Abstract
This article offers a framework for analyzing social movement participation in public education through a focus on universities in Brazil. It builds on the literature on social movement–state relations, participatory governance, and community organizing in schools, drawing on the case of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement and the National Program for Education in Areas of Agrarian Reform (PRONERA) to illustrate the need to recenter the idea of conflict as a central and ongoing process of social movement participation in public schools and universities. The article also introduces the concept of prefiguration and highlights how students can prefigure in the formal public school system the types of social and economic practices they hope to build in the future. Contentious cogovernance and prefiguration are tools not only for improving educational equity but also for increasing the strength and internal capacity of social movements, paralleling the role Paulo Freire envisioned for nonformal popular education within grassroots organizations.
Globally, social movements embrace education as a critical component of social change. Since the late 1960s, the writings of the Brazilian educational scholar and activist Paulo Freire have been a major inspiration for these grassroots educational efforts (Gadotti, 1994; Kane, 2001). A diversity of organizations, from feminist rights groups to labor unions and racial justice organizations, have drawn on Freire’s ideas to develop nonformal educational programs that help communities reflect on the structural reasons for their poverty and engage in collective action to improve their livelihoods. Nonetheless, there are few examples of how Freirean-inspired social movement educational approaches can be implemented in the formal public school system.
In this article, I speak to the relationship between social movements and schooling by examining the educational initiatives of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST), a large social movement of landless farmers famous globally for pressuring the government to redistribute land to more than 350,000 families. The movement has also developed innovative educational practices that help foster activism, small farming, and collective work. In this article, I draw on findings from 20 months of ethnographic research, collected between 2010 and 2015, to analyze one of the MST’s most important educational programs—the National Program for Education in Areas of Agrarian Reform (Programa Nacional de Educação na Reforma Agrária, or PRONERA). Since its creation in 1998, PRONERA has allowed thousands of rural students to access the elite public higher education system through the funding of new bachelor’s degree programs adapted to these rural students’ particular needs and interests. These tertiary programs have transformed the MST from a movement of farmers with at most an elementary or middle school education to a movement of farmers who are college graduates, in a diversity of disciplines and professions. Although PRONERA also had significant impacts on other levels of schooling, in this article, I focus on PRONERA’s influence on Brazilian higher education.
The case of the MST illustrates that social movements not only protest and organize contentious actions against the state but are equally involved in what the German student activist Rudi Dutschke (1969), drawing on the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, termed the “long march through the institutions.” Social movement leaders engage in the long march when they enter the state, helping to carry out the daily job of public service provision while linking those actions to a long-term strategy for economic and political change. This long-march strategy is both collaborative and contentious, leading to what I call contentious cogovernance. Furthermore, the goal of this strategy is not simply more resources or policy changes but, rather, the prefiguration of alternative social and economic relations within these public institutions. Prefiguration, defined as the embodiment of the social relations and practices that are the ultimate goal of a movement, allows movement activists to practice their ideals within the institutions that affect their lives. I argue that this long march through the institutions has helped social movements increase their internal capacity and achieve their social and political goals. This suggests that the contentious cogovernance of public education is a tool not only for improving educational equity but also for increasing the strength and coherence of social movements themselves, paralleling the role Freire envisioned for popular education within grassroots organizations.
In the following section, I summarize the major findings from the literature on states, social movements, and participatory governance. Then, I offer some more background on the MST and its educational activism, and I describe the ethnographic methods I used to complete this research. I present my findings on how the MST developed and implemented PRONERA through the story of three distinct struggles. Then, I analyze how these findings offer a new framework for educational scholarship at the intersection of social movements and schooling. Finally, I conclude with some broader implications from this study for the field of education, including how these findings speak to Freirean theories on the relationship between education and social change.
Literature Review: States, Social Movements, and Participatory School Governance
The claim that social movements can use state institutions, such as public schools and universities, to support their broader social and political struggles is not a given. In both the sociology and education literatures, there are still many scholars who support the lingering perspective that social movements inevitably become more conservative and less effective as they institutionalize (Michels, 1915; Piven & Cloward, 1977) or that schools are destined to reproduce the same class, gender, and racial inequities that exist in the broader capitalist society (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Kozol, 1991). Scholarship inspired by the former perspective celebrates social movements that reject state collaboration, most prominently the Mexican Zapatista movement’s creation of counterinstitutions outside the realm of the state (Dinerstein, 2015) and the U.S. Occupy Wallstreet movement’s attempt to build an alternative social world within the boundaries of Zuccotti Park (Smucker, 2017). Educational scholars inspired by the social reproduction perspective have similarly rejected the emancipatory potential of public schools (Illich, 2001) and instead theorized how education outside the auspices of the state can support social change, as in the examples of the Highlander Center, labor colleges, and the Mississippi Freedom Schools (Altenbaugh, 1990; Glen, 1996; Perlstein, 1990).
