Search

There was in Spain an inicial «army of teachers» freinetians, a group of snipers commited to the renovation of the system of education which was born and grew in the shade of the Republic. To this army belonged the teachers’ small squad of Extremadura, which took two schools of Las Hurdes as a surprising origin. From there it extended to Montijo -principal center of diffusion for the rest of the educational experiences in the region: Calamonte, Valencia de Alcantara, La Puebla del Maestre and, probably also, Arroyo del Puerco. Surprising is not only that the origin of such an educational innovation took place in a region like Las Hurdes, but also that it was proceeding almost at the same time as the huge movement in Catalonia and Aragon, and that it, most likely, was not affected by Almendros ́s influences. There are reasons to believe that the teacher Jose Vargas Gómez, the origin of everything, had early news from Freinet through the teachers from Torrijos and Camarena before arriving to Las Hurdes.

The Chilean educational system, which is considered an emblem of neoliberal public policies, was subjected to a profound legal refom in 2014. The moderate left-wing government passed the «Ley de Inclusión» bill, which seeked avoiding the selection of students, the charging of copay upon families in publicly financed schools, and ending the possibility that private schools, which received public financing, could seek profit. During the discussion of this bill, a set of educative, political and social actors articulated and mobilized looking to stop this. The purpose of this paper is to identify and describe the argumentative twists present in the discursive community that opposed the «Ley de Inclusión» bill. The corpus used consists of 139 opinion columns, published in «El Mercurio» and «La Tercera», the two main political media papers between March of 2014 and January of 2015. From an analysis ot these argumentative twists, a discursive coalition was built. The beliefs and representations of the educational community condense on: the need for a gradualist and evidence-based public policy; the free choice of schools as the dominant rationality and tool in the educational quasi-market; and the defense of private education as a means to ensure the existence of differentiated and plural educational offers in the educational system.

The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the importance of «inculturation» in the religious images drawn by Monica Liu (Ho-Pei), a unique artist who promoted Religious Art and Education in Taiwan. Monica Liu adopted Western Christianity into Chinese art to create paintings that reflect her love for nature as well as Our Lady who is deeply venerated in the Catholic Church and regarded as the mother of humanity. This paper is a qualitative research based on an interview conducted with Huang Wan-Yun, a protégée of Monica Liu who had a very close relationship with the latter during the last ten years of her life. This research is also based on some writings that Monica left behind and several articles written about her by acquaintances. The culture and faith expressed by Monica Liu through Our Lady’s images help us to deeply understand the value and relationship between religious art and faith. In addressing the needs of the secular world, religious art has encountered difficulties in terms of contemporary aesthetics. Monica’s distinct aesthetic considered «moral virtues» important to modern or contemporary art and their absence could result in distorted values. Therefore, true mission work in the field of religious art has to be close to everyone’s heart, as well as emphasize the importance of inculturation through natural representations and create awareness of taboo in art, which involves «additional and supplementary» elements in original artworks.

This paper explores my on-going collaborative research journey that began in 2009 with a critical ethnographic investigation into the ways one early years school in Bristol was working to advance a pedagogy of respect that drew on the multilingual and multiliterate out of school practices of children and their parents in order to open possibilities for in-school learning. The project was framed within a critical ethnographic approach that is underpinned by a philosophy of democratic and collaborative ways of working within the field; acknowledging identities, positionalities and relations of power as constructed within and across institutional settings. In this paper, I present the collaborative learning trajectories and relationships between myself, as researcher, and Lara, the Head Teacher, a key participant within this project. I situate this within a critical reading of researcher identities, collaboration and research-community partnerships within a scholarship that draws on arguments for the democratizing of knowledge production, the re-evaluation and transformation of field relationships through reflexive practice (Byrd-Clark & Dervin, 2014; Facer & Enright, 2016; Giampapa, 2011) and the intellectual and emotional commitment involved in shaping them. What evolved through this unfinished critical ethnographic journey is an understanding of the underlying «practical, personal and symbolic» reasons (Facer & Enright, 2016, p. 59) for field relationships as a starting point in order to build deeper forms of engagement. These deeper forms of engagement generate different ways of knowing that are co-created, ethically grounded, socially responsible and action oriented (Campbell & Lassiter, 2010). I stress the transformative power of these field conversations that were able to evolve and shape new ways of understanding as a result of the longevity of being in the field and working beyond it.

