historically situated, and open to the collective construction of knowledge. It is in this encounter that critical thinking takes shape: by problematizing a shared world, subjects not only interpret it but also recreate it. Dialogue is therefore grounded in recognizing the dignity of others and rejecting oppressive relationships, because it entails active listening, respect, and openness to otherness.

In contrast to the hierarchy and one-way transmission characteristic of the banking model of education, Freire proposes a dialogic pedagogical relationship in which educators and learners teach and learn from one another through a process of shared knowledge production. Figure 2 presents this relational configuration schematically.

Figure 2
Dialogic pedagogical relationship

Freire’s (2013) concept of dialogicality expresses an existential, ethical, and political stance grounded in the conviction that human beings constitute themselves as historical subjects through encounter, listening, and sharing. From this perspective, engaging in dialogue entails a commitment to liberation, active listening, recognizing differences, and confronting the asymmetries that structure society. This is the horizon of liberatory education: a practice that not only transmits content but also calls on subjects to engage in transforming themselves, others, and the world.

For this reason, in Freirean pedagogy, research is constitutive of both learning and teaching. Teaching requires an inquiry stance toward reality, the subjects involved, and knowledge itself. As Freire (2019) states emphatically, “teaching requires research. There is no teaching without research, and no research without teaching. Each of these practices is embodied in the other” (p. 31).

Likewise, because liberatory teaching is inherently dialogic and problem-posing, education must cultivate dispositions and provide tools that enable educators and learners to interrogate reality through an enduring stance of inquiry, discovery, and collective (re)construction of knowledge. Interrogating reality entails an inquiry stance that extends beyond its technical dimension and becomes a way of being and living in the world, requiring epistemic curiosity, intellectual humility, and an ethical and political commitment to social transformation.

Conscientization and the critical reading of reality

In Freirean pedagogy, conscientization goes beyond merely “becoming aware.” It is an educational process through which subjects recognize themselves as active participants in reality and as capable of intervening in it through critical reflection and action.

According to Freire (2015), conscientization entails an ongoing effort to reflect on one’s own practice, which requires moving beyond naive, naturalized, or fatalistic views of the world and apprehending the contradictions that structure social life. This process begins with reading the world, which, as Freire maintains, precedes reading the word, and it calls on subjects to interpret reality through their concrete experiences and historical conditions of existence.

From this perspective, teaching literacy or curricular content is not enough: educational experiences must foster the critical identification of power relations, challenge the taken-for-granted status of inequalities, and confront hegemonic narratives, including in their epistemological dimension. The school thus becomes a space for listening, problematization, and dialogue, where educators and learners come to understand the world not as given but as historical, open to interpretation from different perspectives and to transformation through collective projects. Conscientization, therefore, is a foundational axis of liberatory pedagogy: it is neither a stage nor an auxiliary resource, but the ethical and political driving force of the educational process.

Collective and situated knowledge production

In Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, knowledge is not conceived as neutral, finished, or external to the subject. Rather, it is produced socially, historically, and in situated contexts through the interaction between subjects and the world. By breaking with the logic of one-way transmission, Freire shifts the center of learning toward a dialogic and collaborative act of knowing, in which educators and learners share authorship of forms of knowledge produced in and from the context (Freire, 2013, 2019).

This knowledge emerges from concrete experiences, the cultures that shape subjects, and the contradictions lived within their territories. From a liberatory perspective, therefore, knowledge must be grounded in everyday life, social practices, and attentive listening to the multiple forms of knowledge that circulate within and beyond the school. In this view, teaching does not mean transferring content legitimated by higher authorities, but creating conditions for subjects to interrogate the world, reflect on it, and collectively reinterpret it (Freire, 2013).

Freire conceives of the school as a meeting place for different ways of knowing—the scientific and the popular, the academic and the lived (Vasconcelos et al., 2022). Their coexistence challenges hierarchies among forms of knowledge and opens possibilities for learners’ experience to be recognized as a legitimate starting point for the educational process. What is learned, therefore, cannot be separated from those who learn, and the curriculum ceases to be foreign to subjects’ reality, becoming instead a space for dialogue among distinct readings of the world (Freire, 2013).

In this movement, knowledge ceases to be an accumulated possession and becomes a shared good, produced through the collective practice of listening, problematization, and creation. Learning thus extends beyond the cognitive domain: it is also ethical, political, and cultural, because it involves meaning-making that mobilizes subjects to transform themselves and reality. Within this horizon, learning means recognizing oneself as part of the world and as jointly responsible for its reinvention.

The NEPSO program: Opinion survey research as an educational practice

The NEPSO program emerged in 2000 as a proposal to integrate opinion surveys into pedagogical practice, reframing their social and educational role in the school setting. Its creation was preceded by a seminar that brought together educators, researchers, and specialists to reflect on the pedagogical potential of opinion surveys and collaboratively develop teaching materials to guide their implementation in public schools (Instituto Paulo Montenegro, 2015).

Following this initial meeting, a pilot project was developed in schools in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo to test, in practice, the possibilities and effects of incorporating opinion surveys into everyday school life. The results pointed to significant effects, including more dynamic classes, closer connections between curricular content and students’ lived realities, stronger interdisciplinary work, and greater student agency (Instituto Paulo Montenegro, 2015).

Since then, NEPSO has become established as a pedagogical approach that integrates teaching, research, and democratic participation, engaging students and teachers in analyzing socially relevant topics and fostering the development of cognitive, communicative, ethical, statistical, and political competencies (Correia et al., 2024).

In Brazil, NEPSO was organized through regional outreach and support hubs and centers. Hubs operated in São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais, Pernambuco, Distrito Federal, and Paraná, along with centers in Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, established through coordination led by the program’s educational team. At each hub or center, teachers and students take part in professional learning workshops, research-sharing seminars, and action plans aimed at investigating emerging social issues.

Initiatives were also developed in partnership with universities, state and municipal departments of education, and public institutions and facilities working in education. At the Minas Gerais hub, for example, adopting the NEPSO methodology as an interdisciplinary approach within Projeto Entrelaçando—a grade-acceleration initiative of the Belo Horizonte Municipal Department of Education designed to address age–grade distortion—had positive effects on adolescents’ relationships with school and learning (Andrade & Araújo, 2014).

Internationally, NEPSO worked with research institutes and partner organizations to establish initiatives in Chile (Williamson & Hidalgo, 2015), Argentina (Gesualdi, 2014), Peru (Gamboa Risgo, 2017), Colombia (Baquero Torres & Sandoval Moreno, 2020), and Mexico (Oliveira & Reis, 2021). The initiative in Portugal later joined the network through a partnership with Fundação Vox Populi (Cardoso & Pestana, 2023).

A project carried out within the NEPSO framework follows eight sequential stages (Lima et al., 2010), which together form a collaborative, systematic, and formative inquiry pathway, described below:

Topic selection

At this stage, students are invited to propose topics arising from their concerns, experiences, and contexts. Teachers facilitate the process, fostering attentive listening, respect for diverse interests, and recognition of the territory as a source of knowledge. This is a crucial stage, because curiosity about the topic and the opportunity to choose it tend to influence the group’s engagement and student agency.

The presentation and defense of proposals by subgroups, the use of creative activities, and a collective vote (or the selection of an “umbrella topic” for the study) foster dialogue, negotiation, and a sense of belonging. This thus becomes a moment in which the object of study is constructed collectively, inaugurating a democratic, situated, and ethically grounded research practice.

Exploring and refining the topic

At this stage, students broaden their knowledge base through a range of information sources, such as interviews with experts, news reports, videos, statistics, and prior research. The group’s curiosity is harnessed to deepen its conceptual understanding and problematize the topic under investigation.

By gathering and comparing information, students formulate hypotheses, refine the guiding questions, and define the target population. Exploring and refining the topic also facilitates connections to the school curriculum by bringing together knowledge from different curriculum areas and enabling the selected topic to be examined beyond common sense.