Nonetheless, there are a growing number of studies in the sociology, political science, and educational fields that have taken a more nuanced position on social movement–state relations, and it is this scholarship that I build on in this article. In the social movement scholarship, Sonia Alvarez (1990) and Jonathan Fox (1993) describe how social movements work both within and outside of the state, which they have termed a “dual” or “sandwich” strategy, respectively. Heller (2000) shows how working-class organizations in Kerala, India, institutionalized redistributive policies, and Paschel (2016) documents how Black activists in Colombia and Brazil transformed the state through affirmative action and new land titles. These studies show that movements are not simply advancing “collective interests through noninstitutionalized means” (McAdam, 1999, p. 37)—the most common definition of a social movement. Rather, activists are strategically utilizing state resources and collaborating with state actors to push forward their demands.
The literature on participatory democracy has also burgeoned over the past two decades (Baiocchi, 2005; Fung & Wright, 2003; Goldfrank, 2011), illustrating how deeper forms of democracy can allow for citizens’ direct participation in the provision of state services. These scholars describe the positive impacts of collaboration between the state and civil society, what has been termed the “coproduction of decisions and services” and “state–society synergy” (Evans, 1996; Ostrom, 1996). Fung (2001) and Gandin and Apple (2002) analyze how these participatory processes can take place in schools, drawing on the examples of local school councils in Chicago and citizenship schools in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Baiocchi et al. (2011) argue that the state’s role is critical in “bootstrapping” or facilitating these participatory processes. Together, this literature highlights the importance of strong state institutions, grassroots organizing, and state officials committed to the success of participatory projects.
In education there has been an outpouring of literature on the “organizing approach” to education reform, distinct from other community–school approaches that emphasize service and development (Warren, 2005) or simply focus on how the community can help the school (Schutz, 2006). The organizing approach centers on education reforms that emerge through bottom-up participation, “in a dialectic between experts and an engaged community of stakeholders in and around schools” (Warren, 2005, p. 167). Mediratta et al. (2009) argue that community organizing can improve schools by allowing residents to define their problems and solutions and work with a range of stakeholders to address challenges. Oakes et al. (2006) argue that unlike conventional education reforms, community groups can alter cultural logics, build a broad base of support, and shape the law. Finally, some scholars emphasize movements that address inequities outside the public educational realm (Anyon, 2005), encouraging us to think beyond single organizations and examine the possibilities of broader coalitions for educational and social change (Fabricant & Fine, 2015).
In the higher education sphere, there has also been extensive research on the influence of social movements. For example, Rojas (2007) analyzes the rise of Black studies departments in U.S. universities in the 1960s, arguing that social movements change bureaucracies by first mobilizing direct action and then through a search for legitimacy. However, rather than focus solely on social movements, he argues that it is critical to understand how institutions can support a movement’s achievements and facilitate the development of a “counter-center”—“a formalized space for oppositional consciousness in a mainstream institution” (p. 21). Also in the U.S. context, Williamson-Lott (2008) analyzes the influence of the Black Power movement and student activism at historically Black colleges, arguing that students were able to politicize their colleges’ meaning and purpose. Williamson-Lott also discusses how faculty at Black colleges, who faced more economic pressure and political constraints than faculty at historically White universities, were able nevertheless to support student demands.
The cross-cutting themes in this community organizing and social movement literature include the integration of educational campaigns with other local issues, the importance of increasing the community’s capacity to intervene in school-related policies, the emphasis on communities organizing on their own behalf, and, most important for this review, a focus on relationship building and collaboration between parents, students, educators, and administrators (Shirley, 1997; Warren et al., 2011). Scholars have referred to the latter phenomenon as relational power. As Warren (2005) explains, “Unilateral power emphasizes ‘power over’ others, the capacity to get others to do your bidding. Relational power emphasizes a different aspect, the ‘power to’ get things done collectively” (p. 138). Warren et al. (2011) describe this process as a “dual strategy” that includes both protest activity and the “quieter and patient efforts of groups to find avenues for engagement and collaboration [that] often occur behind the scenes” (p. 240). The major point is that community organizing involves an “inside” and “outside” strategy as well as long-term collaborations with educators and state officials, lessons that become clear in the case of the MST and PRONERA.
