Rodolfo Hachén Centre of Ethnolinguistics National University of Rosario,

1. Rodolfo HachénCentre of Ethnolinguistics National University of Rosario, Learning from Popular Education in Latin America: What Role Can Universities Play? 26th April 2012 Glasgow

2. Rodolfo Hachénrhachen@hotmail.comwww.rodolfohachen.com.ar UNR (Argentina) Researcher for CONICET y UNESCO Activist for Human Rights, especially the right to education, Historical Memory and people's linguistic self-determination (LaSLenguaS).

3. I firmly believe in Popular Education and the dream of Freire to have a “…society reinventing itself from the bottom up, where everyone has a right to an opinion and not only the duty to listen to others…”.

4. Utopía y globalización The concept of globalization often seems linked tothat of homogenization and with policies which deny differences and endanger not only the cultural patrimony of humanity but life itself.

5. Chomsky, 2003 ‘It’s no exaggerationtosaythatthefuture of thehumanspeciesdependsonwhetherornottherebellionagainstneoliberalism can becomesufficientlystrong, mobilised and organisedtocounterthe wave going in theotherdirection.''

6. Landner, E. “Thedifficulties in formulatingtheoretical and politicalalternativestothe total primacy of themarket are dueto… thefactthatneoliberalismispresented as aneconomictheorywhenitshouldreallybeunderstood as a hegemonicdiscourse of a model of civilization…”

7. Models of Civilization and Genocide Humanity has suffered many "models of civilization" that tended to destroy otherness. In the form of invasions, empires, nation states, school systems and / or transnational economic projects, the techniques of domination have not substantially changed.

8. Education in the Service of Domination “Schools don’t educate shepherds for sheep but sheep for shepherds.” (L. Tolstoi)

9. “Schools or education can no longer  be understood  simply as vehicles for the transmission of the basic skills required to earn a living or to maintain a country’s economic competitiveness. For this economic-technological dimension of our civilization to be viable it must be embedded in a human cultural context that sustains it.” (Bruner, 1997:10)

10. Educación Popular: Freire “An education that enables people to  discuss their problems bravely, which warns of the dangers of the time so that, with awareness, people gain the strength and courage to fight instead of having to submit to the will of others and have their subjectivity destroyed. Education which places people in constant dialogue with each other, which predisposes  them to constant revision and critical  analysis of their 'discoveries', to a certain defiance, in the most human sense of the expression; in short, an education that identifies people  with scientific methods and processes”.(1969:85)

11. Another(better)worldispossible The first time I read this phrase was in a book treasured by my grandfather  about the ideas of the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Later I understood that "Education is risky because it reinforces the sense of possibility” (Bruner, 1997:62)

12. 1963 The same year I was born (1963), Paulo Freire  implemented his first large group educational experience, within the National Literacy Campaign, bringing literacy to 300 rural workers in a month and a half and laying the foundations for popular education which, by overcoming the ‘banking’ approach of schools in Latin America (and worldwide), rescued the active role of education for  the radical democratization of knowledge generation. His ideas and above all his liberating praxis transformed my conception of studying and learning.

13. “…tochangetheuglyface of school…” Freire distancedhimselffromtheauthoriatarian idea of education. He madeeducationrelevanttoeveryone , basedontheunderstanding of otherpeople’slanguage and onthe social construction of knowledge, within a welldevelopedunderstanding of theidentity of the ‘popular’ classes.

14. “To change the face of school is, basically, to change the organization of the curriculum, to alter the understanding of teaching methodology, what it means to'teach' and what it means to 'learn'. And this is not done by decree. But you cannot democratise  school in an authoritarian manner because it would be a contradiction.When you realise that, you find there are other ways to achieve that goal. The main one is to be able to convince teachers, the continuous scientific training/education of the teaching body. ". (Paulo Freire)

15. Challenge To ensure the establishment of Popular Education within the framework of an educational system which, as in most of Latin America and the rest of the world, seeks domestication more than liberation.

