Book on adult education translated into German

The German publishing house Argument Verlag, well-known for its social theory journal Das Argument, has just published Politische Bildung bei Antonio Gramsci und Paulo Freire. Perspectiven Einer Verandernden Praxis.

This is the German translation of Peter Mayo's 1999 book, Gramsci, Freire and Adult Education, Possibilities for Transformative Action (Zed Books).

The translation was carried out by Uwe Hirschfeld who also wrote an additional chapter dealing with Gramsci, Freire and Brecht. Heinz Suenker, from the University of Wuppertal, wrote the foreword to the German version of the book.

This book will be used as a text for the first time at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz when Prof. Mayo teaches, later this month, a 10-hour block seminar, Critical Approaches to Education, on an Erasmus Teacher Mobility Exchange visit. While Prof. Mayo will be teaching the course in English, the German students can use the German version of his book as the main text.

This is the third translation of Prof. Mayo's book which was earlier published in Catalan by CREC Valencia and later in Portuguese by the Brazilian publishing house ArtMed of Porto Alegre. Later this year, the Italian translation of this book will be released by the Sardinian publishing house, Carlo Delfino Editore.

The original English version of the book went into reprint and was reviewed in around 20 academic refereed journals including the Harvard Educational Review, Interchange (which carried a review symposium), Comparative Education Review, International Studies in Sociology of Education and Journal of Mediterranean Studies.

His follow-up book, Liberating Praxis (Praeger, 2004) won a 2005 American Educational Studies Association (AESA) Critics' Choice Award.

Prof. Mayo's latest book (co-authored with Carmel Borg), Learning and Social Difference, Challenges to Public Education and Critical Pedagogy (Paradigm, Boulder-Colorado), will be published later this year.