Event Description
Please note: This event will be streamed live at https://drexel.edu/soe/resources/event-series/gec/February-19-2020-event/.
Rebecca Tarlau, PhD
Pennsylvania State University
This presentation is about how social movements use state services, such as schools, to support their social change goals. Over the past thirty-five years, a million farmers in Brazil have won access to land through occupying large land estates. This farmers’ movement also fights for agricultural assistance, housing, health clinics, schools, and other services that support their rural livelihoods. In the case of education, the movement has developed an educational proposal that encourages youth to stay in the countryside and participate in more just farming practices. This book analyzes how activists convince government officials to implement these educational practices and how these initiatives strengthen the movement.
Rebecca Tarlau is Assistant Professor of Education and Labor Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She was inspired to pursue a career in education by her experiences with community organizing in Latin America and the United States, where she witnessed the potential education has to advance economic and racial justice in poor communities. Dr. Tarlau is compelled by the question, what role does education play in facilitating social change, both within formal school systems and in informal contexts? She completed her doctorate in Social and Cultural Studies in Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. Her research agenda has three broad areas of focus: (1) theories of the state and state-society relations; (2) social movements, critical pedagogy, and learning; (3) Latin American education and development. Her scholarship engages in debates in the fields of political sociology, international and comparative education, social movements, critical pedagogy, global and transnational sociology, and social theory. She has a book forthcoming: Occupying Schools, Occupying Land: How the Landless Workers Movement Transformed Brazilian Education (Oxford University Press, 2019).
RSVP HERE
|