Context and Background: Brazil and the MST
The MST arose in the early 1980s to contest the extreme inequity in land distribution throughout the Brazilian countryside. The movement did not begin as one united effort but, rather, as dispersed attempts by landless rural laborers to confront their poverty by occupying large unproductive land estates. Although the MST is not an indigenous movement, landless people’s claim to land was based on the movement’s critique of Portuguese colonialism, the enslavement of Africans and African descendants, and the exploitation of landless laborers by large landowners. These histories had ensured that a small portion of the population owned the majority of the land and millions of rural workers were landless. As more landless laborers began to both occupy land and receive legal land rights in the early 1980s, the workers involved in these occupations formed a national movement in 1984 with the slogan “The land belongs to those who work it” (Branford & Rocha, 2002).
Since the founding of the MST, the movement has helped 1.5 million people, or approximately 350,000 families, win land access through land occupations (A. Wright & Wolford, 2003). The movement continues to occupy land until today, pressuring the government to redistribute land to poor families and provide them with resources to live sustainably on this land. The movement also fights for what activists call “social transformation,” promoting grassroots, popular democracy and socialist economic alternatives such as agroecological cooperatives. The movement has also taken on other intersectional struggles, including gender equity, the defense of indigenous territories, LGBT rights, and youth organizing.
Education is a critical component of achieving all of these political, economic, and social goals. Over the past 30 years, according to the MST’s own internal numbers, 1 it has pressured state and municipal governments to build 2,000 public schools in its agrarian reform settlements, employing more than 8,000 teachers and serving 200,000 students. As I have observed in my research, MST activists cogovern many of these schools, implementing radically different organizational and curricular practices. Through PRONERA, the MST has also developed adult education and bachelor’s and graduate degree programs in partnership with more than 80 higher education institutions, which according to a government study have involved hundreds of thousands of students (INCRA, 2015). In Brazil there are both federal and state public universities; however, universities have the autonomy to determine their internal governance and curriculum. Thus, although PRONERA—a federal program housed in the Ministry of Agrarian Development—offers funding for these new programs, the universities themselves must decide whether to accept the funding and create these new programs. These are essentially affirmative action programs for land occupation participants, as PRONERA programs only accept students whose families are occupying land or have won land rights through an occupation. However, PRONERA changes much more than who is admitted to a given institution. The program also funds entirely new higher education degrees within these public institutions that are tailored to the needs and desires of poor, rural farmers. Furthermore, unlike other higher education degrees, these programs are not designed and implemented unilaterally by the universities but, rather, in partnership with MST activists through an institutionalized system of university–social movement cogovernance. These higher education programs have been critical for the MST’s ability to retain activists within the movement.
Methods: Long-Term Ethnography
The findings in this article are from 20 months of ethnographic research in Brazil. I lived in Brazil continuously between October 2010 and December 2011, in addition to a pilot study in June and July 2009 and several follow-up visits between 2013 and 2015. I obtained permission to do this research from the MST’s international relations collective. When I entered the field, I already knew about the MST’s influence in public education, which had been documented in other studies (e.g., Branford & Rocha, 2002). My research focused on how this process had taken place, or why the Brazilian state allowed a radical and controversial social movement to participate in and reform public schools.
I conducted more than 200 interviews in Portuguese with both MST leaders and Brazilian government officials, to understand these social movement–state relations. In all of these interviews, I focused on the history of the MST’s involvement in education and why access was given for activists to train teachers, introduce curriculum, and oversee classrooms. For the entire research period, I lived with activists in the MST’s education sector. I participated in hundreds of activities, including teacher trainings, internal strategy discussions, and the day-to-day life of the public schools. In the case of PRONERA, I observed four higher education programs for a total of 6 weeks, during which I lived with students in their dorms and participated in their classes. The description of the 1998–2001 higher education program I present in this article is drawn from interviews with students and professors who were in this program. I analyzed my data through process tracing, or piecing together different trajectories of educational change through triangulation of multiple sources, as well as thematic coding to analyze the impact of the movement’s educational initiatives.
