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Acción Educativa
Though “People’s Education” is a byword on the Latin American left, few programs implement the ideas of Paulo Freire better than Santa Fe’s Acción Educativa. AE runs many projects in health, human rights, politics, feminism, and youth. Here we will address their work with street and at-risk kids, only a small part of their activities.
From the beginning, AE has tried to improve the quality of life in several favelas of Santa Fe. They began with La Casita, a center to teach women about health, reproduction, gender relations, violence, and leadership. Work with these women led directly to work with their children, first with mentoring and tutoring, later with more political education.
Women first came to La Casita for their own health, or to find some modicum of power, but kids come, most of all, to have fun. Thus, the Casita offers workshops in theater, art, and drums to bring the kids in; they have found “murga” a sort of Argentina samba, to be the most successful.
Fun is only the beginning. AE always choses games and arts that improve self esteem, generate ethics and cooperation, and deconstruct traditional power dynamics. For instance, the murga happens in the streets, taking them back as people’s space, not just where the rich can look down on the poor, where kids should not be. For the first time, kids feel powerful: “We can change the world! We’re masters!” said one girl. Murga also turns unconnected kids into a real community.
Volunteers, often university students or women from the community, connect play with scholarship. They try to show how important school can be for a full life, but also give the kids the tools they need to critique the quotidian oppressions of school. Reflection workshops give the kids a chance to talk about their own lives, and the intellectual tools to think through them. One resident of the favela told me, “Until I came to La Casita, I barely talked. Only the words the TV taught me, you know? But now I have words that describe my life. It feels wonderful!”
La Casita gets much of its budget by selling birth control pills at a small mark-up. Older women are trained as community health workers, allowing them to prescribe the pill, to the benefit of La Casita and all the women in the community.
In the favela, AE has won permission to transform the plaza (now an empty lot) into valuable community space. Two young architects, trained in Italy by Tenucci, ave volunteered their services to create a “children’s city” in the plaza. Now they only lack several permits and the money. [In June of 2003, AE wrote Shine a light to say that this project has been postponed due to lack of funding.]
The Carrito de los Libros is, literally, a horse-cart filled with novels, history books, and children’s literature. AE takes the Carrito into Santa Fe’s favelas, where it serves as a moving library. AE wants to show that kids have “a right to fiction and stories.” The stories, like many fairy tales, address the concerns of poor and excluded kids. When mothers come with the children to the Carrito, AE staff teach them how to tell family stories, validating local histories and teaching kids how cool their parents and their neighborhoods are. The Carrito de los Libros is a joint program with the Universidad del Litoral.
Other AE programs try to recover children’s memories about the dictatorship, to promote children’s rights, and to give expositions of children’s arts.
AE believes that research is essential, so for the past six years it has examined and written about the micro-politics that affect kids’ lives in Santa Fe.
- Symbolic violence. In Argentina, all kids must carry a school notebook, where they do all their homework. AE began to see that kids saw the notebook as a tecnique of domination, a “Nazi notebook.” After many conversations with kids and using theories from Foucault and the Frankfurt School, AE’s research has shown how the notebook is a tool of hegemony, and how teachers can deconstruct this power.
- Gender and teaching. In the last several years, fewer and fewer men have become teachers in Argentina. AE researched the consequences of this shift, noting that it has made education into a “helping profession” and turned students into “poor things.” AE’s research also showed that this transformation dramatically reduced the prestige of teaching as a profession.
- Attitudes toward school: AE continuously polls children of what they think of school, how they learn, and how they subvert or accept power.
Shine a light is working with AE to dissemiate their knowledge. If you read Spanish, we hightly suggest that you read these texts.
Acción Educativa
San Jerónimo 2830
Santa Fe, Argentina
o Casilla de Correo 303
0342 456 1151
0342 456 4737
Teresa de Kakisu, fliakakisu@ciudad.com.ar
Carlos Zagni, Director, accioneducativa@ciudad.com.ar
http://accioneducativa.8m.com
understanding social services for street kids in Latin America
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