16. Educación Popular: Freire “An education that enables people to  discuss their problems bravely, which warns of the dangers of the time so that, with awareness, people gain the strength and courage to fight instead of having to submit to the will of others and have their subjectivity destroyed. Education which places people in constant dialogue with each other, which predisposes  them to constant revision and critical  analysis of their 'discoveries', to a certain defiance, in the most human sense of the expression; in short, an education that identifies people  with scientific methods and processes”.(1969:85)

17. Educación Popular and diversity Diversity is a characteristic inherent in humanity. Each group of people “speaks the world” (Charaudeau, 1988) in its own peculiar way and herein lies the richness of interculturality.

18. False opposition: equality/diversity EQUALITY is opposed to INEQUALITY DIVERSITY Is opposed to HOMOGENEITY .

19. Tolerance versus Respect Proper Popular Education should promote respect for diversity within a framework of equal rights. We talk about RESPECT and not TOLERANCE because "tolerance permits cultural differences, which I think is very positive; but it doesn’t give them any right, it puts them in a situation of structural inferiority, constantly reminding them that there are limits which, if exceeded, can lead to prohibitions. It is better to be tolerated than outlawed, that’s true. But to be tolerated does not mean to have the same rights and freedoms as those of the dominant group members .” (Wieviorka en Cisneros, 2004: 22)

20. Integration versus Articulation Integration is often a form of forced "assimilation". The idea of articulation is a better approach because it lets us think of a complex structure "... in which things are related as much by their differences as their similarities. This makes it necessary to highlight the mechanisms that connect dissimilar features, since there is no 'necessary correspondence' nor can the hegemony of expression be taken for granted "(Stuart Hall to Jameson - Žižek,1993:99) In this complex structure of the social, cultural operators do not mix, losing their identities; instead they bring their differences together for the benefit of the whole mechanism, a mechanism in which there shouldn’t and can’t be any hegemony of power..

21. Inequality “Racism, class privilege and prejudice, all amplified by the forms of poverty they create, have powerful effects on how much and how we educate…" (Bruner, 1997:45)

22. Original Peoples of America Historically decimated, marginalized, robbed and kept away from areas of institutional power, they await recognition and  enactment of their rights in relation to land, identity and education. The social inequality which minority languages ​​and cultures must suffer can be seen clearly when key variables such as number of speakers, poverty levels and possibilities of access to education are cross-referenced. .

23. Argentina The highest rates of illiteracy are seen in the northern provinces: Chaco with 12,33%, Corrientes with 10%; Santiago del estero with 9,54%, Formosa with 9,24%, Misiones with 9,11%, Jujuy with 7,85% y Salta with 7,57%.

24. Also in these provinces we find the highest rates of people 25 and over with little or no education (no more than 3 years of primary education). While the national average is 12.3%, we see much higher figures in these provinces: Chaco, 27.1%,Santiago del Estero, 21.9%, Formosa, 21.5%, Corrientes, 21.3%, 20.7% Misiones,Jujuy, 18.9% and Salta and Entre Rios, 17.6% (Pognante, 2003). The areas most affected by illiteracy correspond to the historically poorest provinces, those where you find the highest concentration of indigenous populations of Toba, Mocoví, Wichí, Guarani, Quechua, Pilagá, Mbyá, Chiriguano, Chane, Tapiete, Nivacle and Chorote. The Chiriguano language is spoken in this region by 15,000 people (Chiriguanos Tapités Chané, in the provinces of Salta and Jujuy), Mbya by 2,500-3,000 speakers (Mission), Toba, by 35,000 to 60,000 speakers (Chaco, Formosa, Salta), Nivacle by 200 to 1,200 speakers (Salta), Chorote by 1,200 to 2,100 speakers (Salta), Quichua Santiago from 60,000 to 100,000 speakers (Santiago del Estero), and Guarani Correntino (Goyano) and Paraguayan Guarani, 1,000,000 speakers (Censabella, 1999)