Although I do not have the space in this article to offer fine-grained ethnographic evidence or thick descriptions from this research, I have published extensively on the research in other venues (Tarlau, 2019). This article merely offers a summary of the main arguments and implications of this long-term ethnographic study, to make an important theoretical intervention with broad implications for the field of education. Furthermore, although my research included dozens of primary and secondary schools as well as literacy and other adult education programs, in this article, I focus on the tertiary programs that the MST created through PRONERA. I focus on PRONERA because it exemplifies particularly well the processes I theorize in this article. Nonetheless, my findings about primary and secondary schools confirm the claims I make in this article about contentious cogovernance and prefiguration. I have documented these other findings in detail in other publications (Tarlau, 2015a, 2015b, 2019).
Findings: The Story of PRONERA in Three Struggles
Struggle 1: Massive Protests and State Openings
In the mid-1990s, conflicts between social movements and the Brazilian state intensified. Globally, and in particular in Latin America, governments pushed through neoliberal policies that promoted decreased social spending, eliminated tariffs, and opened up domestic markets to financial investment. In 1995, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, of the center-right Brazilian Social Democratic Party, took office, embodying this new fiscal and monetary approach. Although President Cardoso had promised to implement an agrarian reform program during his campaign, as president, he critiqued land occupations. In response to the new government’s policies, the MST increased the number of land occupations throughout the country. This emboldened the entrenched elite who opposed agrarian reform. On April 17, 1996, military police massacred 19 MST activists occupying land in the northern state of Pará, an event that became nationally known as the massacre of Eldorado dos Carajás. The massacre was caught on camera, sparking international outrage and a surge of support for agrarian reform in Brazil, as documented by other scholars (e.g., Ondetti, 2008).
In February 1997, the MST began a “National March for Agrarian Reform.” Thousands of activists walked from three corners of the country to the capital, arriving on April 17, 1997, the anniversary of the massacre, with 100,000 people. Under this pressure, Cardoso was forced to follow through on the demand to implement agrarian reform. By 1998, the end of Cardoso’s first term, the state had granted more than 300,000 families land access—double the amount given in the previous decade. This national wave of support allowed the MST to make similarly bold demands in the educational sphere. As one MST educational activist, Edgar, expressed, “The education sector got a free ride with the larger movement.” Cardoso agreed to create a national fund for educational access in areas of agrarian reform—PRONERA. Thus, it was not a leftist party but conflict and bloodshed that led to the creation of the MST’s most important educational initiative.
Struggle 2: Finding Local Allies and Keeping Them
The creation of PRONERA in 1998 resulted in a huge expansion of literacy programs and other adult education programs designated for agrarian reform communities. MST activists, however, were not satisfied. The national MST education sector had already developed dozens of educational initiatives with state and municipal governments across the country, including massive literacy campaigns, child care programs, and, most impressively, the movement’s own high school. However, very few MST activists held a college degree. The MST wanted to use PRONERA as a way to develop a university degree program for its activists. In particular, many MST activists were teaching in public schools in their local communities without a college degree. Therefore, the need for tertiary-level teacher education programs was particularly acute. According to my interviews, MST leaders approached 10 different public universities with a proposal to create a bachelor’s degree program in pedagogy for teachers working in areas of agrarian reform without higher education. Although these were all universities where the MST had direct contacts with faculty who were considered allies, the universities’ administrations all refused to support the MST’s proposal. These administrators were either themselves critical of the movement or afraid of the legal repercussions of partnering with a controversial social movement.
The MST’s engagement in the provision of higher education might have ended in 1998, if not for activists’ decision to contact one more university, the University of Ijuí, a small private university in the southern part of Brazil with a long history of working with social movements. 2 Due to this progressive history, the professors at the university were willing to open their doors to the movement, agreeing to sponsor accreditation for a new bachelor’s degree and assign faculty to teach in the program. With this local ally, and federal funding, the first PRONERA university program took place at the University of Ijuí between 1998 and 2001—sponsored by the Pedagogy Department and known as the “Pedagogy of Land.” Forty-seven MST activists from 15 different states enrolled in the program.
The University of Ijuí was the perfect institutional context for a radical experiment in higher education. The university faculty collaborated directly with MST activists in the movement’s national education sector to determine the program’s curriculum and organizational structure. These MST leaders convinced the faculty to organize the 4-year program through the “pedagogy of alternation,” whereby students study together for several months at the university and then return to their homes for several months to undertake research projects that connect theory to practice. The MST was also able to implement many of its other educational principles in the university sphere, including student self-governance, collective work, collaborative living, integration of academic disciplines, incorporation of manual labor, and engagement in social struggle. For example, to integrate the academic disciplines, the activists created thematic topics for each semester, on gender inequalities and work or agricultural cooperatives, and then they connected all of the disciplines they were studying to those overarching themes. To practice self-governance, the students divided themselves into small groups that carried out the daily chores of collective living and pedagogical coordination with faculty. All of these initiatives were attempts to prefigure within this higher education program the types of social practices the movement hoped to promote in the wider society.
