Insights from Latin American Community Development Practitioners for Democratic Practice and...

Insights from Latin American Community Development

Practitioners for Democratic Practice and Community Development

David Bronkema

Cornelia Flora

Outline of Presentation

• “Latin American” Community Development – Focus on “Popular Education” and the Council of Popular

Education of Latin America and the Caribbean

• Method: Canvassing of the Spanish/Portuguese Journal “La Piragua” over its 25 year history

• Results – Insights into community development and democracy – Implications and points of dialogue with community

development praxis in the US.

• Goal of this presentation: just give you a taste of what is there, what our Latin American colleagues have been thinking and doing

Community Development in Latin America

• “Latin America tradition of community development”(Pearce, Howard, & Bronstein, 2010 and La Piragua authors)

• Foundational pillars: – Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed - 1969)

• “oppressors and oppressed,” “conscientization,” “problem-posing education,” “internalization of oppression,” “facilitation” of “dialogue of knowledge,” “overthrow oppression.”

• “Critical pedagogy,” “popular education,” “empowerment”

– Orlando Fals Borda (Participatory Action Research – 1970s)

– Enrique Dussel (Philosophy of Liberation – 1970s)


• Latin America Context of 1960s-1980s – Strong, historical movement of adult education, especially

around literacy – “Rapid social change” with industrialization and opening to

world markets for agribusiness in the midst of extreme poverty

– Cold War and revolutionary movements (Cuban revolution in 1959)

– Liberation theology – Military coups and repressive governments, backed by the

US, to counter “communist” threat (1960s-1970s) – Wave of democratization in 1980s – Neoliberal policies in 1980s


• Council of Adult Education of Latin America (CEAAL)

– Formed in 1982 with Paulo Freire as 1st president

– Representatives of NGOs with substantial European funding focused on community development developing and using popular education methods

– “Political project” of resisting and overthrowing oppression and use state to meet needs of the poor, support “social movements” (peasant and labor) as means to do so.


• Council of Adult Education of Latin America (CEAAL) – “Political project” challenged by democratization in 1980s and by

neoliberal policies: popular educators join governments to use state for community development, neoliberal economic policies threaten state and represent “cultural invasion” from the North.

– Struggle with what kind of modernization, democracy and democratic processes should be promoted • “radical democracy,” “integral democracy,” “participatory democracy,”

“distributive and substantive democracy,” • democratizing democracy” (Cespedes, 2005; Pontual, 1995; Salinas Amescua,

2000; Torres Carrillo, 2004, p. 59)

– Journal La Piragua started in 1989: – CEAAL currently composed of 227 organizations from 21 countries in

LA and Caribbean – Change of name to Council of Popular Education of Latin America and

the Caribbean in 2012

Method

• Went through all 39 issues of La Piragua, 1989-2014. – 561 articles: 531 in Spanish, 30 in Portuguese

– Approximately 5,000 pages

• Qualitative study: – Look for themes, insights, thinking on relationship

between community development and democracy

– Purpose: inform US audience and see what learnings and points of dialogue might exist

Results

• Popular education in function of community development ties together the macro and the micro level: the impact of each on each other.

• Macro Level: – Decentralization of the state

– Citizenship

– Social movements, especially women, youth, indigenous • Public policies and advocacy

• Human rights, especially economic, social, and cultural

Results

• Micro Level: – Critical reflection and pedagogy

– Everyday living and experience

– Dialogue of knowledges and interculturality

– Moving beyond rationalism, collectivism, and politics, to emotion, individualism/autonomy, and needs

– Solidarity economy and “buen vivir” (living well)

– Systematization and training to build knowledge and popular educators for democracy

Results: Macro Level

• Themes/Insights/Concepts:

– State Decentralization

• Opportunities for tackling poverty at the local level, linked in with concepts of “democratic citizenship” and “local power” (Jordan, 1994; Palma, 1994).

• CEAAL starts “Local Power” program in the early 1990s. (Caruso, 1994).


