What Would a Socially-Just Education System Look Like? Some Lessons from Porto Alegre, Brazil

• In Event: Education Policy, Democracy and Reform (II)

Proposal

A fundamental question lies at the heart of the issues surrounding the connections between educational projects and larger movements and projects dealing with social justice: what would a socially-just education system look like? In answering this question, one place immediately comes to mind, a whole municipal education system in which schools were involved in guaranteeing the educational promise of access to all, building curricular justice (Connell, 1993), and constructing democratic relations that included all actors involved: the municipal educational system of Porto Alegre, Brazil. This presentation examines the structural and cultural changes that were put in place in Porto Alegre’s municipal system during the 16-year tenure of the Popular Administration (a coalition of Left-wing parties, led by the Workers Party that governed the city from 1989 to 2004) and presents the principles that guided that experience and that can represent a concrete example of how social justice can be forged in education. Among the questions the presentation addresses are: How did these changes come about? What were the components of the Porto Alegre experience? What did it achieve? What is its legacy? What has lasted? What were its main challenges? What does this tell us about the prospects for socially committed critical reforms? To answer these questions, I first situate Porto Alegre in its national and international context. I then examine why Porto Alegre’s educational system deserves to be studied and what it has achieved. I also present some challenges that the experience is currently facing.
For the creators of these city-wide education policy, schools should be the place for learning how to become a citizen: citizens are the ones that have the material goods necessary for survival, symbolic goods necessary for their subjectivity, and political goods necessary for their active participation and social existence. The educational project was part of a larger transformation promoted in the city, including the world-famous Participatory Budgeting, which started in Porto Alegre and was adopted in many cities of the world. The presentation is based in research that is more than fifteen years long and uses ethnographic data collection in schools, interviews with the creators, and documents’ analysis. 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 to complexify the thinner notion of citizenship education present in the literature. The presentation shows that the basic premise of the Citizen School project 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 created several mechanisms (which will be detailed in the presentation), such as empowered school councils, election for principals, a schools based curriculum, based on the contribution of all knowledge areas to the analysis of research topics gathered in the school community, leaning laboratories (in which students learn how to learn and teachers learn how to teach these students), to mention some. 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, it not only changed the schooling experience in the city, but also provided viable alternatives to neoliberal accountability. The main conclusions from the research are: 1. Unlike most reforms, Porto Alegre’s experience was not only participatory in the implementation of the policy, but also in the creation of the policy and its goals as well; 2. Porto Alegre problematized concretely the prevailing common sense views of poor students from favelas and their communities. The Popular Administration understood that the material state of the buildings and teachers’ working conditions and professional development were an essential part of the changes that were necessary in the way the state acts in these neighborhoods; 3. In the Porto Alegre experience, there was a combination of mobilization from civil society and changes in the state agencies in order to incorporate the communities’ needs. It is a classic case where the state itself is “educated”, an ongoing education that was caused both by the development of the policy it implemented and by community organizations and movements; 4. The experience in Porto Alegre was centrally interested in students’ inclusion and academic success. Unlike many other reforms, it understood very well that these goals could not be achieved without a radical discussion of and change in what counts as knowledge, whose knowledge is part of the formal and informal school experience, and how to create a new relationship between popular knowledge and academic knowledge. With decentralized curriculum constructed by teachers after 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 A Gandin, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul