EDUCATION-BRAZIL: Public Schools Fend Off
Invasion of New Ideas
By Mario Osava
ARAÇUAI, Brazil (IPS) - Two non-governmental
initiatives managed to penetrate the walls
around public education in Brazil,
temporarily assuming responsibility for the
administration of schools where they left
their seeds planted. But ultimately they
discovered how resistant the school system
is to innovation.
In the rural schools of Araçuaí, a poor
municipality in the southeastern state of
Minas Gerais, the Popular Centre for Culture
and Development (CPCD) pulled out an entire
arsenal of teaching tools, such as cookies
shaped like letters, name tags on doors,
furniture and other objects, and educational
toys and games, among other techniques it
has developed since its foundation in 1984.
Invited by the local government, this
non-governmental organisation (NGO)
recognised for its creative educational
methods accepted the challenge of tackling
the abysmal state of the municipality’s
schools, and took over the administration of
the local Secretariat of Education between
August 2003 and late 2004.
They used the approach of immersion in a
"literate" environment to improve the
literacy levels of rural schoolchildren,
after a series of evaluations revealed that
students faced serious shortcomings in their
reading, writing and basic math skills in
all eight grades of primary school.
In Araçuaí, the local government is only
responsible for schools in rural areas,
unlike most municipalities in Brazil, where
the municipal government is in charge of the
entire primary education system, in both
rural and urban areas.
The CPCD programme was called "From the
Educational ICU to the Educational City",
alluding to the need for an intensive care
unit to prevent the "civic death" of
children who are illiterate or lacking in
the basic skills needed to exercise their
citizenship, the founder and president of
the CPCD, Sebastião Rocha, explained.
Significant efforts were made to mobilise
the entire community to participate, through
the training of "group mothers" and
"community agents," the organisation of
"book follies," modelled on the traditional
Christmas season celebration of Folía de
Reis (Folly of the Kings), and a large
number of "discussions in the round" - group
talks held in a circle that are at the
foundation of the CPCD’s teaching
philosophy.
The result was a kind of "pedagogical
melting pot of ideas," according to Eliane
Almeida, coordinator of Sustainable Araçuaí,
a CPCD programme initiated in 2005 that
expanded the NGO’s educational goals to
include social and environmental
sustainability in the municipality.
Placing value on the skills and knowledge of
the local community within the educational
process is another of the CPCD’s basic
principles. For example, an illiterate woman
could contribute by baking cookies in the
shape of letters, as part of the effort to
"literally" express everything surrounding
the population.
At the time, the municipality of Araçuaí had
a total population of 36,000 people, of whom
almost half lived in rural areas, and 2,700
students in its 37 municipal schools, which
were grouped into nine micro-regions because
some were very small.
To take advantage of the long periods of
time that many of the students spent
travelling to and from school, the CPCD came
up with the idea of a "bus teacher" who led
the children in song and told them stories
as they rode over the treacherous rural
roads.
Trauma
Evaluations carried out at the end of 2004
revealed marked improvement in the
children’s performance. Nevertheless, the
new mayor, José Antonio Martins, did not
renew the agreement with the CPCD when he
took office in January 2005. This was viewed
as especially unusual given that he had
served as deputy mayor to his predecessor,
Maria do Carmo da Silva, and belonged to the
same party that she did, the left-wing
Workers Party (PT).
Martins, now the former mayor – he was
defeated in his bid for re-election in 2008
– explains that the municipality’s Council
for Children and Adolescents "was not
interested in continuing the agreement" with
the NGO, and since PT administrations are
participatory by nature, they take into
account the opinions of local popular
councils.
"We were shut out of the schools in 2005,
but we continue to look after education
outside the schools, on the streets, with
the group mothers," said Rocha. The CPCD
still carries out a number of projects in
Araçuaí, such as "Ser Criança" (To be a
Child), devoted to extracurricular
activities during the hours when children
are not in school.
The same ICU campaign, renamed simply
Educational City, was adopted by the local
government of Virgen da Lapa, a neighbouring
municipality.
"We’re not interested in the school, we’re
interested in the children. We don’t want
them to continue being unable to read and
write at the age of nine or ten," declared
Rocha. He also highlighted the participation
of the group mothers, who "have more
interest in and knowledge about life in
general."
For many local teachers, the experience of
Rocha and the CPCD taking over control of
the Secretariat of Education was
"traumatic".
"We were undermined. They took the role of
educator away from us, and gave it to
mothers who baked cookies without knowing
anything about pedagogy or teaching
methods," complained Rosángela Silva, who
has been a teacher for 15 years. She said
she was left disappointed after initially
"embracing the initiative" for its
creativity.
According to the CPCD’s philosophy,
"students are not a blank slate, but we, on
the other hand, were treated like blank
slates," said Rosilene Santos, who is now
the vice principal of a primary school in an
urban area of the municipality, administered
by the state government.
