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I believe a prevailing sense that
development is “in a funk,” or has failed to demonstrate its
value and should be abandoned, is shortsighted. I contend
that its core-mission is to facilitate the activation of
unrealized potential in its human subjects, and I assert
that its trajectory suggests this core-mission has simply
never been fully engaged.
One can argue that six decades of modern development have
not significantly elevated the human journey. But that can
be taken as an indictment of the development industry
and its influence, rather than development itself.
These often seem to work at cross-purposes to development’s
core-mission, denying its trajectory; history is the key.
Post-WW II reconstruction and democratization formed into
basic structural development. The emergent development
industry then took hold within a frame of Western capitalist
economic and political theory; consolidating and wielding
the power of its dominant culture influence in politics,
corporate society and academia. Its rhetoric and
infrastructure overwhelmed competing perspectives,
restricting their influence and access to power. The
development industry eventually began responding to the
obvious fact of its self-compromised intentions by
introducing new forms of intervention: basic needs and
participatory development, and through an emphasis on
empowering the local.
In the development industry, political currency, lucrative
contracts, and career paths for academics ensure a
counterproductive emphasis on reproducing rather than
recreating the world. Visionaries like Paulo Freire, Maxine
Greene and Ramona Fernandez, and the Discipline of Black
Studies, have shown that through literacy defined by
mono-cultural dominance in multi-cultural societies, public
education systems by design support the status-quo. While
reorienting education seems to offer the best long-term
solution for redressing this shortcoming, innovative
development strategies rooted in liberation pedagogy may
offer a more immediate likely-to-take-hold alternative.
Through grassroots social programs in Brazil I came to
realize the value of placing greater emphasis on forming the
citizens of excluded constituencies, especially youth,
through a process of emotionally as well as
intellectually resonant collaborative reconstructions of
reality – based on the pursuit of social justice. Emotional
resonance is rooted in understanding that in addition to
making sense, an approach must be credible. Programs I’ve
studied in Brazil demonstrate that such a process can
liberate its beneficiaries to participate in further
developing themselves and motivate them to
participate in the broader development of their communities,
as well as facilitating their more general contributions to
society as productive citizens.
Structural, basic needs, participatory and empowering
development approaches should not be abandoned. But they
should be invoked more thoughtfully, with an understanding
that their value adheres to their role as tactical tools
employed to address issues or circumstances impacting the
human journey, but which do not directly or
sufficiently facilitate the personal self-realization of our
individual human potentials.
The historic trajectory and ultimate purpose of development
must be honored. Education and political economy must
abandon their service to privileged-class dominant culture
definitions of literacy. And they must abandon their
emphasis on producing citizens who specifically serve the
interests of those definitions. Note my departure from more
militant strategies. Revolutionary rhetoric is inherently
problematical and, with all due respect to Marx and Freire
the privileged classes will not commit “class suicide.”
But it is not unrealistic to believe in the value of
principled rhetoric supported by personal credibility, or in
the idea that privileged-class dominance can be lessened
over time.
While authoring articles as a freelance journalist, I
discovered that Brazilian grassroots social programs,
particularly in Salvador, Bahia, employ a fundamentally
common strategy to stabilize their communities. The first of
these organizations, Blocos-Afros, evolved from
Carnival performance Grupos (music groups) which,
through their performance, expressed resistance to the
Brazilian military dictatorship. Performance became a
lure for troubled youth, and it was through discovering how
their participation transformed communities that the
Grupos
evolved into Blocos-Afros. Within the Blocos
and subsequent other programs favela youth adopt
more-constructive behaviors.
Many current programs have formed around specific principles
articulated in pedagogy developed by a program which is not
descended from the Blocos. Projeto Axé arrived
later, under the banner of common cause in response to an
awakening perception of a “crisis of children in the
street.” That perception emerged in the late 1980s as
Brazil consolidated its transition back to civilian rule.
In 1985 Italian born educator Cesare di La Rocca was already
the long-time UNESCO representative to Brazilia. He was
taken with Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and
admired the constructivist childhood development theory of
Jean Piaget. His interest in the plight of street children
was reinforced by robust populist sentiment towards
re-democratization. A new constitution, in 1988, encouraged
municipalities to engage and support local initiatives such
as Axé would become. When a 1990 Statute of the Child
and Adolescent granted Brazilian children and youth special
status as ‘citizens under development,’ La Rocca left UNESCO
and founded Axé.
The significance of Axé rests on its revolutionary
Pedagogy of Desire, designed specifically for working
with street children. Although discarding the revolutionary
rhetoric of Freire, it is solidly grounded in Freiran
principles and Freire worked directly with the program’s
staff through Axé’s first six years of existence. The
Axé pedagogy is also notably informed by Piaget,
Argentine educator Emilia Fereiro and French Freudian
theorist Jacques Lacan.
