Wishing Their Very End – Cursinhos Populares' Prefigurative Politics and the Democratization of University Access in Brazil

• In Event: Higher Education and Technology: Tools for Mobilization of Political Action

Proposal

The field of critical pedagogy is renowned for its cultural critique but is not always accompanied by concrete initiatives for mobilizing transformative political action (Tarlau, 2014). Effective resistance to commodified education demands radical experiments that combine criticism with action.

Latin America, and particularly Brazil, has produced profuse examples of such a strategy (Fernández-González, 2024; Rátiva-Gaona et al., 2022). In this paper, I discuss the pedagogical experience of community-led preparatory courses for university admission - cursinhos populares (CP), social movements that not only challenge the selectivity of access to Brazilian universities but also prepare marginalized groups to admission exams, organizing free or low-cost courses. These community organizations bring together activist educators who are committed to increasing the chances of young people and adults from the periphery entering higher education, especially at the most prestigious institutions (Castro, 2019). In Brazil, public universities concentrate most of the country's research and their access is based on passing a very competitive selection process, which considers solely performance in a high-stakes exam applied to high school graduates (Oliven, 2015).

Heirs to Latin American popular education experiences, such as cultural and educational groups linked to Black movements, the progressive wing of the Catholic Church known as Liberation Theology and the tradition of mobilization of student and union movements (Castro, 2019), it is possible to find CPs distributed throughout Brazil. Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, many of them have shown remarkable resilience and adaptability, organizing their activities partly or exclusively online (Barros & Silva, 2021).

CPs orbit around university admission exams – both providing students with tools to enter the university and denouncing the underlying meritocratic assumptions of the admission process. What if there were no exams at all? In this study, I discuss how CP leaders and students perceive the main barrier to accessing higher education for subaltern classes. I argue that these movements make a creative reading of the exams as a limiting situation (Freire, 2005) for most students to enter university, reimagining possible futures for their political-pedagogical practice if this barrier ceased to exist.

Questioning the end of the high-stakes exam involves imagining a different future, with the intention of identifying the weight attributed by the movement's participants to the exam that, for better or worse, defines the very existence of CPs. This exam must be addressed since it is the motivating factor for students to seek out CPs in the first place. However, an excessive emphasis on the exam content implies a reduced space to promote what would be the declared objective of some CPs, that of democratizing higher education, which would be epitomized in the “end of the admission exam.” If, on the one hand, the end of admission exams as a barrier that limits access implies to some extent a victory for the movement, the ability to prefigure (Tarlau, 2020; Dinnerstein, 2015), on the other hand, leads to the very obsolescence of its format –since CPs have exams as their primary motivation for students to sign up and attend classes. Understanding how the participants evaluate this contradiction allows us to have greater clarity about how CPs act between utopia/prefiguration and the concrete production of their existence as an organizing space for marginalized people seeking to expand their schooling.

The theoretical framework for this study draws from the popular education field (which often conflates with critical pedagogy, although the former would explicitly relate to popular social movements in the Latin American tradition) (Freire, 2005; Tarlau, 2014). I argue that the ability to envision an alternative education is a significant example of prefigurative politics / real utopia (Boggs, 1977; Breines, 2010; Wright, 2010) and has the potential to bring insights to other radical educational experiences, especially those carried out by social movements. It is also part of current discussions about the relationship between social movements and the state and the role of prefigurative politics (real utopias) in the construction of radical educational alternatives.

The research design was qualitative and it consisted of a case study of the first cursinho popular affiliated with Rede Emancipa, one of the largest popular social movements for university admission in Brazil currently, named after a very important Brazilian social and environmental leader: Cursinho Popular Chico Mendes (CPCM). The author, who also contributed as an activist to Rede Emancipa, conducted semi-structured interviews with 3 educators and 3 students from CPCM. The results presented in this paper, drawn mostly from the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of the interview transcripts (Fairclough, 2003), are of significant importance in understanding the role and impact of CPs in Brazil. My positionality as an activist from this particular social movement might both add valuable perspectives, as well as unintentionally overlook some aspects, a gap that I expect to attenuate by epistemologic vigilance and openness to critique (Bourdieu et al., 1991).

By considering the dialectical relationship between discourse and social practice, CDA provides valuable contributions to how actions, pedagogical practices and identities are constructed within a social movement, which can be better understood by analyzing genres, styles and discourses (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999). Genres refer to the forms of action in CPCM, combining mobilization for quality public education and democratization of access to university, and were particularly relevant in the educators' discourse. Although also part of students' discourse, the latter group highlights above all the styles (the way in which social identities are constructed - solidarity, mutual aid, students' agency vis-à-vis institutions) and the discourses (representational meanings), especially the contextualized form aimed at raising awareness and “social formation” of the knowledge produced in the context of pedagogical activities.

This work represents an original contribution about an understudied Brazilian/Latin American social movement, which brings innovative insights into the prefiguration that takes place simultaneously on two levels - both by insisting on the struggle to improve public schooling (and not proposing to be a substitute for it), as well as envisioning university admissions processes that are more inclusive, radicalizing this objective to such an extent that this could bring about its end as a social movement.

Author

• Maíra Tavares Mendes, OISE - University of Toronto