Defining the population and sample

At this point, the group plans who will be heard and why, reflecting on representativeness and inclusion criteria. Depending on the level of schooling, concepts such as the target population and sample, sampling techniques, and limitations associated with the results may be introduced. The definition of the population and sample, however, must consider the project’s pedagogical and logistical feasibility. Even so, the group receives guidance on ethical concerns and the need to make interpretive limitations explicit in light of the sample’s characteristics.

This stage introduces students to the foundations of empirical research and invites them to reflect on the political implications of listening: who has a voice, who is usually heard, and who is rendered invisible? These questions show that public listening is not merely a technical procedure but also a political act, because deciding whom we listen to and how we listen is part of struggles over visibility, recognition, and power in social life.

Questionnaire design

Constructing data-collection instruments requires clarity, objectivity, accessible language, and consistency with the study’s objectives. Students learn to distinguish among open-ended, closed-ended, and partially open-ended questions, organize the sequence of questions, and reflect on the meanings that particular wording may produce. They are also encouraged to propose response options and assess both whether the categories are mutually exclusive and whether the set of options is exhaustive.

In addition, comparing the study’s aims with the conditions required and available for questionnaire administration makes students and teachers aware of the need to develop screening questions, so that the questionnaire is answered only once and exclusively by people who have the characteristics of the study population and are part of the sample. This comparison also prompts discussion of what to ask respondents about their background characteristics (age, schooling, gender and the race or color with which they identify, religion, place of birth, occupation, etc.), why to ask it, and how—or whether—to do so, since collecting such information could provide interpretive keys for their answers to questions concerning the study topic. Thus, at levels of complexity appropriate to their age or stage of schooling, students learn to organize the questionnaire structure (screening questions, demographic and background questions, substantive questions), considering their informational value as well as ethical and operational issues, while also seeking to organize and format the instrument in ways that facilitate both its administration and the subsequent tabulation of the responses obtained.

The use of a pretest as a validation strategy is encouraged as a methodological and reflective practice. This stage makes it possible to discuss limitations or identify adjustments related to the linguistic, ethical, and technical dimensions of opinion survey research, reinforcing the idea that asking questions is, above all, a way of acting in the world.

Fieldwork

The direct-listening stage also brings the study into the public sphere. Students enter the field, conduct interviews, record responses, and learn from others. To do so, the group must organize itself, allocate tasks, observe the criteria established for the sample, decide where the interviews will take place, verify any restrictions, rules, and access procedures, prepare to approach prospective respondents and handle refusals, and assess when approaches need to be adjusted. Contact with diverse social perspectives can challenge prejudices and broaden empathy, while also requiring respect for others’ views and ethical rigor in listening. Prior training, classroom simulations, and teacher support strengthen the formative nature of this stage.

Data tabulation and processing

The data collected must be organized and processed using manual or digital records, such as spreadsheets, tables, diagrams, and other representations, according to the group’s characteristics and the study’s objectives. Students of different ages learn to code responses and construct analytical categories. At more advanced levels of schooling, they may develop frequency tables, calculate percentages, use measures of central tendency and dispersion, and cross-tabulate variables, interpreting what these results mean.

Even in the absence of in-depth statistical analysis, this stage builds familiarity with practices for organizing and synthesizing information and underscores the importance of organizing data to understand complex realities, reframing mathematics as a means of interpreting social reality.

Analysis and interpretation of results

Rather than merely presenting numbers, this stage seeks to build understanding and make sense of the findings. Students cross-reference information, compare variables, test hypotheses, and compare the results with their initial assumptions or with evidence available from other sources. This interpretive and argumentative practice requires critical reading, the ability to synthesize, and connections between data and context. Collective work intensifies, and analytical disagreements become opportunities to develop critical thinking and engage in evidence-based dialogue.

Synthesis, presentation, and dissemination of findings

The findings are organized into communication outputs such as reports, posters, displays, videos, podcasts, and public debates. In the process, the school broadens its dialogue with the community, and students practice active citizenship by communicating what they have produced. This stage may also lead to intervention initiatives: the findings return to the territory and can inform projects, bring local concerns onto the public agenda, and strengthen ties between school and society.

