Building a thick notion of citizenship: the case of the Citizen School Project

• In Event: Brazilian curricular issues in three layers: educational policies, curriculum in school and subject curriculum

Proposal

The definition of what counts as citizenship education can vary widely. This presentation will describe and analyze an experience of a whole large city school district which aimed to achieve a thick notion of democracy and citizenship. This experience is the Citizen School project in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, which was an educational initiative of the municipal government of Porto Alegre, the largest city in southern Brazil, with a population of approximately 1,400,000. In 1989, a coalition of left-wing parties (the Popular Administration), under the leadership of the Workers’ Party, won the municipal elections and started a new plan for the city which was implemented in 16 years (the coalition was reelected for a total of four terms). By utilizing a Critical Education theoretical approach, the research adds the notion of relational analysis to the study of citizenship and education, also connecting to the literature of participatory democracy in order to complexify the thinner notion of citizenship education present in the literature. The presentation shows that the basic premise of the Citizen School project was a radical idea of democracy, one that entailed a real involvement of the citizens in the governance of the city as a whole and in the schools more specifically. In order to materialize such a complex ideal, the Popular Administration envisioned several macro mechanisms in the city. One of these initiatives is the Citizen School which is a project of involving all the municipal schools of Porto Alegre in a radical idea of education for citizenship. Fighting against the idea of an individualized citizen or the market-inspired idea of a citizen-consumer, the Citizen School claimed that the whole educational experience had to embody active citizenship.The presentation is based in a research that is more than fifteen years long and uses ethnographic data collection and documents analysis. Long term (three months) observations, in-depth interviews and document collection were conducted in a sample of schools (8).With decentralized curriculum constructed by teachers after a research in the communities where the schools are situated, with direct election of principals, with an empowered school council, and new mechanisms that stop the tradition of blaming students for their “failure” in schools, the Citizen School project provides a clear example of a what can be done when the principles of Freirian Critical Education are seriously applied to a school system. By actively involving students, parents, staff, and teachers in the democratization of access, governance, and knowledge, and at the same time being part of a global effort of providing viable alternatives to neoliberal accountability (Porto Alegre was the birthplace of the World Social Forum and the World Education Forum), the Citizen School project shows that the goal of global citizenship has to have deep roots in local active organization and at the same time a global imagination, which is able to connect the struggles for real participation and democracy.

Author

• Luis Armando Gandin, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)