• Citizenship – “Construction of citizen subjects” (Osorio, 1994) or

“citizenship formation” (Torres Carrillo, 2004). – Drew on Dewey’s work linking education and democracy. – Incorporated notion of the construction of “social

subjects” (Zemelman, 1992) – Evolved more recently into the concept of the construction

of “popular subjects”: notion of social and political dimensions of people (Jara Holliday, 2012, pp. 6-8)

– Related to the concept of an “integral citizenship” that brings together many dimensions of what it is to be a citizen that go beyond just the political (Leis R., 2009, pp. 55-56).


• Citizenship – Popular education for citizenship was seen as

performing at least three main, interrelated functions: • constitute “critical subjects who are capable of making value

judgments and political choices”;

• build spaces in which “subjects can create an identity, and build autonomy and ethical meaning, and foster public environments for the development of social movements and actors”;

• “communicate with and discover the other…in which the meaning of responsibility, welcoming, and doing good is captured” (Osorio Vargas, 1995, p. 44).


• Social movements

– Major building block of this new political project of “democratizing democracy”: “main partner” of the popular education movement in 2010 by the president of CEAAL (Céspedes, 2010, p. 7).

– Three reasons for this


• Social Movements:

– Provide a way to express and build up identity, meaning, values, and relationships for many different people who are excluded and marginalized by important sectors and processes of society.

• Drawing on Foucault (friendship) and Arendt (human action): they “create a way of life that overflows into projects for the social…giving form and meaning for life” (Fonseka Flakembach & Assmann, 2008, p. 93)


• Social Movements:

– Seen a place where new ideas and “emancipatory paradigms” necessary for democratizing democracy are constantly being forged through their practices of resistance to cultural and political traditions and policies, especially for women, youth, and indigenous:

• They create “new emancipatory political cultures and cultural politics that subvert the dominant political meanings” and “redefining political categories such as public, rights, democracy…and citizenship.” (Torres Carrillo, 2009)


• Social Movements – Shape the macro-political agenda of the interface with

the state in the area of public policy. • Engaged in the essential task of building a new role for

themselves in the context of democratization, a new kind of state/(civil) society relationship.

• Substitute for the traditional role that political parties played (Fals Borda, 1989, p. 24) given the context of a “wide rejection of the electoral political system and of the traditional political parties, characterized as inefficient, oligarchic, corrupt, and linked with the economic interests of the national and foreign elites” (Caccia Bava & Gomes da Costa Santos, 2008, p. 57).

– Human rights as ethics

Results: Micro Level

• Critical Reflection, Everyday Life, Dialogue of Knowledges, and Interculturality – Critical reflection

• Gives popular education its definition – “a critical reading of the current social order” (Zarco Mera,

1998, p. 18),

– “a critical understanding of reality for its transformation (humanization)” (General, 2000, p. 14),

– “a critical reading of the “unjust” character of society” (Torres Carrillo, 2000, p. 23), and its “dialectic, participatory, dialogical, educational method” (Salinas Amescua, 2000, p. 38).


• Critical Reflection, Everyday Life, Dialogue of Knowledges, and Interculturality – Everyday Life (drawing from Agnes Heller):

• “Integrated processes of human development processes…are only possible to develop at the micro level and in everyday life” (Vío Grossi, 1989, p. 6

• “everyday life…is the particular way in which each unique group experiences the macrosocial processes in a different way…the space in which common women and men can become responsible builders of their own destinies…the space in which many are subjects who, to different degrees, dominate their reality, even when that control is relative to the degree that reality is conditioned by macro situations that those individuals do not manage…” (Palma, 1989, p. 14)


• Critical Reflection, Everyday Life, Dialogue of Knowledges, and Interculturality

• Dialogue of Knowledges and Interculturality: – Different kinds of understandings that are built up based on

people’s everyday experiences, and from which each side can learn.

