School Experiences That Defy the Modern/Postmodern Divide

• In Event: Toward Critical Public Consciousness in STEM Education: Inter/Transnational Perspectives

Abstract

Some of the ideals that were forged in modernity seem to be still in order. For instance, positive liberties, that is, possibilities and abilities to participate in public affairs (Bobbio, 2003) need to be rescued as an important goal for citizenship. Likewise, we are in desperate need of a sense of future (Klein, 2017). However, despite having provided us with a liberal secular humanitarian project of society, modernity was also deeply bound to the ideas of progress, technical rationality, universal thought and euro-centric superiority. While post-modern alternatives are more sensitive towards issues of difference, culture and power-knowledge relationships, social inequality remains and stills calls for critical transformative perspectives.
In this paper we discuss some alternatives that defy the modern/post-modern divide, which are inspired by Santos’ views of change as an “upward movement having as its principal actors the underdeveloped rather than the rich countries” (Santos, 2017). Santos sees politics as “the art of imagining changes and creating the conditions to bring them into effect” and predicts emergence of promising situations. As an educator, I have no other choice but to look for and to create some of such conditions. Actually, I believe some of them are already in place in different areas. One of them concerns attempts made by socially organised groups to appropriate the public school in order to promote a kind of education that is congruent with their particular social projects. The “quilombola” schools in Brazil and the “bachilleratos populares” in Argentina are examples of that. “Quilombos” date back to 16th Century and were a place of refuge for slaves who escaped their owners. To this date, they gather slaves’ descendants who preserve historical and cultural traditions and fight for rights of property of land. Indeed, they were granted by the Brazilian State a type of schooling that is based upon a methodology that combines academic and cultural/work experiences and that does not follow the norms of traditional school organisations. The “bachilleratos populares” are schools for young and adult education that were created out of the Piqueteros and Unemployed Workers movement in the 1990s. Instead of focusing their demands on economic matters, like most trade unions did, they focused on demands for fulfillment and expansion of educational rights. The schools created have set out their own curriculum and not only are they committed to both new forms of management but also to projects of social transformation. A number of them have been accredited by the official school system. In the presentation I will present examples related to science and health education enacted in these two contexts deal with issues concerning citizenship and with relationships between culture and universality.
Origins of these school alternatives are popular movements, the demands of which are framed and routed by the appropriate political channels. They may be examples of upwards movements that challenge (colonial) relationships between knowledge and society and help problematise the role of schools and of education in the autonomy/transformation and control/reproduction interplay in society.

Author

• Isabel Martins, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro