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In
Occupying Schools, Occupying Land, Rebecca Tarlau looks at the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement over the past thirty-five years to illustrate how social movements can use state services, such as schools, to support their social change goals. Through a detailed ethnographic and long-term examination of the MST's educational struggle, Tarlau shows how educational institutions can in turn help movements build capacity and social influence. This book provides an analysis of how activists convinced government officials to implement these educational practices and how these initiatives strengthened the movement.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Acronyms
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction
- Part One: Constructing a National Educational Program
- 1. Pedagogical Experiments in the Brazilian Countryside
- 2. Transforming Universities to Build a Movement: The Case of PRONERA
- 3. From the Pedagogy of the MST to Educação do Campo: Expansion, Transformation, and Compromise
- Part Two: Regional Cases of Contentious Co-Governance of Public Education
- 4. Rio Grande do Sul: Political Regimes and Social Movement Co-Governance
- 5. Pernambuco: Patronage, Leadership, and Educational Change
- 6. Ceará: The Influence of National Advocacy on Regional Trajectories
- Conclusion
- Epilogue
- Appendix A: Manifesto of Educators of Agrarian Reform, July 1997
- Appendix B: Curriculum of the University of Ijuí Pedagogy of Land Program (1998-2001)
- Appendix C: Curriculum of the UNESP PRONERA Geography Program (2007-2011)
- Appendix D: Fourth National Seminar on PRONERA Final Document, November 2010
- Appendix E: Manifesto of Educators of Agrarian Reform, September 2015
- Glossary of Portuguese Terms
- Notes
- References
- Index
About the author
Rebecca Tarlau is Assistant Professor of Education and Labor and Employment Relations at the Pennsylvania State University. She is affiliated with the Lifelong Learning and Adult Education Program, the Comparative and International Education program, and the Center for Global Workers' Rights.
Summary
Winner of the 2020 ASA Sociology of Development Book Award
Winner of the 2020 APSA Michael Harrington Book Award
Winner of the 2020 Comparative and International Education Society Globalization and Education Book Award
Winner of the 2020 Latin American Studies Association Brazil Section Best Book Prize in the Social Sciences
Winner of 2019 Robert Reis Best Book Award
Over the past thirty-five years the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), one of the largest social movements in Latin America, has become famous for its success in occupying land, winning land rights, and developing alternative economic enterprises for over a million landless workers. In Occupying Schools, Occupying Land, Rebecca Tarlau explores how MST activists have pressured municipalities, states, and the federal government to implement their educational program in public schools and universities. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic field work, Tarlau documents how the MST operates in different regions. She argues that activists are most effective using contentious co-governance, combining disruption and public protest with institutional pressure to defend and further their goals. Through an examination of the potentials, constraints, failures, and contradictions of the MST's educational struggle, this book offers insights into the relationship between education and social change, social movements and states, and the barriers and possibilities for similar reforms in democratic contexts throughout the world.
Additional text
Tarlau's impressively organized text is framed as a rebuttal to Michels (1915) and Piven and Cloward (1977), who suggest that movements inevitably deradicalize and demobilize as they engage more with the state.
