Adam F.C. Fletcher

12/16/2025

AWESOME! Wendy Lesko has made the BEST summary of the best 25 tools from 2025 related to youth infusion, including youth voice, engagement, empowerment and more. AND she included my e-book from last year! https://youthinfusion.org/sign-up-for-25-must-have-free-youth-infusion-resources/

Simply fill in this form and you will receive the “Top 25” to open 25 doors and learn about 5 Youth Infusion trends. All for FREE! (Your information will not be shared with anyone.)

12/08/2025

This TREMENDOUS feedback arrived yesterday from Europe, where I keynoted on youth and e-democracy this fall. See the source and learn about the conference and project athttps://www.sdruzenisplav.cz/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/GroundUp_Publication_compressed.pdf

12/04/2025

“Standing on the shoulders…”? More like sitting in dialog…

Paulo Freire sat in a small church classroom in Recife in 1962 watching sugarcane workers learn to read by writing their own lives on chalkboards because he believed no nation could call itself free while its poorest citizens were kept illiterate on purpose.
Brazil’s elite called the workers unteachable. Some politicians openly said literacy for the poor would threaten the existing social order. Freire saw a different truth. He built his method on conversation rather than memorization. He wrote words like “land,” “hunger,” and “work” on a board because those were the words that shaped their days. Within forty five days, three hundred laborers who had been treated as invisible citizens were reading, writing, and debating the laws that governed their lives.
Success created backlash. Local officials warned that “dangerous ideas” were spreading. Landowners complained that educated workers would demand rights. Freire refused to soften his approach. He met students under trees, in abandoned shacks, in borrowed rooms. He taught them that literacy was not just letters. It was power. When one worker said he felt “born again” after reading his first sentence, Freire wrote the moment in his notebook and called it proof that education must begin with human dignity.
Then came 1964. A military coup seized Brazil. The new regime declared Freire’s work subversive. Soldiers raided classrooms and confiscated books. Freire was arrested and interrogated for seventy days. They accused him of stirring rebellion. He answered that teaching people to read was an act of respect, not revolt.
Exile followed. First Bolivia, then Chile, then Geneva. Everywhere he went, Freire carried the same notebooks filled with sketches of lessons, quotes from students, and questions he believed every teacher should ask. Nations invited him to rebuild literacy programs. Universities studied his methods. In 1970 he published Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a book that challenged educators to treat students as partners rather than empty vessels. Critics attacked his ideas as radical. Teachers around the world embraced them as liberation.
When Freire finally returned to Brazil after sixteen years of exile, thousands of former students greeted him. Many were leaders, organizers, and teachers themselves. They told him his lessons had outlived the dictatorship that tried to silence them.
Paulo Freire did not treat education as a classroom subject.
He treated it as a pathway to freedom, and he proved that a single chalkboard can shift the balance of power in a society.

11/26/2025

ALL of us…

11/24/2025

Pluralistic, diverse, multiethnic, cosmopolitan, multiracial, inclusive, multicultural, heterogeneous, belonging, mattering, competence, co-creation…

11/23/2025

I've created a new, one-stop shop for YOUTH SERVICE PROVIDERS, youth workers, nonprofit directors and program coordinators and all sorts of caring adult allies who want to learn more about youth power — FREE! Check it out right now at https://adamfletcher.net/youth_garage/

11/21/2025

I wrote a massive bibliography with details about every publication that influenced me during the Freechild Institute years. Want to see it? https://adamfletcher.net/2019/06/27/freechild-institute-for-youth-engagement-bibliography/

11/17/2025

JUSTICE has to be at the core of learning. Relevancy matters in all ways to young learners!

11/11/2025

Thanks to James Toole for sharing this great story with me!

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/us/politics/surry-county-virginia-supervisor-election.html

Cameran Drew, 19, defeated his former high school government teacher, Kenneth Bell, by 10 votes for a seat on the Surry County Board of Supervisors this week. There are no hard feelings.

11/10/2025

In my latest post, I reflect on the humbling recommendations and citations people have given me over the years. If you're interested, its at https://adamfletcher.net/2025/11/10/a-quarter-century-grateful/