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Harvest in Times of Drought – cultivating pedagogies of life for sustainable communities

Voices of the country

In the following lines, the book Harvest in Times of Drought is presented and offered for download (please find the download link at the bottom of the post). This publication is about creative education in Brasil that can generate social transformation and sustainability.

Brasil is one of the countries that is hit hard by the consequences of the industrialization in form of sharp inequalities, uprooting communicide and ecological upheaval. It has reached a threshold between a terrifying drought and a reflexive dawn. The task is to create on time a global project capable of cultivating a new paradigm of cooperation and sustainable community instead of competition.

Children and young people are seriously affected, because it is their future that is at stake. They already seek refuge in industrialized foods, virtual communities and paradises of self-consumption. Their parents feel powerless and can not point out alternative, aware that these will not resolve our crisis of civilization. A way must be found in order to create a new human performance of care, co-responsibility and solidarity, not just with others, but with ourselves, and with the future.

Every intervention and learning method must be based on pluricultural respect and transcultural care. Alternative experiences of social beauty and ethical self-respect can be offered and inspired by new as well as ancient pedagogies.

The aim is to create self-confidence to intervene in all human spaces and enable people to read and transform our cultural reflexes and political imagination. In order to avoid the reproduction of the violating past in the future, Harvest in Times of Drought roots the educative and transformative potentials of the artistic languages in the wisdoms of the land, the forest and the rivers of the Amazon to contribute to a proposal adaptable to any neighborhood, school and social organization.

The outcome after a seven years collaboration of Dan Baron (author of Cultural Literacy and co-founder of the World Alliance for Arts Education) and Manoela Souza (co-founder of the Brazilian Network of Arteducators) is this  pedagogic resource and collective artwork. Fifty rural pedagogues and community leaders from the Federal University of Pará, Marabá, contributed their share to book in form of life stories, poems, songs and visual as well as pedagogic narratives.
The book is dedicated to Maria do Espirito Santo da Silva, eco-pedagogue, popular educator, extractor, grandmother and co-author of this collective book, who was assassinated with her partner, José Ribeiro da Silva near their forest settlement in northern Brazil, where they were fighting for the protection of the forest and cultures of the Amazon.

Outline

Part 1 is a collection of poems and short-stories. This collection introduces and contextualizes the book’s pedagogic proposal.

Part 2 presents this proposal, based on a dialogue between knowledges, accompanied by a photo-narrative, and includes reflections from the participants who tested, refined and developed the proposal.

Part 3 records a dual process of transition. It dramatizes the challenge of sustaining this pedagogic proposal inside a university, in response to the key questions about complicity and resistance to the new. It lays the foundations of an artistic-pedagogic (aesthetic) project.

Part 4 is the pedagogic proposal in action, education as a transformational aesthetic project and it also contains a pedagogic Charter of Principles.

The final Part 5 contains the lyrics of the CD that accompanies this book.

Download the online version of the book (PDF file) for free:

Harvest in Times of Drought – Colheita em Tempos de Seca

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