She claims that the ICU project failed and
its results were falsified, because students
who had already learned to read and write
were counted as being illiterate at the
beginning of the experiment.
The mothers and community agents "made
spelling mistakes when they taught the
students to write, which confused them,"
according to another teacher, Andreia Rocha.
"Everything was simply imposed on us, they
wouldn’t accept any criticism, as if the
teachers didn’t know anything, and any
progress made was thanks to the group
mothers," added Deusdilene Silva, a teacher
with 13 years of experience.
Another teacher, Adriana de Jesus Rocha,
disagreed with her colleagues, reporting
that her 19 third grade students "learned a
lot through the games, books and garden." As
a result, they were all able to read by the
end of the experiment, when very few knew
how at the beginning. She admitted, however,
that there could have been better
communication with the teachers prior to
beginning the project.
One thing that all of the teachers agreed on
was the value of the educational games and
other innovations introduced by the CPCD. "I
learned a lot" with Sebastião Rocha, but his
administration of the Secretariat of
Education was "authoritarian," said Santos,
who had previously worked for four years on
an earlier preschool project carried out by
the NGO.
In response to the criticism, Rocha stressed
that the data measuring the students’ poor
academic performance at the outset and the
progress they made during the ICU initiative
are recorded in an evaluation system run by
the state government of Minas Gerais, which
has always been open for all teachers to
consult. He attributed the teachers’
complaints about the participation of
mothers in the teaching process to "a power
struggle."
A number of principals of urban schools in
Araçuaí, which did not participate in the
ICU project, have also lodged complaints
about the CPCD – in this case, for having
created the Children of Araçuaí choir.
Because of frequent performances in other
towns and cities, the children who are
members of the choir end up missing a lot of
classes, they say.
Among the students in the choir, there are
some who pose discipline problems, yet they
are "rewarded" with these trips, something
that demonstrates "the CPCD’s lack of
commitment to the school," charged Marilda
Guedes, principal of the Leopoldo Pereira
State School, which has eight students in
the choir.
Janice Pereira Sá, the principal of the
Arthur Berganholi school, was especially
concerned about one particular student with
learning difficulties who missed almost
three weeks of school in May.
She believes that the choir’s tours should
be scheduled during school vacations, so as
not to interfere with the children’s
learning, or at the very least, the schools
should be informed of tours well in advance.
But there is a serious lack of integration
between the choir project and the schools,
complained.
A similar "invasion" of the public school
system took place in Salvador, capital of
the northern state of Bahia, where the
non-governmental Axé Project got permission
in 1999 to create the Barbosa Romeo
Municipal School, targeting at-risk
youngsters like street kids.
The school, also called "Ilé Ori" – which
means "House of Knowledge" in the African
Yoruba language – allowed Axé to put its
educational concepts into practice. Learning
was based on "projects," involving an
interdisciplinary approach to chosen themes,
explored collectively. Axé also emphasises
ongoing training of teachers and the role of
the children as "subjects with rights,
knowledge and desires."
Another of the NGO’s central concepts is
what it calls "unschooling".
"Axé gave us a different vision of children,
less school-centred, not only as students
but as cognitive, social beings," said
Elizabete Monteiro, the educational
coordinator at the school. Monteiro was one
of the first nine teachers involved in the
project, motivated by "the desire to learn"
and willing to devote a part of her weekly
working hours to this goal.
The first year was somewhat chaotic. The
school was housed in a small rented
building. There were around 400 students
between the ages of six and 19, divided into
two shifts. Some classes were held in the
courtyard, and disciplinary problems were
common. Students walked in and out of class
as they pleased, used foul language, and
some even made violent threats.
"They were challenging us, testing the
school," said Raidalva da Silva, another of
the initial group of teachers.
These problems brought some teachers to
tears, or even led them to quit, as in the
case of Sonia Rossi. "It was important to
leave and important to go back," said Rossi,
who left because "I was afraid and I wasn’t
ready for the challenge," but later returned
because "I learned to be a teacher, to
appreciate what is important, when
everything is at stake, because it wasn’t
enough to give classes, you had to be
special."
This new stance won out in the end. A year
and a great deal of discussion later, a
certain sense of order was achieved.
According to Rita Brito, a teacher at the
school since 2000, the students told them,
"We like you because you care about us,
don’t give up on us." The initiative proved
that it is possible to create "a school for
delinquents, rebels and street kids," she
said.
The school got a new building, and also
became "a centre for the promotion of debate
on teaching," said Monteiro. Some of its
former teachers have gone on to become
school principals, she added.
The initiative continues today, sustained by
the teachers but without the participation
of the Axé Project since 2005, when the
newly elected city government authorities
chose not to renew the agreement with the
NGO. As a result, Axé founder and president
Cesare La Rocca was unable to realise his
dream of "infecting" the entire local public
school system in Salvador with the
organisation’s proposals. |
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