The Politics of Nonformal Education in Latin America


Book Description

Using the literacy and adult education programs in several Latin American countries as prime examples of adult educational reform, Torres examines such issues as why given educational policies are created, how they are constructed, planned, and implemented, what are the implications of such policies.




The Politics of Nonformal Education in Latin America


Book Description

Using the literacy and adult education programs in several Latin American countries as prime examples of adult educational reform, Torres examines such issues as why given educational policies are created, how they are constructed, planned, and implemented, what are the implications of such policies.




Latin American Education


Book Description

This book offers a relevant sample of the current research on Latin American education in comparative perspective. In their introduction, Torres and Puiggros, two of the most recognized researchers of Latin American education, draw from political sociology of education, theories of the state, history of education, and deconstructionist theories to focus on changes in state formation in the region and its implications for the constitution of the pedagogical subject in public schools. Throughout the different chapters, the contributors present and analyze the most relevant topics, research agendas, and some of the key theoretical and political problems of Latin American education.




The Politics of Institutional Weakness in Latin America


Book Description

Analysts and policymakers often decry the failure of institutions to accomplish their stated purpose. Bringing together leading scholars of Latin American politics, this volume helps us understand why. The volume offers a conceptual and theoretical framework for studying weak institutions. It introduces different dimensions of institutional weakness and explores the origins and consequences of that weakness. Drawing on recent research on constitutional and electoral reform, executive-legislative relations, property rights, environmental and labor regulation, indigenous rights, squatters and street vendors, and anti-domestic violence laws in Latin America, the volume's chapters show us that politicians often design institutions that they cannot or do not want to enforce or comply with. Challenging existing theories of institutional design, the volume helps us understand the logic that drives the creation of weak institutions, as well as the conditions under which they may be transformed into institutions that matter.




Latin America


Book Description

This is a broad introduction to Latin America, ranging from religion and history to literature and education, with a focus on cultures and cultural change. With lively prose and a variety of informative inserts, Williamson draws the reader in to the diverse realities of a continent in flux, holding it together by a strong theoretical framework.




Education and other modes of thinking in Latin America


Book Description

After long periods of military dictatorships, civil wars, and economic instability, Latin America has changed face, and become the foremost region for counter-hegemonic processes. This book seeks to address contemporary paradigms of education and learning in Latin America. Although the production of knowledge in the region has long been subject to imperial designs and disseminated through educational systems, recent interventions – from liberation theology, popular education, and critical literacy to postcolonial critique and decolonial options – have sought to shift the geography of reason. Over the last decades, several Latin American communities have countered this movement by forming some of the most dynamic and organised forms of resistance: from the landless movements in Brazil to the Zapatistas in the Chiapas region of Mexico, from the indigenous social movements in Bolivia to Venezuela’s Chavistas, to mention but a few. The central question to be addressed is how, in times of historical ruptures, political reconstructions, and epistemic formations, the production of paradigms rooted in ‘other’ logics, cosmologies, and realities may renegotiate and redefine concepts of education, learning, and knowledge. Consequently, this book transcends disciplinary, epistemological, and methodological boundaries in education and learning by engagement with ‘other’ paradigms. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Lifelong Education.




Private Education and Public Policy in Latin America


Book Description

"Examines the relationship between private education and public policy in Latin America by combining conceptual analysis with empirical research, and incorporating case studies from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Peru, and Venezuela"--Provided by publisher.




Education and Social Change in Latin America


Book Description

Education and Social Change in Latin America is a valuable addition to the area studies literature in Comparative Education. Torres knits contributions from recognized North and South American experts to produce a comprehensive tapestry of analyses of both formal and non-formal education in Latin America. The book constitutes an excellent example of the application of a broad social science perspective to the study of education, viewed as a constituent sub-system. The foci of non-formal education (Part I), political socialisation (Part II), and the impact of social change upon education in Brazil (Part III) facilitates a broad range of comparisons. A balance between the often-contradictory perspectives-economic, anthropological, sociological and political-provides the reader with a comprehensive “snapshot” of trends and developments in Latin American education during the crucial 1980s. This inter-disciplinary examination of aspects of Latin American education has a broad range of applications, ranging from introductory courses to senior seminars to a valuable research tool. What would otherwise be an exceptional book is rendered even more valuable by Torres’ conversation with Paulo Freire. While Torres is recognized as one of the foremost authorities on Freire, this chapter explores Freire as a human being, an educator, and introduces some of the contradictions faced by a world renowned adult educator who assumed the mantle of an administrator in the formal education system in his native Brazil between 1989 and 1991.




Myth, Reality, and Reform


Book Description

"Myth, Reality, and Reform bridges these critiques by balancing the importance of the four key functions of higher education: academic leadership, professional development, technological training and development, and general higher education. The book suggests how to consolidate the strengths of higher education systems while fundamentally reforming their weaker features.




The Politics of Liberation


Book Description

First Published in 2004. This work explores various forms of oppression that plague contemporary society. Through the analyses and reflections of theorists and social activists - including Paulo Freire himself - Politics of Liberation brings together, under a common project of human liberation, critical voices from around the globe: Mexico, Guatemala, Britain, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. The essays argue that Freire's work offers an avenue out of the malaise of contemporary politics and culture. They place Freire temporally in relation to moments of modernity and postmodernity; culturally and existentially in relation to the First and Third Worlds and at the standpoint of indigenous peoples; politically in terms of his attention to the range of sites and dimensions of oppression and their relatedness; and intellectually in relation to the eclectic range of theories on which he draws. The book is a response to the current global crisis of solidarity among progressive and dissident intellectuals, educators and cultural workers.