3 Critical Pedagogy in Action A Study on Interaction and Dialogue in Musical Composition Viviane Beineke and Rafael Dias de Oliveira 1 Introduction If I do not love the world – if I do not love life – if I do not love human beings – I cannot enter into dialogue. 1 Paulo Freire Critical pedagogy, in general, is characterized as an educational current that links education with issues of power, oppression, domination, jus- tice, identity, knowledge, and culture. It is an educational perspective whose aim is to develop critical awareness, in which students participate as active subjects, engaging in dialogue with their colleagues and teach- ers, with a view to promoting a fairer and more egalitarian society. In Brazil, critical pedagogy has been strongly infuenced by Paulo Freire’s work, which focused on a learning process in which students think and discover the world on the basis of their own reality. His work in adult literacy in Brazil has become known worldwide for teaching literacy to people through a political consciousness of the world. Freire sees dialogue as essential for meaningful and transformative ed- ucation. The “self” and the “others” are legitimate, each based on one’s own history. They build knowledge together and broaden their views on reality. However, do all interactions among people result in a dialogical relationship? Not for Freire (1987, p. 83), who believed that a dialogical relationship occurs in the interaction among subjects in a horizontal re- lationship, mediated by the world, so that dialogue can give rise to vi- sions and points of view about reality. The opposite of this concept is anti-dialogue (Freire, 1987, 2001b), which implies a vertical relationship between one person and another, one that does not generate criticism, as it is unlovable and breaks the feeling of “sympathy” between the interloc- utors; “Anti-dialogue does not communicate, but rather issues communi- qués” (2001b, p. 116). Based on this perspective, this chapter proposes a debate on the in- teraction and dialogue established in music classes in youth and adult education (YAE), 2 at a school in the city of Florianópolis, located in the southern region of Brazil. The objective of this work is to analyze the