Parent engagement programs are in high demand these days, particularly as they pertain to immigrant and refugee families. But working with families entails purposeful communication with families (Valdés, 1996). Yet, often families are caught in cross-cultural divides that forces them out of engagement with those running the program (Machado-Casas, 2012). Cultural disconnections often times become ways in which minority families find themselves trapped (Nieto & Bode, 2011). Some researchers have looked at non-traditional pedagogical spaces to challenge future and practicing educators and community members to examine how the process of normalization privileges dominant groups while simultaneously oppressing ‘others’ (Cary, 2006). When this happens the process of «pimping families» through discourses that «talk» at them rather than to/for them lead to furthering hegemonic practices often aimed at minority families. Through interviews with families, and educators, this paper will highlight the «cultural confessions» of educators, and families who utilize non-traditional spaces to expose how prejudice and privilege have influenced their perceptions of «legitimate knowledge», legitimate spaces, and legitimate cross-cultural communication. This paper will present data obtained form Communities United for Education (CUPE) a family involvement and education program that nurtures a strong sense of community among students, teachers, and families. The program focuses in the empowering of families through developing support, leadership, advocacy, and activism, in addition to working with parents on bridging the digital divide among family members. Data presented will expose how families have educators have experienced and dealt with cross-cultural communication issues.

Attempting to explore and push the margins of philosophy of education, this article describes Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and its characters, staying inside the and observing the education of their consciousness. The description offered is limited to educational reflections on what happens, avoiding normative questions and concerns. However, the conclusion hints towards ways in which philosophers of education who are interested in normative questions and concerns might approach this text in ways which this article does not. The expressions used in this paper – dispositions, consciousness, unconscious– are gestural and figurative rather than exhaustive and scientific. The argument is not concerned with what these words mean in general but rather with what they might mean and might elucidate for educational thought in the context of reading The Waves. This article rejects the need to do something un-literary by comprehensively elucidating key concepts, saying why they are important, relating them to everyday life, and defending claims like «dispositions are in-educable». The educational resonances of the text itself are presented as evidence, context, and point of interest. Implicit to the argument of this paper is a critique of limited and institutionally biased conceptions of experience as education.

University education has adapted to the prevailing circumstances and that it is even proving to be an essential resource in the optimization of the reality. Otherwise, the university is a very important part of the social system in which it is, and the training of excellent professionals is a cardinal issue for the proper functioning of such a system. Yes it is, today various professional profiles, classics and currents, are demanded to be formed in the classrooms of our universities. However, that is not all, and depending on how you look at it, is not even the most important. However, at the same time and internationally speaking, we have also witnessed the emergence of concerns about the nature of this education, above all in relation to the personal, ethical, and civic development of today’s student populace. It is logical to think, that is not enough to train excellent professionals, indeed, reality shows that this is not enough when personal and ethical training is insufficient or does not live up to the current circumstance. The aim of this paper is to focus on this aspect, and in doing so it revisits a past in which essential philosophical ideas were being formulated, ideas which this paper argues are highly pertinent to the current reality.

The paper will describe the development of universities in Latvia from 1950’s to nowadays. The higher education system experienced changes along with the political transformations of the country. Latvia was incorporated in the Soviet Union in 1940, regained its independence in 1991 and joined EU in 2004. Since 2012 Latvia is a fully fledged participant of the European Higher Education Area. The paper will describe the transformations of universities in Latvia from the perspective of a cultural learning theory and transfer of knowledge defined by Gita Steiner-Khamsi. It will provide the reference to an external education model, its modification and metamorphosis into a local educational model. Latvia as a small country and relatively new culture had found itself in the situation to learn from the cultural experiences of countries that have longer experience of democracy and had to overtake the ideas of the education systems from other countries and adopt them to the local needs.

Currently English universities are responding to a recent government Green Paper which promises to deliver a raft of radical policy changes which could have a major impact on how excellence in teaching and learning is to be publicly acknowledged and rewarded. A significant, yet controversial proposal is the introduction of a «Teaching Excellence Framework» for universities. This paper examines and contextualises the current important policy debates and then presents some preliminary findings from a recent empirical case study which explored how research-intensive universities have valued, rewarded and supported excellence in teaching through institutional structures and also from the perspectives of academic staff responsible for teaching students. We argue that the reality on the ground for many academics is a sense of confusion and contraction around how their universities value and support high quality teaching and that there may be some way to go before some of the ideas and principles currently being discussed in the context of a national English Teaching Excellence Framework are fully embedded in practice.

This paper doesn’t attempt to situate the figure of Paulo Freire in the context of Latin America or international pedagogy. In this paper, the author presents a synthesis of the Angicos (Braisl) political literacy experience, asking what Freire learned from the Angiços experience. The following questions are developed in the paper: How Freire consolidated his pedagogical model through a social science based on a critical hermeneutics? How his thinking evolved into a theory of social and cultural reproduction, looking particularly to the role o education? And, how then Freire moved into a critical social psychology focusing on domination and the developmental pedagogical subject? Freire was inspired by the profound political and pedagogical experience of Angicos and his political pedagogical practice, understood praxis as collective learning. At the conclusion, the author discusses the two obsessions of Freire, already present in the Angicos experience and that stay with him throughout his life: the relationship between democracy, citizenship and education, and education as a postcolonial ethical act of social transformation. Received: 30/04/2013 / Accepted: 18/09/2013How to reference this articleGadotti, M. (2014). Alfabetizar e Politizar. Angicos, 50 anos depois. Foro de Educación, 12(16), pp. 51-70. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14516/fde.2014.012.016.002