The Landless Workers Movement’s itinerant schools: occupying and transforming public education in Brazil

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Social movements
• brazilian landless workers movement
• landless workers
• itinerant schools
• pistrak
• shulgin

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For a longer discussion of a Gramsican approach to the study of education and schooling, see Tarlau (2017a, 2017b).

2 The movement specifically draws on the educational experiences that developed in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, as a decade when there were lots of creative experiments in building a new socialist society. The movement acknowledges that after the 1930s this creativity was greatly diminished.

3 Mariano wrote all of his sections in Portuguese. Tarlau translated all of these sections. In addition, all quotes from books in Portuguese are Tarlau’s translations.

4 They appear ‘common sense’ not in the Gramscian usage of the term as people’s contradictory philosophy of the world, which always holds a kernel of good sense, but rather in the general usage of the term common sense as obvious or intuitive.