Although the professors in the program were generally supportive of the students, a series of conflicts emerged between the institutional norms of the university and the MST’s educational goals. For example, there were professors who refused to change their teaching practice to be more dialogical and interactive with the students. As one of the students, Adilio, explained, “The math professor knew his content, but he would just lecture and leave exercises on the board. There was no discussion.” The faculty who initially sponsored the program agreed with the MST’s educational ideals, in particular the movement’s Freirean emphasis on grounding classroom content in the experiences of students. Nonetheless, once the students enrolled in the university they were forced to interact with faculty who had the autonomy to ignore the movement’s proposals.
There were also some conflicts within the cohort. For example, one student did not want to do the extra collective work that the MST demanded. As Elizabete, described, [A student in our cohort] was against bringing the organizational structure of the MST inside the university. He thought we should take advantage of the university how it was. He left the program. . . . And the university . . . helped him matriculate into another program.
Elizabete described this incident with outrage; however, the faculty I talked to defended the decision. They explained that the university cannot require students to do extra work, such as collective child care and cleaning, which the MST cohort believed was so important. The logics of the university and the movement had collided.
Despite these tensions, the PRONERA program continued to move forward. Nonetheless, an even bigger conflict emerged during the last study period. The Brazilian Ministry of Education began requiring that students take a standardized test to rank private and public universities. The National Union of Students, the most important student organization in Brazil, called for a boycott of these tests. Nonetheless, for the professors overseeing the first PRONERA program, this test was extremely important for the course to gain national legitimacy. The MST activists had a long debate about the decision but ultimately decided to respect the boycott. However, rather than refuse to take the test, the MST leaders went for the test but left all of the exam papers blank.
The professors in the Pedagogy Department were outraged. The failed exams would seriously affect their department’s national reputation. One professor said, “They did not allow anyone to know about their decision, there was no dialogue!” Another professor expressed similar resentment: “We agreed to work with the practices of the movement, we did what the movement wanted, but the movement refused to work with the practices of the university.” The professors who had been the MST’s biggest supporters were so angry, they refused to go to the students’ graduation. However, the MST cohort defended their actions. Ivori explained, “We had to think about the long-term implications of taking the test. It was against our ideals. And we knew this course would be a pioneer, it would set the standard for all future PRONERA higher education programs.” These divergent opinions illustrate the conflicting logics between the university faculty, who needed to justify the resources spent on this program, and the MST, which was ideologically opposed to standardized testing. Consequently, the MST never developed another PRONERA program at the University of Ijuí.
The conflicts that developed in the first PRONERA university program are an example of what I call contentious cogovernance, when social movements oversee the management of public services in coordination with institutional actors, while also engaging in contentious political actions and promoting practices that come into conflict with institutional norms. Even under left-leaning governments and in progressive institutions, these tensions and conflicts are a constant process in social movements’ long march through the institutions. This is because the goals and practices of a self-declared socialist movement are always going to conflict with the values and norms of institutions and governments in a capitalist, individualistic, and so-called meritocratic society.
Despite the conflicts that emerged, the first PRONERA baccalaureate program was a turning point in the MST’s educational struggle, as it became the movement’s institutional entry point into the public university sphere. Even before the University of Ijuí program ended and the most serious conflicts emerged, other public universities began sponsoring bachelor’s degree programs through PRONERA. Partially this was due to the funding available; the University of Ijuí program had proven that PRONERA would fund a cohort of students in an alternative educational format not yet institutionalized in universities—the pedagogy of alternation. Furthermore, the University of Ijuí showed university administrators that there would not be any legal repercussions from a partnership with the MST. By the time the conflicts at the University of Ijuí came to their peak in 2001, there were already three public universities offering PRONERA higher education programs for MST activists.
Then, with the presidential election of the left-leaning Worker’ Party candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2003, funding for PRONERA expanded even more rapidly. According to the most recent government study, by 2011 there were 3,323 students who had graduated from 52 higher education programs (INCRA, 2015). Again, this is surprising as PRONERA was intended to be a literacy program, not a tertiary affirmative action program. Nonetheless, the MST used the program to legitimatize and fund this sphere of educational access. Thus, PRONERA became a wedge for the MST to open the doors to other institutions, transforming the program into something bigger than the state had intended.
