Berkley Center

Background: As part of the Education and Global Social Justice Project, in summer 2013 undergraduate student Nick Dirago interviewed María Leonor Romero Ochoa, director of the Department of Education and Design at Fe y Alegría Peru. In this interview Ochoa discusses the role of Fe y Alegría in Peru, the model and curriculum of the Fe y Alegría schools, and the relationship between Fe y Alegría, private, and public schools in Peru.

What is social justice, and how does education relate to it?

For me, social justice is where everyone, men and women, can be treated and recognized as having the same dignity as everyone else, and that they themselves feel that way. But beyond that feeling, that they have equality of opportunity to fully develop. The most important thing is that they’re acknowledged as human beings and that they’re able to be agents who promote their own social and personal development. And not just within the context of their family, but in their community and in the country, if possible.

And the best answer that exists for social justice is education. It’s almost the only answer that could ever bring about social justice. If we as educators push towards the recognition of each person and their dignity and their empowerment—that is, their ability to have a voice and strategies to keep growing—then the country can change. In that way, students discover that they’re important. They learn how to develop the skills necessary to be agents promoting change.

So it’s education with a goal of social change?

For us, that’s essential—education to create a new citizenship, in which everyone has the same rights. We can never even think of a poor education for the poor. Because they deserve the best, to be happy, and to grow as human beings.

How is Fe y Alegría distinct here in Peru?

It’s important for us that a community, a group of settlers, or leaders among the settlers, wants better education—that they demand it and look for better alternatives. So Fe y Alegría seeks ways for them to have a quality education. So, for us, settlers are a key element. Another key element is that the Ministry of Education is willing to give us the space for our schools and accredit them.

We keep responding because of the credibility we’ve gotten from many communities. Currently eleven communities are asking us for postsecondary technical schools. The credibility of the Ministry of Education also allows us to keep advancing. But we also keep advancing because of the support we receive—from civil society, businesses, academia—to keep progressing and responding.

One of the characteristics of Fe y Alegría in Peru is that it’s continually responded to the challenges that the country has faced. One of the fundamental characteristics of all of Fe y Alegría is knowing how to read reality in order to know how best to respond. It’s an essential element; we couldn’t exist without it. For example, take the story of how we began serving the provinces. In 1972, there was a very bad earthquake in Peru. To respond, we saw that we had to go to the provinces; we couldn’t just concentrate on the greater Lima area. So our schools answered the call. We got to the provinces in the early 1970s, just after the earthquake. And before long Fe y Alegría was more conscious of the misery of rural areas, the urgent need for the country to change, the terrible discrimination, the marginality of rural areas. [People in rural areas] couldn’t have had access to the right to education if we weren’t there.

Another example: around 11 years ago, Fe y Alegría realized that we had to tend to those youth that couldn’t access the educational system or had had to leave it. Maybe they left because of violence or they needed to work. We had to tend to them. And we responded with a distance learning program.

Six or seven years ago, Fe y Alegría saw that it couldn’t stop with secondary education. We had to provide postsecondary technical education. It was the only way to respond to the country’s needs and for our students to have a better quality of life, keep growing, and maybe even go to college—but in any case, to be the creators of their own work.

Do you approach education differently in the city and in the countryside?

Our focus is the same: popular education, which for us means first and foremost believing in people and their potential. Besides believing in God, it’s essential to believe in people, in communities, in culture. Believe, love them, value them. Without this essential aspect, we can’t walk alongside them as equals or accompany them in order to empower them. We want them to develop fully as individuals, as social beings, and as agents of change.

The methodology of popular education is important for us. It’s see, judge, act. Reading reality, first of all, is important. This [notion of reading reality] comes from Ignatius of Loyola: seeing and contemplating reality in order to be able to love it and change it. This is essential because it helps you become conscious of the way things are. If you don’t read reality, you’re not conscious of the situation and you become numb. The status quo—violence, marginalization, injustice—start to seem natural and doesn’t cross your mind.

The next important aspect is judgment—the development of a critical eye. Another way of saying it is developing the capacity for discernment. What is best for this person in this circumstance? What is God’s will here? [Judgment is] seeking the best for a given community and a particular reality.

And then the other aspect is action, which for us is essential—engagement, developing the capacity to change. First, changing as a person. Teachers change their educational praxis. Then change the family, the school, the neighborhood. Not repeating the status quo, but pursuing something different, something that helps provide new answers.

