The Theatre of the Oppressed, as a transformative methodology, has a pedagogical potential in Higher Education contexts. To evaluate this potential, we developed a participatory action research study in three Higher Education contexts, two of them in Coimbra's College of Education, Portugal, with Portuguese students, and the other in Hanze University Groningen, Holland, with students from several European countries. Altogether the three groups engaged thirty students, from full time young students to mature working students that were attending a master degree and license degrees in Education.

Our goal was to understand how the Theatre of the Oppressed could empower students to change and innovate across their life as well as in their future professional contexts. In the international setting, we also explored how students enriched themselves in the interaction of their differences while building an identity through an European dialog.

Based on Paulo Freire’s concepts of conscientization and empowerment and on Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed techniques (Forum and Invisible Theatre), we constructed with the students a pedagogical structure, which will be presented and discussed in the paper, according to the following five phases:

1. Initial Discussion: after a presentation dynamic, the students discussed theatre, liberty, oppression and empowerment;
2. Clarification and Theoretical Framework: from student's discussion, the facilitators introduced the main aspects of the Freire and Boal perspectives;
3. Group Dynamics:the students had the opportunity to communicate and to interact with themselves and with each other in several dynamics;
4. Exercise of Forum or Invisible Theatre: the students choose the “Curinga”, shared and selected life stories of oppression, built a scrip, rehearsed, performed and gave life to the forum;
5. Final Discussion about the learning experience: the students analyzed the process and the results of the experience, and reflect about the implications for their development and learning.

These pedagogical experiments were developed in a democratic participatory way, engaging students in the research process with respect for the theoretical principles, as easily seen in the adopted pedagogical structure. The students were not mere spectators or objects of research. They were actors or using Boal's terminology spect-actors.

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