EDUCATION-BRAZIL: Public Schools Fend Off Invasion of New Ideas

ARAÇUAI, Brazil, Sep 13 (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.

* Additional reporting from Salvador, Brazil.

" This article forms part of the "Art Is the Best Education" series of reports. The project that gave rise to this effort was the winner of the AVINA Investigative Journalism scholarship. The logos must be published with the reports. The AVINA Foundation and Casa Daros, its local partner in the Art and Society category, are not responsible for the ideas, opinions or other aspects of the content. ".