Publication by 2009 DPDF Revitalizing Development Studies Fellow Rebecca Tarlau:

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.

Publication Details

Title
The Social(ist) Pedagogies of the MST: Towards New Relations of Production in the Brazilian Countryside
Authors
Tarlau, Rebecca Senn
Publisher
Arizona State University
Publish Date
April 2013
Citation
Tarlau, Rebecca Senn, The Social(ist) Pedagogies of the MST: Towards New Relations of Production in the Brazilian Countryside (Arizona State University, April 2013).
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