Over the next 5 years, PRONERA programs began to diversify, with baccalaureate programs in a range of areas from agronomy to geography, journalism, arts and music, math, administration, and even law. PRONERA also began to fund graduate programs in similar disciplines. This diversification of programs was significant because it increased the professional opportunities available for students in areas of agrarian reform. Furthermore, just as importantly, although these students graduated with a regular university degree that legitimized their knowledge in the eyes of the outside world, these courses were very different from traditional university programs. For example, in the geography program, the students had basic courses such as “Geographical Thought” and “Economic Geography,” but they also had courses such as “Production Alternatives for the Countryside” and “Public Policies and Agrarian Rights.” Conflicts over standardized testing also dissipated as the federal government no longer prioritized national rankings.
Furthermore, because all of these programs took place through the pedagogy of alternation, with time at the university and time in the communities, there was a focus on the connection between theory and practice. As I learned through the interviews, students in one infant education graduate program were asked to interview community members and their children about their values and priorities and then design and construct a playground in their community that embodied these ideals. In an undergraduate program in pedagogy, one student’s final thesis project was helping children build musical instruments with recyclable materials and then create a band, “The Tin Band,” and theorize this process. As I have directly observed in four PRONERA tertiary programs, every single student who enters a PRONERA program has to develop a similar research project. The overarching goal is that students learn how to investigate their local reality and organize projects to improve it.
Finally, another development was the formalization of the relationship between social movements, government officials, and university sponsors, which became known as a system of “triple governance.” As documented in government publications, the idea behind triple governance is that the state should not be responsible for deciding what educational programs to offer; rather, communities should propose new programs based on their local needs. Thus, only a recognized rural social movement organization 3 can submit a PRONERA program proposal, in partnership with a university that the movement identifies. The proposal is then approved and funded by the federal government; however, it is the social movement and the university that oversee its implementation. This suggests, as Fung (2001) describes in the case of local school councils in Chicago, that there can be a productive relationship between the centralization and decentralization of education reforms.
As a consequence of these higher education programs, the MST leadership transformed from a group with, at most, high school education to a movement of college graduates and beyond. As Maria, a graduate of the first PRONERA university program, said, “Now we have pedagogues, agronomists, lawyers, journalists, all of these professions in the countryside that are important for the working class.” However, PRONERA’s contributions are not simply about getting more rural youth degrees, legitimacy, and professional status. In the words of MST educational activist Edgar, “These educational programs are pedagogical laboratories. They are privileged spaces because in no other space are activists together for an extended period of time, discussing and creating theories for the movement.” This process, what Paulo Freire refers to as praxis, or the ongoing and interactive relationship between theory and practice, is a critical component of building strong social movements as it allows activists to continually improve on their previous initiatives. Although many activists aspire to this form of praxis, it is difficult to obtain the time and resources it takes to build institutions that embody alternative ideals. In addition to conferring degrees, PRONERA has strengthened the MST itself by allowing activists space and time to discuss, create, and practice theories of social change, which they then implement in other movement spheres.
Struggle 3: Defending Institutional Gains
However, it is precisely the MST’s ability to use PRONERA to support its agrarian reform struggle that opened the program up to conservative attacks. Most significantly, in 2005, the State University of Mato Grosso (Universidade do Estado de Mato Grosso, UNEMAT) agreed to sponsor a 4-year PRONERA bachelor’s program in agronomy. Like other PRONERA programs, all of the students lived together for intensive 2- to 3-month study periods and collectively cleaned, cooked, studied, and completed other day-to-day tasks. The MST was able to ensure this collective organization due to the process of triple governance, which requires local activists to propose the program and participate in its cogovernance.
Nonetheless, the MST does not have complete control over which students from agrarian reform communities enroll in these PRONERA programs. In 2008, one of the students in the UNEMAT program refused to continue participating in the collective organization of the program, claiming that the MST leaders were imposing unnecessary requirements on the cohort—a conflict similar to the one that had emerged in the University of Ijuí course. The student wrote a complaint denouncing the PRONERA program. The Brazilian Federal Court of Audits (Tribunal de Contas da União, TCU), the conservative auditing branch of the Brazilian Congress, took up the investigation. On November 19, 2008, the TCU issued a scathing judgment (acordão 2653/2008) that PRONERA was being administered “without a public call or open selective process, which allows professors to be chosen by an organization that is external to public oversight, the MST, which abuses the principles of impartiality and morality.” The TCU judgment required that all PRONERA programs be administered through contracts, placed a ban on paying professors in PRONERA programs, and prohibited the participation of social movements. Although the TCU judgment did not forbid PRONERA from continuing, these requirements paralyzed the program.