Demonstrating success makes Axé noteworthy,
but not extraordinarily noteworthy. It is only in
combination with its ever expanding influence that Axé’s
success becomes truly significant. Axé initiated a
non-traditional form of development which has proven to be
effective, more-or-less self-sustainable and
self-propagating. It inspires the constructive emergence of
other programs, like Circo Picolino, which was
founded concurrent with Brazil’s transition back to civilian
rule in 1985. Salvador’s largely impoverished two and a
quarter million inhabitants are 87% Afro-Brazilian, but
co-founders Anselmo Serrat and Veronica Tamaoki were
struggling to survive and could only enlist students from
the nearly all-white middle-class. So Picolino was
strictly a business enterprise until 1990, when it
encountered Axé.
Shortly after forming Axé, La Rocca set out to find
opportunities around the city for the youth in his program
to participate in various activities. A key factor was that
the children themselves would express a desire to
participate in a particular kind of activity, and some
wanted to attend circus school. Serrat welcomed Axé’s
black favela children at Picolino, but their
arrival precipitated an exodus of the financially more
lucrative middle class students. This was not triggered by
the students themselves, but by their parents.
Picolino could have abandoned its new commitment and
reverted back to serving only the white middle-class. It was
forced to make a decision, but not forced to make the
decision that it did. Picolino opted to stand with
the excluded youth of Salvador’s favelas, but had no
experience working with children like these. Axé thus
influenced Picolino’s subsequent reorientation.
Axé provides its educators with special
training for working with street children. Its pedagogy has
nothing to do with ‘reading, writing and arithmetic,’ rather
it facilitates the reconstruction of each child’s reality
(perspectives) consistent with surfacing their own desires
for a better future. Children are not recruited into Axé,
street educators initiate a three phase strategy which
brings them into the program of their own accord.
Flirt pedagogy takes place on the street child’s turf
and terms. It recognizes that the lives of these children
have been marked by abusive experiences which leave them
suspicious toward outsiders and unreceptive to overtures. It
also accounts for their developmental capabilities,
consistent with the work of Piaget. Street educators
initially feign disinterest, allowing the children to see
for themselves over-time that they pose no threat,
and beyond that may offer a portal through which the
children might pass into a better future. Here again we see
a correlation between experience-based emotional
understanding and credibility.
The second phase, courtship pedagogy, is initiated
when the curiosity of a child is piqued to the point where
he or she initiates a street dialogue. This dialogue is
first characterized by verbal ‘pricking,’ a kind of making
fun at one another. Over time it becomes more serious,
progressively opening a window on the specific life, fears
and wishes of the child. Almost always it culminates
at a point where the child expresses, of his or her own
volition, a desire to leave the streets. At this point the
street educator will issue an invitation for the child to
enter the
Axé program.
Phase-three, or comfortable pedagogy, is constituted
by citizenship training which largely takes place in an
activity venue of the child’s own choosing. Thus the child
begins to realize and develop a sense of having control over
his or her own destiny. Typically, as is true with
Picolino, the activity venues are associated with the
performing arts.
While conducting research partially funded by a 2005 Indiana
University Project on African Expressive Traditions grant, I
was invited to visit Projeto Cultural Arte Consciente.
Arte Consciente was founded in the Salvador
Afro-Brazilian favela of Saramandaia in 2003, by five
Axé alumni, two of whom are also Picolino
alumni. The 32,000 residents of Saramandaia suffer from
chronic 60% unemployment, and by 2003 the community had
become very violent. Most disturbing was the fact that both
the perpetrators and the victims of the violence were
typically so young … 10, 11, and 12 years old. Arte
Consciente was founded in response to that violence, and
by the time I encountered the program two and a half years
later the violence had abated.
My encounter with Arte Consciente prompted me to more
aggressively look for other indications of Axé’s
impact on society. Another program, Agua Dourada in
the Salvador community of Pituaçu, was also founded by
Axé alumni. A couple of the founders of Arte
Consciente had reached out to activists in other
struggling communities.
In 1995 Fernanda Almeida, and Inaiá Carvalho reported that
Axé was consulting, and helping to train street
educators around Brazil, and even in other countries. The
then recent establishment of Projeto Travessía in São
Paulo they said, which eleven years later still attends to
thousands of street children in the world’s third largest
city, was “inspired by the experience of Axé.”
Almeida and Carvalho noted that in Salvador itself at that
time, at least some of “the proposals of Axé came to be
subsidized, technically, by a program developed by the
Municipal Government, known as Cidade Mãe, which” was
then serving “700 youth in educative workshops in two
popular neighborhoods of the city.” Like Projeto
Travessía, Cidade Mãe still serves at-risk
children and youth in Brazil.
I believe that within the frame of development’s culminating
progression, consistent with its ultimate mission, Axé,
Picolino and Arte Consciente should become the
focus of intense scrutiny to produce a more complete and
better understanding of their work, and of more critical
reflection and debate to better assess their impact on
society.
Challenging Mono-cultural
Dominance in a Multi-cultural Society through
Non-traditional Development
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