25. “…some day we might be able to talk about ethnic genocide as a thing of the past but cultural genocide is still active each time we try to impose better ways of life and congratulate ourselves when people who are proud and independent gradually succumb, in the best of cases, to the the good intentions of making them as much as possible like us and, in the worst of cases, leaving them just as they are so as to exploit them better.” (Romano, 2007: 190)

26. Nuestra tarea So it’s the job of universities to address diversity not saying ‘of’ but ‘with’. We shouldn’t adopt a paternalistic approach but instead create a true climate for dialogue since, as indicated by the Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú “What we need isn’t that you give us a hand but that you take away the one you already have around our necks...”(Rigoberta Menchú)

27. Educación Popular and traditionalconceptions of education “Education, however it is organised, in whichever culture, always has consequences on the subsequent lives of those who receive it. (…) education is never neutral, it never fails to have social and economic consequences. Try as anyone might to argue against it, education is always political in this wider sense” (Bruner, 1997:43 y 44)

28. Prescriptiveinstitutions: church, school and literarycriticism(Chartier - Hebrard, 1994) “With regard to prescription, various groupings concentrated attention: the discourses of school, the churches and literary criticism, and each one of them had an institution of production and control, a legitimacy, a system of exclusion.”(Chartier - Hebrard, 1994: 18)

29. Liberty as a threat Free access to reading, for example, and especially its free interpretation, becomes a danger which threatens the stability of the most powerful institutions which, throuhout history, have based their power in their exclusive knowledge. The establishement of a unique set of knowledge alien to the social group has always been linked with power.

30. In thecrossroads of education Trapped in the well-known crossroads between subverting or consolidating the established order, schools don’t always fail in their objective, but this objective answers to shemes and suppositions of which they are no longer even aware. We believe that ‘An education sytem should help those who grow in a culture to find an identity within that culture” (Bruner, 1997:62) Educationshouldpromotethesense of AGENCY, REFLECTION and COLLABORATION always in conjunctionwiththe socio-cultural dynamic.

31. ¿What do we mean whenwetalkabout Educación Popular? In the history of (Latin) America, the expression ‘popular education’ has often been used to refer to a variety of political and ideological questions. From religious beginnings in colonial times it slowly changed in the 17th and 19th centuries under the influence of the Enlightenment and the beginning of ‘rationalism’.

32. Siglo XIX The consolodation of Nation States associated education with the builiding of a strong nationalist image. In the second half of the 19th century, in opposition to the dominant ideas, there is an upsurge in anarchist and socialist groups and popular nationalist governments who propose some alternative pedagogical practices

33. Siglo XX “At thebeginning of the 20th centurytheuniversityextensionmodelwasintroducedtoLatinAmerica and wassynonymouswith popular education. Thiswaspromotedbythework of theMovementforUniversityreform. Exampleswouldbe Popular Universities and IndigenistProjects. In the 50s educationisseen as decisive in thedevelopment of humanresources and so thedifferenteducationsystems are modernised””

34. Decada del 60 “In the 60s educationisseen as a resourceforindividualstoovercomemarginalisation. In thisperiodthereisanupsurge in projectswith a more political and social focus, directedtowardschangingthedegree of participation of the popular classes. Inspiredbythetriumph of the Cuban revolution and the new position of theChurch (Vatican II, TheLatin American BishopsConference and the Puebla Meeting), as well as bygroups of intellectuals and thestudent sector, Popular Educationbecomesstronger and more resonant (..). Fromthe 90s onwardsitreconsidersitspolitical position: societyisseen as agglomaration of ofspaces of confrontation of whichtheschoolisone. Thestrugglefor a public popular educationisthe central approach in thisdecade”

35. Theuniversityplays a decisive role, pushedbyworkersorganisations in Guatemala, El Salvador and Peru. University Extension is particularly popular in Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay, Nicaragua and Argentina and indigenist education programmes begin to appear in Ecuador and Bolivia.