These stages mobilize multiple forms of language and a range of skills, foster interdisciplinarity, teamwork, listening to others, and engagement with social reality. Throughout this process, research is treated not merely as a technical instrument but as a social and educational practice that fosters the development of critical, participatory subjects (Kalil, 2012).

Each stage of NEPSO brings together specific skills and contributes to broad, situated education, extending beyond technical competence to encompass communicative, ethical, and sociopolitical dimensions. Figure 3 sets out the relationship between stages and skills, showing how the inquiry pathway mobilizes listening, argumentation, analysis, and intervention.

Figure 3
NEPSO methodological pathway: Stages and skills

The graphic synthesis presented in Figure 3 illustrates how the principles underlying the NEPSO approach operate. From topic selection to the dissemination of findings, students are called upon to investigate the world with epistemic curiosity, engage in dialogue with different people, and make meaning collaboratively. It is therefore a pedagogy that both mobilizes and produces diverse forms of knowledge, strengthening critical consciousness and, in this respect, aligning with the Freirean conception of emancipatory education.

NEPSO and Paulo Freire: convergences between theory and practice

Freirean pedagogy and the NEPSO program’s approach share an ethical–political and epistemic matrix that understands education as a process of liberation, meaning-making, and collective action upon the world. Both recognize subjects’ forms of knowledge, value dialogue, embrace inquiry practice as a pedagogical strategy, and challenge traditional school structures that privilege the accumulation of content over critical consciousness.

Freire (2013) maintains that education should be guided by a pedagogy of questioning rather than ready-made answers. In this sense, research is not an appendage to pedagogical practice but a constitutive dimension of a way of learning and teaching that seeks to be critical, dialogic, and transformative.

By integrating opinion survey research into everyday school life, NEPSO puts these ideas into practice by engaging students as subjects of knowledge in ongoing processes of reading and (re)reading the world they inhabit. Against this backdrop, we identify five main convergences between NEPSO and Freirean pedagogy, revealing epistemological, political, and pedagogical implications that become visible in the very way the proposal organizes the school experience.

The first axis lies at the heart of Freirean pedagogy: understanding education as a political act and transformative practice. Far from being neutral, educational practice, for Freire, carries political intentionality and can help maintain or transform reality. By stating that “education is a political act” (Freire, 2019, p. 83), he breaks with the discourse of neutrality and calls for a stance committed to social justice and equity. NEPSO embodies this principle by inviting students to problematize their experiences and local realities. The inquiry begins with concrete experience: the area surrounding the school, community problems, and the challenges facing the territory. Topic selection, hypothesis formulation, and analysis of the results are acts of critically reading reality. Thus, the educational process is not limited to the appropriation of disciplinary content; it expands into the development of an inquiry stance committed to social transformation.

When a class decides to investigate, for example, racism in schools, violence against women in the community, or urban mobility in the neighborhood, it performs a political act in the deepest sense of the term: it interrogates reality through questions, seeks to understand it by considering the perspectives of other subjects, and contributes to its transformation. In this sense, NEPSO becomes a tool for citizenship education and critical engagement by inviting students to recognize their role as historical subjects.

It should be noted, however, that not all selected topics initially address social problems. If we consider the titles of projects registered on the program’s website (www.nepso.net), we find that local issues and the experiences of age and social groups are frequently chosen by children, adolescents, young people, adults, and older adults. Topics such as “your dream party,” “who wants a new car,” and “eating habits among Youth and Adult Education students,” for example, express concerns and cultural markers that, once made explicit, can foster an understanding of the world, the relationships established within it, and the different positions subjects occupy in those relationships. Thus, even when a topic appears to stem from a narrowly focused curiosity, broader social issues may emerge in the process. Teacher facilitation is crucial to strengthening the political and transformative dimension of these projects.

The second axis of convergence concerns the Freirean commitment, embraced by NEPSO, to treating dialogue and listening as foundations of the educational process. Freire’s pedagogy of dialogue begins by rejecting a vertical conception of teaching. Unlike banking practice, in which the person who teaches is expected to deposit knowledge into learners, who are conceived as empty vessels, liberatory education recognizes that “no one educates anyone else, nor does anyone educate themselves; people educate one another, mediated by the world” (Freire, 2013, p. 69).

