Joanne Williams

Mass Schooling for Socialist Transformation in Cuba and Venezuela.

In contemporary contexts of Education for All and emphases on national educational performance, mass education globally continues to be strongly informed by human capital thinking, and by notions of developing future world citizens and workers for the international economy. In this paper, our central focus is on the ongoing educational project of Cuba, and more recent educational reforms in Venezuela as part of its Bolivarian Revolution, to explicitly direct mass schooling to a socialist transformation of society. Drawing on formal policy documents, international reports, and secondary research, we consider the two countries achievements on universal access and equity in schooling, as orthodox measures of a systems performance, and their policies and strategies for preparing new socialist citizens who will directly contribute to and/or consolidate the social and economic transformation of society. Our major focus here is on whether and how mass schooling can prepare citizens to contribute to the construction of authentic alternatives to capitalism. We acknowledge some major tensions and contradictions in such a project, but argue that with the benefit of learning from the experience of previous socialist experiments, there are heightened opportunities for Cuba and Venezuela to make significant gains in this area, and hence to advance theorising about such a model of mass education for contemporary times.

Conceptualising teacher education and research as ‘critical praxis’

A particular approach to epistemological action as ‘critical praxis’ is proposed where we bring together the ideas of ideology critique, self-reflective consciousness and emancipatory action. Critical praxis for educators seeks to move beyond the constraints of formal teaching, knowledge and curriculum and instead encourages communities, teachers and students to work together in producing new understandings and practices for the public good. As teacher educators, we are attempting to design a research methodology that will enable our field of practice to be theorised and to encourage a movement towards new critical understandings of teaching and learning for our students and for ourselves. This is a process of reflexive practice that endeavours to constantly and systematically interrogate our own views and to move beyond the status quo of conservative educational systems, procedures and rigidities so that knowledge is a legitimate investigation of possibility and transformation. In this article, we report a Critical Praxis Protocol to guide further development of teacher education and research. We trace our trajectory from a progressive emphasis on improving learning and professional educational practice to an emerging notion of criticality that seeks explanation with the theorising of Bourdieu. A draft habitus–field analysis is provided to indicate our current understanding of generative themes that suggest the emancipatory potential of teaching and schooling.