It’s a movement of popular education and social advancement—social advancement because we want every one of the communities that we work with to continue changing through education and the development of the people. For that reason, Fe y Alegría is two-sided: the school and the community are one and the same, both springing from popular participation. If a community involves itself in the process of having a school that is their school, Fe y Alegría is truly accepted by the people. We want it to consistently become a more central part of the community. Sometimes that’s not so easy. But that’s our goal, our horizon, our vision.

Who are the students of Fe y Alegría? What populations do the schools serve?

In marginalized urban areas, which surround the big cities, we find people that came from mountainous areas to the outskirts of the city. They thought Lima was going to be better, that they would be able to develop as people. They came with grass mats, looking for water and electricity and education. And that’s how it began. Almost all of our first students were the early settlers. But now we’re teaching their children and even some of their grandchildren. We also have schools that serve the people of the countryside as well as schools in indigenous areas. And depending on where we are, we work to respond to the community while respecting its culture; we meet them where they are, starting from the richness that they have. We work with them to construct a new culture. Schools have always reproduced the system. We want to change it.

Can you describe the curriculum and pedagogy of Fe y Alegría? How are they different from those of public and private schools in Peru?

Our pedagogy focuses on popular education. The goals of popular education are transformation, development, integration. That doesn’t happen in public schools, because sometimes popular education is misunderstood solely as education from the poor for the poor. That’s only a tiny aspect of it.

It’s important that we begin from their culture, their richness, so that they can grow fully, so that they can become more capable, have a voice, and make decisions about their functional organization. And [because] we try to make that reality, we’ve been talking about [working it into] the curriculum. We have a methodology that allows us to work together in figuring out how best to do so. Every two years professors and administrators of the schools undertake a reading of reality, and from there they make changes to the curriculum. They define the most urgent problems and from there prioritize the basic issues, which are then analyzed further to determine how to work with them in the curriculum.

In many schools, they saw violence, really bad violence that was affecting the schools and the children. Violence has been prioritized [as an issue to address]. It’s important that we define certain values to work on. And we try to work these values into the curriculum and into the management of the school. Students learn to read reality; they develop that critical eye. Various disciplines—social sciences, religion, tutorials—work in the key theme, a transversal theme. But it’s translated into other words. You wouldn’t say “violence.” You’d say “education for peace,” for example.

… Another key element is that the teacher discovers his or her role: accompaniment, being by students’ side, to be able to facilitate the construction of understanding. We very much respect students’ culture. We’re mediators with them; we’re by their side, and we establish with them a dialogue of knowledge. Of course, teachers can shed light on certain things. But it’s essential that they understand their role.

It’s been suggested to me that integrating poor and wealthy students into the same school can really only happen at the university level, once the students are more mature; before that, they say, the kind of discrimination and bullying that takes place is too damaging for the poor students. Do you agree? In the young towns and at the College of the Immaculate, it’s important to pick up on students’ existing frames of reference. What perception do they have of the world? Because what happens if you don’t deconstruct all that is that they don’t appropriate it; you can teach them other things, but they never really uncover new horizons. You have to help younger children, but if they never feel the suffering of the have-nots, they can’t understand that suffering. If you’re used to living in your house with a maid who serves you—maybe you treat her well, maybe you don’t—that dynamic is already natural for you as a child. If you don’t consider that in school, it’s never going to change.

I think the College of the Immaculate has social formation activities; they all go to a [poorer] school and everyone does activities together. But that’s one day. What about the other days? I’m really not sure exactly how those programs are now, but even if they’re only three or four times a year, they’re still important.

I wouldn’t send a group of two or three [students from Fe y Alegría to the College of the Immaculate]. I’d send a group of eight, maybe, for a week or two, and eight students from the College of the Immaculate would go to a Fe y Alegría school to see another station. Because I think that it’s important for them to integrate.

Years ago, for example, [high school] students from one of the [private] Jesuit schools went [to a Fe y Alegría school]. And they admired how the students there conducted themselves, how they worked in groups, how they led. It was helpful for them, I assume, and it taught them that those students were equal to them, even though they were poor kids. When I was in school, we did a similar visit to a poorer school. One of my classmates went up to a little girl and asked her why she didn’t bathe. The teacher explained that there were people with darker skin. The girl had blonde hair and blue eyes. She had just never seen... I’d be willing to bet that she hasn’t forgotten that moment. It comes down to this: if you don’t come into contact with others, you won’t understand. It takes direct contact with that reality.

Can you have students from poor and rich backgrounds in the same classroom, though? Or would there need to be a process of social formation first?