In response to the TCU judgment, between 2009 and 2010, MST leaders reached out to allies and political supporters to publicly shame the TCU and pressure the agency to reverse its decision. Critical to this coalition were the university faculty and administrators who had grown to support PRONERA. Even though only a decade before, none of these public universities had been willing to sponsor a bachelor’s degree program funded through PRONERA, by 2009, hundreds of professors and dozens of provosts had direct experiences with PRONERA higher education programs. These faculty had come to embrace PRONERA as an effective way of offering university access to rural populations.
The mobilizing climax came in November 2010, at the Fourth National Seminar on PRONERA, which I attended. Six hundred students and university professors were at the seminar, in addition to dozens of MST activists, government officials, and legislators. Impressively, 59 university provosts signed a letter in support of PRONERA, which the provost of the Federal University of Goiás presented. In his speech, he defended the “social role of the university” and the “autonomy of the university” to provide alternative programs for poor and marginalized students. Then, on the second day of the conference, President Lula signed a presidential decree making PRONERA an official public policy. The decree stated that PRONERA would be governed by “representatives from civil society and the federal government,” directly contradicting the TCU judgment. On December 1, 2010, the TCU passed a new judgment (acordão 3.269/ 2010) that lifted most of the restrictions placed on PRONERA. It was a huge victory for the MST, leading to the establishment of dozens of new university degree programs for youth and adults living in areas of agrarian reform.
Discussion: Toward a New Framework of Contentious Cogovernance and Prefiguration
The story of PRONERA highlights four important and well-documented themes from the educational scholarship on social movements and community organizing: (1) a need to move away from dichotomous understandings of protest versus collaboration and social movements versus the state; (2) the integration of educational concerns with other social and economic struggles; (3) an emphasis on both grassroots organizing efforts and committed state officials with the institutional support to implement activists’ demands; and (4) the critical role of relationship building between activists and other stakeholders, such as educators and administrators.
In addition to corroborating these themes, the story of PRONERA can also add to this existing literature in three important ways. First, the story of PRONERA’s creation and expansion shows that social movements’ effective participation in formal institutions requires a combination of political advocacy and contentious protest. Although scholars have acknowledged social movements’ dual strategy of working both inside and outside of the state, there is still a tendency to overemphasize collaboration (e.g., Lopez, 2003). My research suggests that we need to recenter the idea of conflict as the central process of social movement participation in public schools. I refer to this as contentious cogovernance—social movements overseeing public institutions in coordination with state actors while simultaneously engaging in contentious political actions and promoting practices within these institutions that come into conflict with institutional norms and the interests of the state itself. In this article, I highlighted three struggles that surrounded PRONERA. In the first struggle, the creation of PRONERA was only possible after the movement organized a national march with 100,000 participants. In the second struggle, activists had to search long and hard for a progressive institutional ally that supported the movement’s higher education proposal; however, even with local allies, the values of the movement came into conflict with the values of the university. Finally, despite a left-leaning government being in power nationally, the MST has had to continually mobilize allies to defend PRONERA in the face of judicial attacks. Thus, institutionalization was never a freezing in time of the MST’s educational proposal but, rather, a dynamic process that required both mobilization and political maneuvering to push forward institutional goals.
The second contribution my research offers is a shift from understanding the goal of social movement participation as simply a means to an end (e.g., more resources in schools) to seeing participation as an opportunity for students to prefigure in the current world the social practices they hope to build in the future. Warren et al. (2011) speak to this idea when they emphasize how organizing processes can help build an “inclusive democratic culture” (p. 229) in schools, as does Rojas (2007) when he refers to “counter-centers” within universities; however, this aspect of community organizing is not explicitly theorized. I draw on the concept of prefiguration, originally defined by Boggs (1977) as the “embodiment, within the ongoing political practice of the movement, of those forms of social relations, decision making, culture and human experience that are the ultimate goal” (p. 100). The case of PRONERA shows that occupying formal institutions can help students prefigure more direct forms of democracy and alternative economic and social relations, while also building a movement’s organizational and leadership capacity and resource base. Thus, the existence of PRONERA defies the claim that “it is not possible to compel concessions from elites that can be used as resources to sustain oppositional organization over time” (Piven & Cloward, 1977, p. xxi). To the contrary, over almost two decades, PRONERA integrated new activists into the movement, contributed to their professional and intellectual growth, and directly supported the economic development of agrarian reform settlements.
