Rebecca Tarlau

In this article, Rebecca Tarlau attempts to build a more robust theory of the relationship between education and social change by drawing on the conceptual tools offered in the critical pedagogy and social movement literatures. Tarlau argues that while critical pedagogy has been largely disconnected from its roots in political organizing, social movement literature has shifted away from a theory of educational processes within movement building. Specifically, she suggests that the currently dominant “framing perspective” in the social movement literature is incredibly limited in its ability to analyze the pedagogical aspects of organizing. Conversely, while scholars of critical pedagogy are extremely convincing when critiquing U.S. schooling, the field is weaker when theorizing about how teachers using critical pedagogy can link to larger movements for social transformation. Critical pedagogues need more organizational thinking and social movement scholars need a more pedagogical focus. Tarlau suggests three conceptual frameworks for moving forward in this direction: the notion of social movements as pedagogical spaces, the role of informal educational projects in facilitating the emergence and strength of social movements, and the role of public schools as terrains of contestation that hold the possibility of linking to larger struggles for social justice.

Over the past 30 years, the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), one of the largest social movements in Latin America, has developed a series of pedagogical practices for public schools that support the movement’s struggle for agrarian reform in the Brazilian countryside. The MST’s educational initiatives can be viewed in terms of their place in the debate about how grassroots movements develop alternatives to dominant educational practices.

This article examines the conflicting visions within the US labor movement about the proper function and implementation of labor education programs, and how educational programs are connected to union structure. While this article is primarily based on interviews with union officials, the article also draws on union documents and participant observation in union meetings and educational workshops. The author argues that an analysis of worker education programs is an appropriate entry point for drawing out the similarities and differences that exist about the goals, structure, and political values of different unions in the contemporary US labor movement.

This article explores how social movement co-governance of public education offers an alternative to neoliberal educational models. The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) is one of the largest social movements in Latin America. We describe one of the many schools that the MST co-governs, the Itinerant School Paths of Knowledge (Caminhos do Saber), located in an occupied encampment in the state of Paraná. We analyze three of the most unique pedagogical innovations in the school: the teacher’s incorporation of ‘portions of reality’ into classroom teaching, the student work collectives, and the participatory student evaluation process. Although these pedagogies are seemingly mundane changes to everyday school practice, we argue that they represent a challenge to the neoliberal educational model being implemented globally. These movement pedagogies are likely to continue, despite recent conservative attacks, and they offer several concrete lessons for how to effectively contest neoliberal educational practices in other global contexts.

Beginning in the summer of 2008, the global financial crisis destroyed wealth across the world. Emanating from the world’s financial capital in New York City, as the financial institutions Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, the crisis rapidly influenced the financial well being and prosperity of people, businesses, and governments across the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. The crisis exposed the harsh reality behind the rapid economic growth and wealth creation of the new millennium – it was predicated on levels of inequality unseen since the Great Depression.

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century documents this landscape of rising wealth inequality in the twenty-first century. While inequality is not a new topic, the book’s unparalleled success came at a moment of political salience when inequality was at the forefront of academic conversations, political rhetoric, and social movement demands. Piketty’s arguments powerfully entered the public dialogue and served to reinforce the growing consensus that our global economic system is unjust and has led to unprecedented returns on wealth for a few and devastating, precarious conditions for most of the world’s population.

Although the question of inequality is not a new topic in the field of education, Piketty’s economic treatise is an opportunity to revisit the question of education’s role in producing a more equal society in the twenty-first century. According to Piketty, the diffusion of knowledge and skills through education is an important ‘force for convergence’, but cannot overcome the powerful forces of divergence within capitalism that propel increasing inequality. This special issue is comprised of scholars who examine if, how, and to what extent Piketty’s analysis is useful for understanding contemporary relationships between inequality and educational policy and practice. The authors draw on, expand, reject, and/or critique Piketty’s arguments and proposals in light of empirical findings in their own research.

In this article I analyze the tensions and difficulties that activist-scholars face in developing collaborative and critical social movement research. Through a series of reflections on my own trajectory into the academy and seventeen months of field research with the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement, I cautiously offer some ways forward for social movement researchers. Contextualizing these reflections in the rich literature on the ethics of social movement research, I argue that activist-scholars should attempt to design research questions that generate movement-relevant theory, leverage our (limited) influence to study powerful actors, move beyond dichotomous understandings of the “researcher” and the “research subject,” and be continually self-reflective about the unresolvable contradictions that come with being an activist-scholar. I end the article by suggesting that no matter how movement-relevant or collaborative our scholarship, this does not replace the “action” part of the action-theory praxis.

On the outside walls of a rural public school in Brazil, in the northern state of Pará, an unlikely set of images is painted: the Brazilian flag, the logo of the local municipal government, and the flag of one of the largest social mobilizations in Latin America, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST)—the landless workers’ movement that has been a thorn in the side of the Brazilian state for almost 30 years. Alongside these symbols is written, “Reforma Agrária para Justiça Social e Soberania Popular” [Agrarian Reform for Social Justice and Popular Sovereignty]. This school is representative of an apparent contradiction occurring throughout rural Brazil: the active coordination between the government and the MST for the provision of public education.

But while bureaucrats in many states and municipalities are working cooperatively with MST activists, in other regions the official response is drastically different. Based on 17 months of ethnographic field research in three regions of Brazil, I analyze the conditions under which states cede power over education policy to social movements. Data come from 70 interviews with MST activists, 60 interviews with elected officials and government bureaucrats, extensive field notes, informal conversations, site visits, school observations, teacher training and shadowing MST activists.

