Posted Date: May 27, 2021

Episode Description: LAC member Michelle McGowan interviews Dr. Rebecca Tarlau, an Assistant Professor of Education and Labor and Employment Relations at The Pennsylvania State University. They discuss Dr. Tarlau’s book Occupying Schools, Occupying Land: How the Landless Workers Movement Transformed Brazilian Education (Oxford, 2019) and the intersections of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra, or MST) with issues of climate justice, COVID-19, and social movements more broadly, including the efforts of the 3/20 Coalition in State College, PA. Dr. Tarlau also compares teacher-led movements in the U.S. and Brazil.

Guest Biography

Rebecca Tarlau is an Assistant Professor of Education and Labor and Employment Relations at The Pennsylvania State University, affiliated with the Adult Education and Lifelong Learning Program and the Center for Global Workers Rights. Her ethnographic research agenda has three broad areas of focus: (1) Theories of the State and State-Society Relations; (2) Social movements, Labor Education, and critical pedagogies; (3) Latin American education and development.

Project Abstract

Rebecca has spent extensive time living in Latin America and has worked as a popular educator in a variety of social movement and union contexts. Her book Occupying Schools, Occupying Land: How the Landless Workers Movement Transformed Brazilian Education (Oxford University Press 2019) is on the educational initiatives of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST). This research explores the movement’s attempt to transform public education across the country, focusing on the micro-politics of grassroots educational reform: the strategies activists use to convince state actors to adopt their initiatives and the political and economic conditions that affect state-society interactions concerning schools. Rebecca’s current research project examines teacher union organizing in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States.

Resources

• Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra): English website or Portuguese website
• 3/20 Coalition on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

Rebecca’s Publications

• Her Book:
  • Occupying Schools, Occupying Land: How the Landless Workers’ Movement Transformed Brazilian Education (Oxford, 2019)
• Articles:
  • “Coproducing Rural Public Schools in Brazil: Contestation, Clientelism and the Landless Workers’ Movement” (Politics & Society)
  • “Education of the Countryside at a Crossroads: Rural Social Movements and National Policy Reform in Brazil” (Journal of Peasant Studies)
  • “From a Language to a Theory of Resistance: Critical Pedagogy, the Limits of ‘Framing,’ and Social Change” (Educational Theory)
  • “How Do New Critical Pedagogies Develop? Educational Innovation, Social Change, and Landless Workers in Brazil” (Teachers College Record)
  • “Not-So-Public Contention: Movement Strategies, Regimes, and the Transformation of Public Institutions in Brazil” (Mobilization)
  • “Prefigurative politics with, in, and against the State: The MST and Latin American philosophies of education” (Lápiz: Latin American Philosophy of Education)
  • “State Theory, Grassroots Agency, and Global Policy Transfer: The Life and Death of Colombia’s Escuela Nueva in Brazil” (Comparative Education Review)