– “Academic” (Mejía, 1992, p. 7) or “elaborated knowledge” and the “popular knowledge” that has been built up systematically through everyday life (Magendazo, 1991)

– Interaction between the knowledges of people of different cultures isparticularly important one for the democratic process because of the view that indigenous cultures hold an “accumulated democratic wisdom” ("Editorial," 1989, p. 4) in which “economic and political democracy are not separated but are a substantial part of everyday life” (Leis, 1989, p. 29).


• Beyond Rationalism, Collectivism, and Politics, to Emotion, Individualism/Autonomy, and Needs – Question what they saw as popular education’s one-sided emphasis

on the “rational” or “cognitive” side of the people as opposed to the “affective” or “emotive” side, an obvious result of their emphasis on critical reflection.

– New dimensions of subjectivity lead to exploration of “autonomy” and “freedom,” (Freire, 1998), and “processes of individuation,” (Mejía J., 2009, p. 47).

– Pay closer attention to people’s needs and desires, rejecting a differentiation between “felt needs” and “real needs,” (Zemelman, 1992, p. 14 footnote 6), drawing on the human scale development theories of Max Van-Neef and the overall question of human wellbeing and flourishing within the framework of the larger economic and cultural project (Boltvinik, 2007; Cadena Barquín & Collin Harguindeguy, 2011, pp. 37-38).


• Beyond the Market: Solidarity Economy, and Buen Vivir – What would an economic and cultural alternative to

neoliberalism look like at the local level? • Solidarity Economy

– Rooted in the everyday life of people for access to basic goods and services

– Create associations of “producers-consumers-savers” in a “market of solidarity,” provide goods at low prices by circumventing intermediaries, create work opportunities on farms and in community stores, encourage healthy consumption habits, improve the environment, build trust and solidarity with savings associations, community currency, and barter, among others (Cadena Barquín & Collin Harguindeguy, 2011, pp. 45-46).


• Beyond the Market: Solidarity Economy, and Buen Vivir – Buen Vivir

• Concept of “living well” or “good living” comes from a variety of indigenous groups in different parts of Latin America, each with their own name for it (Mejía J., 2012, p. 119).

• The concept and form of life that is centered in the relationship of the person with nature and with society, with individual and collective existence, based on a vision of a respect that seeks to integrate values into human conviviality, because it affirms the creation of a new social contract that integrates unity in diversity, pluriculturality, equity, and integrity as the promising seeds which, giving great encouragement and hope, are sprouting and bursting into the bosom of the splintered and violent society that we are suffering from (Leis R., 2009, p. 68).


• Systematization and Training: Building Knowledge and Popular Educators for Democracy – Systematization (evaluation):

• Build up knowledge based on a systematic, intentional , critical and “dialectical” reflection on social reality in the context of actions, experiences, and projects, a method appropriately called “systematization” (Ghiso, 2006, p. 45).

• Draws on Schön’s “The Reflective Practitioner” (Schön, 1983): get the practitioners, those engaged in the interventions, to define why they took the actions they did, “to bring to light the theory that is in practice” (Barnechea et al., 1999, p. 39) that most practitioners are not aware that they have or are using (Barnechea et al., 1999, p. 41).


• Systematization and Training: Building Knowledge and Popular Educators for Democracy – Training:

• Informal level of the everyday work of popular educators with community and social movement leaders;

• Creation of curricula for more formal and specialized schools, for the so-called “Dialectical Methodological Conception” (CMD in Spanish) popular education schools established in the mid-1980s that continue to operate today (Antillón & Orozco C., 1992, pp. 51-52; Kane, 2001, pp. 68-82)

• Creation of curricula for state-accredited schooling system in social work programs, popular education BA degrees, and MA degrees in popular education.

Conclusions and Implications for US Community Development Praxis

Insights from Latin American Community Development Practitioners for Democratic Practice and...

Government & Nonprofit

Transcript of Insights from Latin American Community Development Practitioners for Democratic Practice and...