Third and finally, this case suggests that public education remains a vital state institution for social movements to engage and transform. Most academic scholarship drawing on the idea of prefiguration does so from an anarchist, autonomist, or antistate lens (e.g., Graeber, 2002; Holloway, 2010). These scholars critique “inside” strategies and support the counterinstitutions or the “building [of] the new society within the shell of the old” (Breines, 1989, p. 20). In contrast, my research illustrates that public schools are ideal places for students to prefigure participatory democracy, collective work, and agroecological farming, among other alternative practices. Schools monopolize the waking hours of most youth and many adults and are thus critical institutions where movements can begin to prefigure, in the current world, the social practices that they hope to build in the future. While the MST leadership promotes these types of alternative practices in other movement spaces, public schools bring together students, parents, and educators who might not otherwise engage with the movement. This process of prefiguration contributes to the internal capacity of movements by allowing children, youth, and adults to practice what it means to be part of a social movement, while also obtaining a state-recognized degree. Prefiguration offers a framework for how social movements’ contentious cogovernance of public education can turn schools into “real utopias” that show “another world is possible by building it in the spaces available, and then pushing against the state and public policy to expand those spaces” (E. O. Wright, 2013, p. 22).
Conclusions
The case of Brazil’s MST is in no way typical. The MST is one of the largest social movements in Latin America, and the activists have been able to sustain their struggle for more than 35 years. Furthermore, the MST is what Fernandes (2005) has termed a socio-territorial movement, occupying territories of land and attempting to transform the entirety of social and economic relations within those territories. This makes the case of the MST more similar to indigenous movements that fight for both land and educational access, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico (Vergara-Camus, 2014) or the indigenous activists at Standing Rock (Shield et al., 2020). Indeed, in Brazil, many indigenous communities have also developed and institutionalized their own educational proposal in the primary, secondary, and tertiary education systems (Sobrinho et al., 2017). The relationship of a movement to a school within its claimed territory is clearly different from an urban community organizing around educational issues.
Nonetheless, the MST is also not unique in its attempt to transform public education, and it can therefore inform the scholarship and practice of social movements in diverse political and economic contexts. Importantly, the case of PRONERA offers some concrete lessons for educators, students, and activists working at the intersection of social movements and higher education: (a) the need not only for marginalized communities’ access to but moreover for their participation in the development of alternative higher education programs that cater to their particular needs and dreams; (b) the importance of creating more collective learning opportunities for university students that also teach about the role of collective struggle in promoting social change; and (c) the necessity to offer a more holistic educational experience that prepares students not only for the job market but also for the creation of the type of society they want to build.
The case of PRONERA also teaches us that transforming institutions like public universities will be a contentious process that requires diverse forms of collaboration. It shows us that this process can increase the legitimacy and professional expertise of a movement while also strengthening the movement’s capacity to practice alternative social and economic relations. It also suggests that public education institutions are important spaces for social movements to wield control and influence, as these institutions attempt to wield control and influence over diverse communities. Importantly, conflicts with powerful institutions like universities can also result in negative outcomes, such as violence and repression, or backlash against the group that is demanding change. The fact that there is so much resistance to transforming our educational systems is an indication more than anything else of how urgent it is for communities to fight for these transformations.
Indeed, it is this dialectical relationship between education and social movements that first inspired Freire’s concept of theory and practice, or what he referred to as praxis. Freire envisioned consciousness raising as a collective process led by organized communities who could utilize what they were learning to take action to improve their lives. For Freire, investing in education was never simply a means to an end; to the contrary, by allowing students to become the protagonists of their own educational process, Freire believed that communities could learn in practice the ideals of direct democracy and participatory governance. Freire’s goal for this learning process was never individual empowerment but, rather, the strengthening of social movements with the power to demand and implement real structural change. In other words, Freire’s writings suggest that education is a powerful tool for addressing structural inequality if it is organically connected to social movements. The MST offers activists, educators, and scholars real-life examples of how social movements can utilize the public education sphere to achieve their goals.