CIEJA - CL
São Paulo, Brasil
Sofie Baeke
November 2014
Photography by Edu On Tour
& Revitarte
Sources:
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General information
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CIEJA Campo
Limpo, a public school in the most violent neighborhood of the world, is probably
the only building in town where the doors remain open. The school is situated
in the south of São Paulo between the slums (favelas) of ‘Parque Santo Antônio’ and ‘Godoy’. Right now the school
has more or less 1200 students.
Anybody older
than 15 is welcome from 7:30 am until 10:30 pm. This is a place where your past
does not matter, where you won´t be interrogated about how you ended up here.
In fact, many of the pupils were sent to CIEJA by the court and the school
played an important role in the pacification between the two fighting slums.
Inclusion of
everybody in society is extremely important to this school, specifically the
inclusion of people with special needs.
Briefly, the open
doors symbolize a warm-hearted welcome, a fresh start and the freedom to shape
a better, responsible future.
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Founding
story
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Êda Luiz -
people call her Dona Êda - is the woman it all started with. Passionate about
the art of educating, she grew up in this neighborhood in front of the previous
school ‘Ciemens’. Her house became a meeting place for her friends and she was
the one who mobilized a whole community network to start CIEJA in 1999.
Having studied
together with Paulo Freire and inspired by his political and critical pedagogy,
the keywords of this education are autonomy, inclusion, questioning &
discussing, learning with meaning and applying theory into practice in the
surrounding community.
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Teaching methodology and
curriculum
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CIEJA is
structured by the model of the democratic schools and uses the Paulo Freire
method which starts from the social context of the students. The goal of the
school is to strengthen the autonomy of pupils. This autonomy is seen as a
process in which democracy and inclusion are a practice, not merely a theory.
Conscientização
(awareness) of the existential situation is the first step in the liberating,
emancipatory process to become who you are.
Flexible
schedules from morning till night allow students to combine their studies with
a job. On Fridays students plan the semester project and the next week
together.
To integrate
all disciplines and to make them more efficient, the curriculum is divided into
4 categories:
1.
languages and codes (including
English and Portuguese);
2.
human sciences (with history
and geography);
3.
logical and artistic learning
(mathematics and the arts);
4.
sciences of thought (science
and philosophy).
Every month the
school works around a theme. A problematic situation is being presented to
students. Pupils engage in personal research followed by collective debate and
ending with an exercise to apply theory into practice. This is the basic
structure of the classes. Next to the ‘adapted’ curriculum, students can
involve in community projects each semester.
Pupils are
evaluated in different ways: self-evaluation and evaluation by the teacher go
hand in hand. Evaluation happens mainly written as literacy is an important
aspect of Paulo Freire’s alphabetization program.
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Organizational and structural
aspects
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CIEJA has two buildings with many
classrooms, a teachers` room, a kitchen, a dining space, a square, a garden,
etc. In most of the classes pupils sit in small discussion groups.
The school
offers free meals, providing healthy food for everybody but the students
themselves are the ones who cook and clean the school. Teachers and students
decide the school rules together, including how to solve problematic behavior.
Café
Terapêutico is a two hour weekly encounter with parents and people of the
neighborhood to discuss the inclusion of disabled students in the school and in
the community. Amongst them are mute, blind and deaf people and pupils with
Down syndrome.
Family of the
students and the organizations in the surroundings are involved in decision
making. This way CIEJA functions as a kind of community center for recreation,
reflection and even for resolving conflicts.
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Funding
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Being a public
school, CIEJA is subsidized by government, and can count on support from
partnerships in the community. To receive funds for the meals, the neighborhood
helped in building a dining space as this was one of the conditions.
It wasn´t easy
to get the ‘adapted’ curriculum accepted by the public education inspection but
by perseverance and detailed explanation the school could eventually convince
inspectors and gain their confidence.
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Personal
experience
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Walking through the school, witnessing
the activities and listening to the people, I could sense a sincere passion for
education, a supportive environment, responsible autonomy and political
impact.
Being a fan of Paulo Freire who had
never seen his method in practice, I was amazed by the serenity of this
community school, which feels like a comfortable home where people strive,
search and celebrate together.
This is a democratic school where
teachers still teach, or more precisely, they create dialogue inviting students
to think for themselves. To me these teachers look like friends, real friends,
real shining friends.
On one of the Edu On Tour education events,
we created a movement for an education (r)evolution and we named it ‘#Imdaba’. When
I asked Dona Êda if CIEJA had a wall available for an #Imdaba-graffiti, she
answered ‘All the walls are yours’. (picture Dona Êda with the artists of ‘Revitarte’
and a student)
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Contact
details
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CIEJA - Centro
Integrado de Educação de Jovens e Adultos
Rua Cabo Estácio da Conceição, 176
Capão Redondo –
São Paulo CEP 05854-060
Telephone: +55 11
5816-3701
+55 11 5816-2907
http://projetocafeterapeutico.blogspot.com.br
http://eduontour.weebly.com/
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