The Landless Peasants Movement (MST) in Brazil

Rebecca Tarlau will discuss the educational initiatives of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), the largest agrarian social movement in Latin America. Based on 17 months of field research living and working with the MST over the past two years, Tarlau will first go over the origin of the movement and how the MST’s political organizing has evolved over the past thirty years. Although the MST is famous around the world for its success forcing the Brazilian government to redistribute land, less well known is the movement’s simultaneous fight for access to education in all areas of agrarian reform. Part of this fight is for the movement’s right to develop its own educational pedagogies and curriculum in public schools. Over the past three decades members of the movement have drawn on a variety of theorists to develop these educational practices, from Paulo Freire to Soviet pedagogues. Tarlau will briefly talk about the the two Soviet theorists the movement draws on—Moisey Pistrak and Anton Makarenko—and how these theorists arrived in Brazil and the ways in which members of the movement have adapted these theories to their contemporary context. Tarlau will end by reflecting on how the MST’s conscious use of Soviet pedagogies, as well as Freirean educational practices, is part of the movement’s overarching goal of creating socialist economic alternatives in the Brazilian countryside through collective organic farming. Co-sponsored by the Task Force on the Americas.