Pedagogies of struggle and collective organization: the educational practices of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement [Interface] (original) (raw)
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2016
The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) is one of the largest and most influential social movements in Latin America. Since the very beginning of the movement’s agrarian reform struggle, MST leaders have developed a broad-based program of leadership, political training, and education for all participants in the movement. The MST’s educational demands are organically connected to the movement’s attempt to create, in the present, a new social order based on social justice, participatory democracy, autonomy, and humanistic and socialist values. The goal of this article is to introduce to an English-speaking audience the main contours and components of the MST’s educational proposal. The first part of this article discusses the three theoretical foundations of the movement’s educational approach and its five pedagogical practices. The second part of the paper presents two concrete experiences of educational institutions administered by the MST leadership: the “Itinerant Schools” i...
British Journal of Sociology of Education, 2019
This article explores how social movement co-governance of public education offers an alternative to neoliberal educational models. The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) is one of the largest social movements in Latin America. We describe one of the many schools that the MST co-governs, the Itinerant School Paths of Knowledge (Caminhos do Saber), located in an occupied encampment in the state of Paraná. We analyze three of the most unique pedagogical innovations in the school: the teacher’s incorporation of ‘portions of reality’ into classroom teaching, the student work collectives, and the participatory student evaluation process. Although these pedagogies are seemingly mundane changes to everyday school practice, we argue that they represent a challenge to the neoliberal educational model being implemented globally. These movement pedagogies are likely to continue, despite recent conservative attacks, and they offer several concrete lessons for how to effectively contest neoliberal educational practices in other global contexts.
The Landless Peasant Movement and Popular Education: Addressing postcolonial violence in Brazil
Postcolonial Directions in Education, Vol. 11 No 2, 2022
In the context of Latin America’s resistance to hegemonic power relations, several subaltern movements emerged with their own educational projects and pedagogies. The Brazilian Landless Peasant Movement (MST) adopted a model of “popular education” which was recognized as a political actor endeavouring to counter colonial injustices and ongoing forms of neo-colonial violence. By applying a 4Rs analytical framework (cf. Novelli et al., 2017), the paper analyses how the movement’s aims, philosophy, organisation, and role of popular education have been able to promote social justice and peacebuilding processes, at the same time discussing constraints and limits encountered. Vários movimentos proletariados com projetos educacionais e pedagogias próprias surgiram no contexto da resistência às relações hegemônicas de poder na América Latina. No Brasil, o Movimento Sem Terra (MST) adotou um modelo de “educação popular” pelo qual foi reconhecido como ator político. O movimento pretendia enfrentar as injustiças coloniais e as formas de violência pós-colonial. Aplicando um quadro analítico chamado 4Rs (cf. Novelli et al., 2017), o artigo analisa como os objetivos, a filosofia, a organização e o papel da educação popular do movimento têm sido capazes de promover justiça social e processos de construção da paz e, ao mesmo tempo, discute restrições e limites encontrados.
Learning to Fight: The MST’s Escola Nacional and its Pedagogy of Resistance
2006
O Movimento de Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST), has accomplished extensive land occupations and other socioeconomic and political gains by interjecting a class struggle in its agrarian reform platform. Thus, connected to its physical fight and demand for land, the MST from its inception has engaged in the political formation of sem terra—a process that “refers to learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (Freire 35). For the MST, this political formation is critical in the construction of an alternative socialist “nation that is free, wealthy, and just, a nation of citizens with no one left out” (Flavia 24). In the last 22 years, Brazil’s shifting sociopolitical domestic and international policies, as well as the MSTs own varying needs, have influenced the different ways in which it has approached the issue of political formation. In the past, it has ...