Dialogue is therefore a condition for educators and learners to jointly become subjects of the educational process. NEPSO operates on this basis: each stage of the program is built through listening practices and collective negotiation. From topic selection, which involves presenting and publicly defending proposals before the class, to conducting interviews, students are called upon to listen to peers, teachers, and the broader community.

Listening in NEPSO is not merely a technical resource but an educational and relational strategy: people listen to understand, put themselves in another person’s place, and share meanings. Valuing dialogue and listening also entails recognizing popular forms of knowledge, local narratives, and lived experiences as legitimate sources of knowledge. This broadens students’ and teachers’ cultural repertoires and challenges the school curriculum to engage with the diversity of territories.

The third axis of convergence focuses on research as an educational and epistemological practice. Freire (2019) proposes an education that mobilizes epistemic curiosity, understood as “a questioning restlessness, an inclination to unveil something, a question expressed verbally or otherwise, a search for clarification” (p. 33). From this perspective, learning requires asking questions, investigating, and embracing doubt as a structuring element of knowledge.

Research, therefore, is not a technical exercise in data collection or a task for practicing skills, but an attitude toward the world. NEPSO’s methodology gives concrete form to this conception by organizing the educational process around an actual student-led study in which students begin with curiosities and concerns, formulate hypotheses, construct instruments, collect data, interpret results, and present conclusions. Each phase of the study is accompanied by pedagogical mediation that fosters an active understanding of knowledge and integrates school knowledge with other social practices.

In particular, developing a project from the NEPSO perspective can democratize access to scientific discourse and statistical literacy, demystifying the idea that research is reserved for academic or corporate settings. By designing a questionnaire, tabulating data, constructing graphs, writing reports, and presenting results, students practice scientific and communicative competencies that are essential for critically interpreting studies reported in the media and evidence used in decisions that affect individual and collective life.

This critical perspective rests on the opportunity afforded to students and teachers to identify the possibilities and limitations of statistical procedures and representations—an opportunity that arises precisely when students use those procedures and representations in situated ways. Thus, such purposeful use contributes not only to the development of technical skills but also to the formation of autonomous subjects capable of reading information, constructing arguments, and adopting or rejecting positions on reasoned grounds.

The fourth axis of convergence lies in the shared concern with developing critical consciousness. The development of critical consciousness is central to Freirean pedagogy, which distinguishes naive consciousness, marked by the acceptance of reality as immutable, from critical consciousness, oriented toward problematization and the effort to understand the causes of social phenomena.

NEPSO fosters this development by encouraging students to observe reality through an analytical lens. When investigating, for example, perceptions of public health, students learn to identify contradictions, inequalities, and injustices; when cross-tabulating variables and formulating hypotheses about how sociocultural determinants may affect responses, they practice relational thinking; when interpreting data, they learn to argue from evidence. They thus develop cognitive competencies and, at the same time, a critical attitude toward the world.

This dimension is especially evident in questionnaire design, in processing the information generated through interviews, and in analyzing the results. What might be regarded solely as an exercise in mathematics or statistics can, when grounded in the curiosity driving the inquiry, become a practice of social interpretation: students realize that numbers express inequalities, cultural patterns, exclusions and privileges, hierarchies, silenced voices, and social dynamics that are legitimized or rendered invisible. Statistical procedures and research itself thus cease to be ends in themselves and become starting points for problematizing reality.

Finally, the fifth axis of convergence concerns the promotion of student agency and the collective construction of knowledge. Freirean pedagogy maintains that students must be recognized as historical subjects capable of thinking, acting, and transforming the world. As Freire (2019) states, “learners become genuine subjects in the construction and reconstruction of knowledge, alongside the educator, who is likewise a subject in the process” (p. 28). This requires fostering learning that promotes autonomy, participation, and authorship.

