Pé no Chão (Feet in the dirt)
Pé no Chão is one of of the best and most creative programs for street kids in Latin America, especially when it comes to street education and political activism. From its origins, it has hoped to provide a space for deeper reflection on pedagogy and politics.
When street kids in Recife tell their stories to strangers, they’ll always say, “Estou com pé no chão...” “I’ve got my feet in the dirt (because I have no money for shoes), struggling to survive...” At the same time, feet in the dirt means work than is based on the real life of the community, not some idealistic principle. In this way, the Pé no Chão captures two of the most important aspects of the group’s work.
From the beginning, Pé no Chão’s feet have been in the dirt: it’s first project was to research the real lives of Recife’s street kids. It went to visit the families of 60 children from the favela of Encrucilhada to ask why the children left home, how long they had been in the street, if they ever returned home...
At the beginning of the 1990s, most people in Recife thought that street children were abandoned or orphans, so the research went off like a bomb. Pé no Chão discovered that 78% of Recife’s street children kept up close relations with their families and that 80% used some kind of social service. This research inspired the best NGOs in Recife to adjust their emphasis more toward families and schools.
Because street kids said their had access to social services, Pé no Chão decided not to create new structures like shelters or soup kitchens. Instead, they decided to improve the lives of families in the favelas, the structures of power in poor families and in the government, and then to inspire kids to return to their communities. Pé no Chão insists that it wants revolutionary change, not just to help a couple of children.
Community work lies at the base of Pé no Chão’s philosophy, but it’s work always begins on the street, where it attempts to “transform the street into an educational space.” Unlike some other programs, it does not suggest that the street is educational in and of itself -- the street must be transformed if children are to learn real lessons. For this reason, when street educators arrive on the scene, they first clean the street, picking up trash, then cleaning the sidewalk with soap and water. Then they set up a huge open sided tent to create a “space on the street but not of the street.” The tent provides shade and sets up a place that belongs to the kids -- if an adult or a policeman wants to come in, he must ask the children’s permission.
Educators come to the street with a “toy suitcase” and a “mobile play room” (the second is a converted van). Inside the tent, the children understand that they have to accept certain rules, so they take care of the toys, don’t hit each other, and don’t use drugs. The can do this because the tent provides a new context where they can behave in a new way; it is a transitional space, the antechamber to a different life.
Pé no Chão’s work is based entirely on artistic, linguistic, and political expression. Speech and self expression are tough for street kids, because most have spent little time in school and because they have adopted a fixed and simple discourse when they beg. Passers-by think that street kids are trash, so the self-expression they adopt is often that of trash, something pitiable and filthy. The educator’s first task is to break this mirror, allowing children to think of themselves in a new way.
Pé no Chão does this work through the urban arts: hip-hop, graffiti, breakdancing, and drums. Educators also work with sculpture and painting based on trash: when they clean the street, they keep the trash, clean it, and help the children make paintings, sculptures, or found-objects (in the tradition of Marcel Duchamps). The metaphor is obvious: people think that this is trash, but we can turn it into art. People think you are trash, but you can make your own life into art.
Street teams break into two roles: the educator and the workshop leader. The workshop leader is an artist -- a breakdancer, a drummer, an artist of graffiti -- while the educator is a professional teacher. While the workshop leader teaches, the educator observes. In a classroom, there is a certain control over the educational space, but that’s not true on the street, so the educator must ask what stands in the way of learning? Is everyone interested? Are the children afraid of anyone? What is there in the local environment which can teach children about their world? How can one “read the street”?
Each day, Pé no Chão offers a different workshop: a day of breakdancing, then one of drums, then one on graffiti. Educators are on the street every day, but workshop leaders are under contract, so they only come to teach their subject. Children can come to as many or as few workshops as they wish.
Pé no Chão’s pedagogy is always based on the philosophy of Paulo Freire (author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed), but it always goes beyond his ideas. Like Freire, Pé no Chão believes that the subjective knowledge of poor and oppressed people must be the base of education, but the program focuses more on the dialogue between local knowledge and international, “hegemonic” knowledge. The educator, who has been to the university to study, plays this role, putting the knowledge that poor people have about themselves into dialogue with the rest of the world. One example of this work is a collaboration with the MST (Landless Movement), where Pé no Chão helps children to find out about their family history by putting them in touch with the peasants who still live in the places where the children’s parents came from. Educators use this dialogue as a way to talk about family relations, political movements, political economy (what forced you parents to leave the countryside in 1987? What was going on then?), cultural history (what is it like to be black in the countryside? In the city?), and modernization. Children also learn about the history of slavery and how African culture became Brasilian culture and urban culture.
Pé no Chão understands that street education may or may not lead to a job -- though some program graduates are now professional dancers, singers, or DJs, the majority will have to find another way to put bread on the table. Pé no Chão insists that it wants to offer children the “tools of happiness” -- even if a young man is working in the supermarket, he will always have art as a way to make sense of his life and to bring happiness to himself and his community.
“Echo of the Periphery” is one of the most interesting of Pé no Chão’s projects. The idea is to blend urban art with political activism and learning about the world. Hip hop turns out to be a great way to learn about the globalization and life in other countries, because the kids hear a rap from Germany, then begin to ask, “there are blacks in Germany? What is their life like? Turks rap too? But who are the Turks? Why are they in Berlin? And why is it that everyone is rapping these days?” Because the kids love the music, they become curious about what lies behind it. Then, when an important event happens in the world, educators have a way to explain what happened and the kids have a way to imagine a response. Echo from the Periphery wants to “make fun of society” through art, making people think about power and politics.
In 2002, examples of this program included street theater in front of the Italian Consulate after the death of a protester in Genoa (the children put on makeup and pretended to be dead), a drum show to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas (with beats from all of the cultures that would be killed by free trade), and constant events to commemorate victims of human rights abuses. The program also stages events in schools and universities, which raises consciousness and deconstructs people’s ideas about street kids.
Pé no Chão also works with families and communities. It begins from the perspective that families are allies in the effort to help their children -- they are not people “who need help” or “who need to change.” Pé no Chão trains parents to be better allies, and in the end, this means that the families change more than they would have in the hands of a social worker. This training is parallel to the education of their children: after the kids take a trip to the beach, Pé no Chão takes their parents to the same beach. When children learn to read, educators go to the favelas to work on reading with their mothers. Parents are always invited to the street to see their children’s artwork or performances, which changes everyone’s ideas about each other.
Pé no Chão has begun the process of formalizing and writing out its methodology, so that it’s experience can be helpful to other programs. It's 2004 annual narrative (a fascinating 240 page document) is available here in Portuguese (download of 22MB).
SAL has collaborated with Pé no Chão on several projects:
- Africa on the Street
- The Hip-Hop Education Project
- CineFavela
- Civil Society against gang violence
Grupo de Apoio Mútuo Pé no Chão
Avenida Guararapes 86 SL 802
Santo Antônio, Recife, PE 50010 000
81 3424 6077
Contacto: Jocimar Borges, penochao@terra.com.br