Education, civil society, and social change: A case study of a Brazilian social movement
2006
For the last twenty-five years, the Landless Worker's Movement (MST) has organized some 1.5 million landless rural workers to claim and occupy unutilized cultivable land to which they are legally entitled under the 1988 Constitution. The movement has been instrumental in the redistribution of unused cultivable land to thousands of landless rural families and the creation of a new positive identity for rural people that values their culture, knowledge, and autonomy. In doing so, the movement has become a global exemplar for a more equitable, just, and sustainable approach to development. A philosophy and practice of education that is democratic and responsive to the social and economic contexts of rural learners has played a key role in the expansion and longevity of this popular movement. My dissertation looks at the ways in which the MST has contributed to improving the quality of education policy and programming for rural children, youth, and adults. My dissertation begins with an examination of the ideologies and institutional arrangements that have historically shaped the formulation and implementation of policies for rural basic education in Brazil. I discuss relationships between the state, market, and society and, in particular, the construction of alternative policy arenas and discourses by organized civil society that have shaped current efforts by the federal government to develop a national rural education policy. I go on to examine the micro-interactions between the state and the MST in the context of literacy programs for rural youth and adults in the state of Rio de Janeiro. In this context, I discuss the possibilities for expanded participation in policy formulation and implementation for basic education for a) organized civil society, b) rural communities, c) educators, and d) learners. This study has implications for the ways in which we understand and theorize about the role of progressive social movements in opening up new educational, political, and social possibilities for a democratic society.
The Landless Workers' Movement (MST) is recognized as Brazil's most successful social movement. Although its goal is agrarian reform, the MST has been the subject of significant educational scholarship due to the emphasis it places on education reform, and formal and informal education. The MST's pedagogy has been extensively analysed. However, what remains remarkable about the MST is the on-going participation of its members after they achieve their immediate goal of land allocation. This article presents findings from a content analysis of 25 years of the movement's journal - the Jornal Sem Terra (JST). Although the usage of media within movements has received considerable attention, the majority of this scholarship focuses on external media. This article explores implicit pedagogical usage of the JST. Specifically, grounded theory is used to analyse how the MST pedagogically advocates on-going participation in collective relations through its usage of the Portuguese term formação, whose meaning is nuanced, but can be summarily understood as training or development. Through a content-analysis of the JST, three key themes on cooperation as on-going participation are illustrated, documenting how formação - as a pedagogical imperative for new cooperative social structures - is part of the struggle Gramsci terms the 'war of position'.
The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 2015
One of the hallmarks of anti-capitalist social movements in Latin America is the incorporation of self-organizing processes of political education and involvement in the educational process of their children and youth. This article discusses popular education and critical pedagogy upheld by historical and contemporary Brazilian social movements, particularly the Landless Workers Movement (MST) and its historical struggles in defence of public education. First, it identifies the context of the origins of popular education in the late 1950s and early 1960s, notably Paulo Freire’s epistemological and theoretical contributions. After characterizing the political context of the period, the article focuses on the key experiences of popular education. It then discusses Florestan Fernandes’ criticism of the Bourgeois-Democratic Revolution strategy that played a leading role in the struggles of the period 1955–1964. Next the period of pedagogical practices that were forged in resistance to t...
Globalisation, Societies and Education, 2023
Over 2015-2016, high school students in Brazil occupied hundreds of schools across the country. Students fought to keep public schools open, funded, and functional, against outsourcing and privatisation, and in solidarity with teachers' trade unions and strikes. The 'primavera secundarista' ('student spring') was the most significant school student movement since the struggles against the military dictatorship (1964-1988). This paper firstly addresses the political dynamics of the primavera secundarista. Secondly, it discusses the movement's educational practices, which flourished in the months that students occupied their schools. Thirdly, it discusses the forms of community and solidarity that students built with other social actors and how they each learnt from this. In doing so, the paper builds on the work of Aziz Choudry and other scholars of social movement learning to argue that such student movements are prime sites of counter-hegemonic knowledge production and dissemination. Shown through the Brazilian high school occupations, the paper highlights how student movements are unusual in being situated in formal epistemic institutions, and yet are not widely recognised, especially in high schools, as blending formal and informal learning to produce and share knowledge-from-below.