NEPSO embraces this agency as a pedagogical principle: students decide on topics and questions, plan and conduct interviews, process and analyze responses, and produce and present results. Teachers mediate the process by encouraging, guiding, and helping to organize emerging forms of knowledge without controlling the process. This reconfiguration of traditional classroom logic transforms the role students play in the pedagogical relationship: from passive reception to ownership of the inquiry process and knowledge production.

The collaborative nature of research, in turn, fosters recognition of collectivity as a value: by working in groups, discussing hypotheses, dividing tasks, and building consensus, students experience democratic practices grounded in solidarity. In this context, knowledge results from a collective and situated construction in ongoing dialogue with lived reality.

NEPSO’s educational contributions: dimensions of critical, communicative, political, and collective learning

The convergences we have identified between the NEPSO approach and Freirean pedagogy reveal the breadth of NEPSO’s educational contributions. By encouraging students to investigate meaningful topics grounded in their lived experiences and concerns, NEPSO helps reinvent the school as a space for situated, collaborative, and socially engaged knowledge production. Along this pathway, four educational dimensions associated with inquiry come into view: epistemological, communicative, sociopolitical, and ethical and collective. Summarized in Figure 4, these dimensions are discussed in this section, with emphasis on their educational implications and their relationships with the foundations of Freirean pedagogy.

Figure 4
Educational Dimensions Fostered by NEPSO

Epistemological dimension: learning to know, investigate, and make meaning

For Freire, the act of knowing cannot be reduced to acquiring information; it is a dynamic, situated, and relational process in which subjects engage critically in making meaning of the world. Knowledge arises from the movement between action and reflection—praxis—which makes it possible to interpret reality and intervene in it intentionally and with ethical commitment (Freire, 2013). From this perspective, teaching is not about transferring content but about provoking thought, eliciting questions, and creating conditions for learners to recognize themselves as knowing subjects who are continually developing.

It is within this horizon that NEPSO’s epistemological dimension is situated. By engaging students in every stage of an opinion survey, from selecting the topic to analyzing and disseminating the findings, the program shifts the focus of teaching from the mere reception of information to actively problematizing reality. Students do not merely access knowledge: they interrogate, reinterpret, and (re)construct it through their lived realities, concerns, and place-based experiences.

This pathway fosters what Freire (2019) calls “epistemic curiosity” (p. 40), understood as a rejection of cognitive passivity and an inquiry-oriented disposition toward understanding the world critically. Unlike naive curiosity, which is satisfied with immediate or superficial answers, epistemic curiosity is guided by a reflective and creative attitude. In NEPSO, it takes shape when students formulate hypotheses, design instruments, produce, organize, and analyze data, compare perspectives, and grapple with the complexity of the reality around them.

It is, therefore, a form of learning that connects knowledge and experience, content and context, reason and sensibility. The knowledge produced in NEPSO emerges from lived experience but is constituted through collective mediations that broaden meanings and deepen interpretations. Ultimately, subjects not only learn about a topic: they develop intellectual autonomy and expand their capacity to understand the world critically and to act within it on the basis of evidence and shared meanings.

Communicative dimension: learning to engage in dialogue, make arguments, and listen

In Freirean pedagogy, language occupies a central place not only as a means of transmitting content but also as an instrument through which subjects are constituted and the world is transformed. For Freire (2013), there is no liberatory education without dialogue, and no dialogue without listening, mutual recognition, and an ethical commitment to another person’s word. In this sense, language is not neutral: it expresses worldviews, articulates historical and social experiences, and has the power to affirm or deny the dignity of subjects.

NEPSO’s communicative dimension is grounded in this conception. Throughout all stages of the survey, the group of students is called upon to listen, engage in dialogue, formulate hypotheses, make arguments, and communicate clearly and responsibly. Written, spoken, gestural, graphic, visual, and multimodal forms of communication thus become mediations that not only express thought but also produce it. It is through language that subjects encounter others and themselves. Therefore, because the production of knowledge requires language and is constituted through it, it always unfolds as collective action.