36. “A second stage of popular-democratic projects are represented by: the literacy work begun by Freire in Brazil (1961) during the government of Joao Goulart; the Reform carried out by the United Popular government of Salvador Allende in Chile (1970); the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) in Bolivia (1952-1964); the Arbenz government in Guatemala (1954); the Cuban Educational Reform (1958); the Educational Reform in Peru (1968) and Panama (1969), with the establishment of ‘schools of production’ during the government of ??????. The Reform in Bolivia took place underJuan José Torres (1970-1971) and in Nicaragua under the Sandinista government (1979-1991)”

37. Popular Education as analternativetoinstitutionalisedmodels Theexclusion of poorpeoplefromeducationalinstitutions, thelack of provision and quality, as well as theconception of people and societypresentedbystateeducation, ledgroups of intellectuals – declaringthemselvestobeontheside of themajorityclasses and committedtotheir causes – todeveloppolitical-educationalprojectsdirectedtowardsthetransformation of social structures..

38. Paulo Freire He analysestheinstitutionalconceptions of educationapplied in thedependent American countries, referingtotherootedness of what he callsthe ‘culture of silence’ as a cause of subordination and control in thecountrieswhichhadbeenconquered. His fundamental critique of bankingeducation leads himtodevelop a methodforteachingliteracytoadultswhich he himselfputsintopractice. Freire recognisedthepoliticalintentionality of education. Tosayyour ‘word’ istheright of allhumanbeings and itis in dialogue, in communicationwithotherpeople, thatwe can reflectontheworldwhichsurroundsus in ordertointervene in itcritically. Freire abandonsthehierarchicalrelationshipbetweeneducator and learnerfor a dialogicalrelationship in whichknowledgeisnourishedthroughexchange.

39. We can therefore conceptualize Popular Education "as a collective process through which the popular sectors manage to become the subject of history, director and protagonist of a project of liberation that takes account of its own class interests, …it should see itself as part of and support to a collective process through which the popular sectors, starting from their own social practice, build and consolidate their own political and ideological hegemony, ie developing the subjective conditions – political consciousness and popular organization – which will make the building of their own historical project possible for them." (Peresson, T.; Mariño, Germán; Cendales, Lola. Educación Popular y alfabetización en América Latina. Dimensióneducativa. Colombia 1983. P. 116.)

40. Dictaduras de los 70 y 80 y proyectos neoliberales de los 90 Augusto Boal: Brazilianplaywrite, theatre director, knownfordevelopingtheTheatre of theOppressed, a theoretical concept and methodfor a people’sdemocratictheatre. He wasjailed and torturedduringthedictatorship, labelled as a ‘cultural activist’.”

41. Theatre of theOppressed “Looking at the world, beyond appearances, we see oppressors and oppressed in all societies; ethnic groups, genders, classes and castes; we see the world as cruel and unjust. We are obliged to invent another world because we know another world is possible. But it’s our job to build it with our hands and act, both on stage and in life. Theatre can’t just be an event, it’s a form of life! We’re all actors; a citizen isn’t someone who lives in society, it’s someone who transforms it! • (Boal, 2009)

42. Role of Universities: toparticipate in theredefinition and promotion of popular education “Weneedto redefine Popular Education and this time basedonthe link betweendifferentspecificdeterminationssuch as anexpression of thearticulation of differentnationalstrategiesortheproductcreatedbydifferent concrete groups. Itshouldbedesignedtopromotethegreatestcapacityfortransformation in a popular-democraticdirection, towardstheutopia of a justsociety.” (Adriana Puiggrós,. Historia y perspectiva de la Educación Popular latinoamericana. En: MocairGadotti e Carlos Alberto Tórres.).

45. However we conceptualise authentic educational practice, it’s process implies hope. Educators without hope contradict their practice...educators should always analyse the ideas coming from social reality. Comings and goings which enable a greater understanding of hope. Paulo Freire