This article explores the social(ist) pedagogies of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), a large agrarian social movement that fights for socialism in the Brazilian countryside, meaning that workers own their own means of production and collectively produce the food and other products necessary for their communities’ survival. Over the past three decades, activists in the movement have developed an alternative educational proposal for rural schooling that supports these new social relations of production. Drawing on major theories of reproduction, cultural production, and resistance in the field of education, I argue that three theorists—Paul Willis, Paulo Freire, and Antonio Gramsci—are critical in assessing the role of schools in processes of social reproduction. I examine four components of the MST’s social(ist) pedagogy: the incorporation of manual labor into public schools; the promotion of collective learning; counter-cultural production; and linking schools to concrete political struggles. Drawing on Willis, Freire, and Gramsci, I argue that the MST’s educational proposal is a limited but real attempt to interrupt dominant social relations of production in the Brazilian countryside, thus representing a unique example of social pedagogy in the 21 century.

The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) is one of the largest and most influential social movements in Latin America. Since the very beginning of the movement’s agrarian reform struggle, MST leaders have developed a broad-based program of leadership, political training, and education for all participants in the movement. The MST’s educational demands are organically connected to the movement’s attempt to create, in the present, a new social order based on social justice, participatory democracy, autonomy, and humanistic and socialist values. The goal of this article is to introduce to an English-speaking audience the main contours and components of the MST’s educational proposal. The first part of this article discusses the three theoretical foundations of the movement’s educational approach and its five pedagogical practices. The second part of the paper presents two concrete experiences of educational institutions administered by the MST leadership: the “Itinerant Schools” in Paraná, a network of public schools located inside MST occupied encampments, and the MST’s national political training school, the Escola Nacional Florestan Fernandes (ENFF). Together, these two cases offer concrete examples of how the MST’s educational proposal is implemented in diverse Brazilian contexts.

Studies of food systems education have largely avoided questions concerning race. In this commentary, we interrogate the racial assumptions behind certain food systems education projects. Food systems educators are often motivated by a whitened cultural desire to "bring good food to others" and see garden-based learning projects, which seek to instill healthy nutritional behaviors, as the solution to the problem of purported food deserts. We argue that food systems education is in need of a critical intervention. In this commentary, we propose critical food systems education (CFSE) as a theoretical framework, set of pedagogies, and vision for policy that moves beyond teaching students about the food system, and helps them realize their potential to structurally transform it through collective action. The CFSE perspective is theoretically grounded in food justice, food sovereignty, political agroecology, and critical pedagogy. The CFSE approach is not merely theoretical, but arises from the examples of grassroots social movements throughout the world that have developed radical forms of food systems education. We highlight this approach using the example of the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (MST). The MST opposes a racialized discourse of the "peasantry" as backwards and ignorant. The movement's leaders reject a vision of education that reproduces white modernity, and instead support a vision that advances radical agroecological education programs that train students to be political subjects capable of creating a socially and environmentally equitable food system. The example of the MST underscores the potential of CFSE as a corrective for the food systems education's racialized assumptions.

This article provides an introduction to the Brazilian social movement known as the Landless Workers Movement (MST). After a brief history of the landless struggle and the international organisation of the movement, the article discusses educational philosophy and practice in the MST. The MST actively cultivates a 'culture of study' within all the diverse spaces of the movement including (but not limited to) its schools and literacy programmes, political education, agricultural production, and culture and media communications. These processes of knowledge production and dissemination are informed by the philosophical principles that constitute the MST 'Pedagogy of the Land'. which links anti-capitalist struggles for land, education, and culture. Readers are also provided with an extensive reference list on publications about and by the MST - in English and Portuguese.

This chapter discusses the educational initiatives of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), the largest agrarian social movement in Latin America. Although the MST is famous around the world for its success forcing the Brazilian government to redistribute land, less well known is the movement’s simultaneous fight for access to education in all areas of agrarian reform. Part of this fight is for the movement’s right to develop its own educational pedagogies and curriculum in these public schools. Over the past three decades, members of the movement have drawn on a variety of theorists to develop these educational practices, from Paulo Freire to Soviet pedagogues. This chapter explores two Soviet theorists the movement draws on—Moisey Pistrak and Anton Makarenko—and how these theorists arrived in Brazil and the ways in which members of the movement have adapted these theories to their contemporary context. This argument is based on extensive interviews with MST educational activists as well as visits and participant observation to dozens of schools in MST settlements and camps. In addition to a historical discussion, the chapter also analyzes two schools administered by the MST where the theories of Makarenko and Pistrak are currently flourishing. This chapter argues that the MST’s conscious use of Soviet pedagogies is part of the movement’s overarching goal of creating socialist economic alternatives in the Brazilian countryside through collective organic farming.

Tarlau, R. (2018). Social Movement-Led Participatory Governance of Public Education: The Case of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement. In Another Way: Decentralization, Democratization and the Global Politics of Community-Based Schooling, eds. K. A. Heidemann and R. A. Clothey. Boston: Sense Publishers.

Kuk, H. S., & Tarlau, R. (2020). The confluence of popular education and social movement studies into social movement learning: A systematic literature review. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 39(5-6), 591-604.

Mariano, A., & Tarlau. R. (2019). The MST and research with and for landless peasant-worker struggles in Brazil. In D. Kapoor & S. Jordan, eds., Research, political engagement and dispossession: Indigenous, small peasant and urban poor activisms in the Americas and Asia (pp. 29-49). Zed books.