This process entails critical literacy, through which subjects not only master linguistic codes but also take ownership of authentic discourse genres and exercise agency in communication processes. When designing questionnaires, for example, students learn to formulate questions that engage with respondents’ realities; when analyzing the data, they learn to interpret the social discourses that emerge from the responses; and when sharing the findings, they position themselves as political subjects capable of making their analyses and proposals public.

Along this pathway, language ceases to be seen as a purely technical resource and instead emerges as an educational and emancipatory experience, as it enables students to recognize their own voices, construct sound arguments, and develop active listening that welcomes, problematizes, and transforms. As Freire (2013) reminds us, communication is an ethical and political act, and every word imbued with meaning is also imbued with the world.

Sociopolitical dimension: learning to take a stand, act, and transform

Education is, in essence, a political practice because it involves choices about which forms of knowledge will be valued, which voices will be heard, and which experiences will be legitimized. There is no neutrality in the act of educating, since every educational practice participates, in some way, in either reproducing or contesting the social order. Within this horizon, educating entails developing subjects who recognize themselves as agents of history and who share responsibility for the reality they inhabit.

NEPSO gives contemporary expression to this conception by enabling students to select topics based on their concerns and contexts, thereby unsettling the traditional logic of teaching and shifting the focus from imposed content to content they construct. In this process, they learn that every question carries an intention, every act of listening entails decisions, and every act of knowledge production is shaped by power relations.

Inquiry, therefore, does not mean merely collecting data but adopting a critical stance toward reality. At each stage of the survey, the group of students is invited to challenge taken-for-granted views, identify social contradictions, and reflect on the implications of what they discover.

Analyzing the information, therefore, is not limited to its technical or statistical dimension: it requires choices that guide interpretation, argumentation, and positioning in relation to the findings. In presenting the findings to the community, students, in turn, assume public responsibility for the knowledge produced. Reporting the findings back is not a merely procedural act but a gesture of ethical commitment to the common good. Thus, by turning data into meanings and meanings into action, students (and teachers) undergo an educational experience that connects them to their territory and calls them to pursue social transformation.

Ethical and collective dimension: learning to live together, collaborate, and share responsibility

The ethical and collective dimension of the education proposed by NEPSO is realized in the pedagogical practice of living together and sharing responsibility. Throughout all stages of the survey, subjects are called upon to cooperate, make decisions together, embrace a diversity of perspectives, and build consensus. Learning thus ceases to be an individualized experience and becomes a relational, dialogic process grounded in solidarity.

Freire (2013) understands education as an act of mutual recognition and collective commitment. From this perspective, ethical development does not take place through moralizing discourses but through the everyday experience of solidarity, listening, and openness to others. Freirean dialogicality requires subjects not only to speak and listen but also to recognize others as legitimate partners in constructing knowledge and transformative action.

Within NEPSO, this recognition is expressed through valuing peers’ knowledge, respectfully listening to differing opinions, jointly making decisions about the inquiry, and sharing responsibility for the findings communicated to the community. Because it is constructed collectively, the inquiry process helps students and teachers understand collective life and participate in it.

Concluding remarks

This article aimed to analyze the points of convergence between the NEPSO program and the foundations of Freirean pedagogy, showing how opinion survey research, when incorporated into everyday school life and conducted by students on the basis of their interests, can become a critical, dialogic, and emancipatory educational practice. Far from being merely a technical or teaching instrument, research in this context becomes a holistic educational process that calls on its participants to listen to the territory, read reality critically, and collectively construct socially situated knowledge.

Throughout the article, we have shown that NEPSO brings about a significant epistemological and pedagogical shift: from transmission to inquiry, from passivity to participation, and from silence to active listening. This shift challenges the tenets of the banking model of education (Freire, 2013) and aligns with the conception of education as the practice of freedom, guided by problematization, dialogue, and a commitment to transforming the world.

The program’s eight stages structure an educational cycle that brings together different dimensions of learning—cognitive, communicative, ethical, and political—and fosters the emergence of subjects who are more aware, engaged, and prepared to assume shared responsibility. By integrating lived experiences, curricular knowledge, and critical analysis of reality, NEPSO embodies a pedagogy of questioning, listening, and committed action.

However, its broad and sustainable implementation requires addressing significant challenges. One of these concerns teachers’ continuing professional development, so as to strengthen dialogic, interdisciplinary, and territorially grounded pedagogical practices. As Freire (2019, p. 47) reminds us, “teaching is not the transfer of knowledge but the creation of possibilities for its production or construction,” and such possibilities require time, material conditions, and a school culture that recognizes inquiry as a constitutive dimension of learning.

In addition, in contexts marked by democratic crises, disinformation, and the trivialization of symbolic violence, it becomes even more necessary to strengthen educational practices that foster active listening, critical thinking, and reading the world. Against this backdrop, NEPSO offers a counterpoint to apathy and conformity by calling on teachers and students to affirm the school as a space for meaning-making, democratic practice, and social transformation.

Reviving and strengthening experiences such as NEPSO means affirming a pedagogy that places its trust in the dignity of its participants, the force of questions, the power of listening, and the collective creation of knowledge. It means embracing the school as a territory of research, dialogue, and transformative action. As Paulo Freire summarizes it: “education does not transform the world. Education changes people. People transform the world” (Freire, 2019, p. 67).

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais (FAPEMIG) for the financial support granted to the project “EducAção digital com o NEPSO: enfrentando a violência nos ambientes virtuais” [Digital Education with NEPSO: Addressing Violence in Online Environments] (Grant APQ-05660-23), developed under FAPEMIG Call No. 014/2023 – Research for Innovation in Basic Education. They also thank the people and institutions that, throughout the history of the Nossa Escola Pesquisa Sua Opinião program (NEPSO), contributed to building the experiences, reflections, and learning that inspire and provide the foundation for this article.

Support and funding:

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais (FAPEMIG) – APQ-05660-23

Use of AI:

The authors state that they did not use Artificial Intelligence (AI) resources at any stage in the preparation or drafting of their manuscript, including, but not limited to, resources for generating text, images, code, summaries, translations, or analyses.

Copyediting:

Bibliographic standardization (APA 7th ed.), copyediting, and proofreading in Portuguese: Francisco López Toledo Corrêa, [e-mail]

English and Spanish versions: Francisco López Toledo Corrêa, [e-mail]

¹

A Brazilian nonprofit organization established in 2000 at the initiative of shareholders and executives of the then Grupo Ibope, with the aim of sharing accumulated expertise in social and opinion research with the education sector. IPM was one of the creators and principal sources of technical and financial support for the Nossa Escola Pesquisa Sua Opinião program (NEPSO), especially during its establishment, consolidation, and national and international expansion. For more information, see http://ipm1.tempsite.ws/.

²

For decades, Ibope was one of the leading public opinion and audience research institutions in Brazil and Latin America. The group played a central role in providing institutional, technical, and financial support for educational initiatives such as NEPSO through IPM. Following the sale of the group and discontinuation of the Ibope brand, these initiatives were not continued by its successors.

³

A nonprofit civil society organization established in 1994 and dedicated to promoting educational, cultural, and youth rights. It was a key partner in the design, development, and implementation of the NEPSO program, making a decisive contribution to the pedagogical and methodological development of the approach. For more information, see https://acaoeducativa.org.br/.

⁴

This implementation was made possible by establishing regional outreach and support hubs in São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais, Pernambuco, the Federal District, and Paraná, as well as centers in Rio de Janeiro and Bahia; it also expanded to other Latin American countries through partnerships with research institutes, universities, and nongovernmental organizations in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. A hub was also established in Portugal, operating in several regions of the country. For more information, see www.nepso.net/.

Data availability

The content underlying the research reported in this article is included in the manuscript.

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Corresponding author:

Soares, Denilson Junio Marques – Rua Pandiá Calógeras, Ouro Preto, MG, Brazil, 35400-000.

Responsible editor:

Chantal Medaets https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7834-3834

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  21 Sept 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  18 Dec 2025
• Reviewed
  30 May 2026
• Accepted
  26 July 2026