There would have to be a very good process of social formation first. The wealthier students have much more social and cultural capital than the poorer students—linguistic ability, access to books and internet and libraries, international travel. It’s not easy, sometimes because students’ parents are intolerant of the poorer students. They think that those children, because they’re from poor areas, are violent or have [various] other problems. [The parents think this] because they themselves never had that social formation. First I think we need to work on cultural prejudices, get rid of all the schemes we have for people. But it’s not easy. It’s a challenge.

So, on one end are the private, prestigious, expensive schools, and on the other end is popular education like that of Fe y Alegría. And in the middle is the same goal of Jesuit education. It’s as if the two different types of schools had to work together to arrive at their ultimate goal. [The goal] is always to construct a new, less discriminatory, more just Peru.

So how is the relationship between Fe y Alegría and schools like the College of the Immaculate? Is there true collaboration happening?

No. There’s not much of a relationship. We used to have something of a relationship, and it’s possible that an individual Fe y Alegría school still does. But on the whole, we’ve had a better relationship in the past.

We used to have a joint social formation program—teachers from the College of the Immaculate and teachers from Fe y Alegría. It was a kind of mutual enrichment, with common courses. These days there isn’t much of a relationship. There could be. I think at the national level we could do something. [The College of the Immaculate] could contribute their experiences and their richness.

Why did the relationship weaken?

For six or eight years, probably more, we had courses together, but I think they just realized that the courses weren’t satisfying for them anymore. They needed something more, even though our schools can be very good. They’ve had good results—not as good as the College of the Immaculate, but [Fe y Alegría schools] are successful.

Can you tell me about the agreement with the Catholic University of Peru?

They give us twenty scholarships per year. Antonio Ruiz de Montoya University gives us scholarships, as well, but they aren’t full scholarships because they don’t have the resources for that. The scholarships from the Catholic University are full rides. They see the way that our students respond and want to fight for change. And with a little bit of support, they can do it. They see that our students set very high goals and that they’re quite capable. And through their college experiences, the students realize that they really can help their families and their communities.

But families have a lot to do with it, as well. If you’ve got a close family that supports you, you’re much more likely to succeed. Sometimes families totally abandon their children, so it’s not always so easy.

So how does Fe y Alegría integrate the family into the educational process?

We think that the family should have [a] role beyond just getting their kids to go to school. First of all, they can participate in improving the infrastructure. They can also contribute to what’s going on in the classroom. How are their kids? What do they need to know? What are their interests? And the school keeps that in mind as far as the curriculum. And if there are parties or dances or holidays, whatever activities, they’ll participate in those as well.

Not every school is the same, though; it depends on the school and on what the family is able to contribute. If they work all day, they can’t always be helping out. But we want them to have a responsibility in the school. We want them to feel like the school is theirs; it belongs to the community, not just the students.

Here in Peru, the government pays the majority of Fe y Alegría’s costs.

Yes, almost 70 percent. They contribute to salaries, in particular. But everything else—construction, maintenance, workshops—that all comes from the support of other institutions.

And I imagine they could pay 100 percent if they wanted to.

Well, it’s not that simple, but if they wanted to, yes.

Why can’t public schools adopt Fe y Alegría’s model?

Well, first of all, our schools are public [but] with private management. They’re just as public as any other public school. Peruvian law has two classes of public school: publicly managed and privately managed. They’re not the same. Here at Fe y Alegría, which is privately managed, we are lucky enough to have administrators that are in love with the mission of the organization. This translates into success for two reasons: we have a strong training and formation program for teachers and administrators, and teachers understand accompaniment as part of their role. This sustains our mission—walking alongside the students. We transmit capacities to them, but we also accompany then. That way, when we’re teaching, we never forget the realities of the community that students come from.

Do you think public schools could have this spirit?

They could, if they had a dedicated group of enthusiastic administrators and teachers who are in love with the mission and dedicated to supporting their students, not just to grading them.

Theoretically, the Ministry of Education has come a long way. There are people in the ministry who get it, but there are other interfering factors that prevent that spirit from taking root.

So there’s another element that other schools don’t really pay attention to: the institutional climate, a spirit of believing in people and respecting the students and making them feel valued.

Fr. Quiroz told me that one of Fe y Alegría’s goals is to impact public education. How does this work?

We don’t think the ideal is quality schools’ being oases. We want every single school to get better. We want education to be better. So we want to have an impact on public schools; that’s one of our goals. And we try to communicate with other organizations to share what we know. At the moment, we’re in the process of rewriting our educational mission in order to have more of an impact.

Have there been changes as a result in the public schools?

Absolutely. For instance, the National Curricular Design has integrated technical education much in the way that Fe y Alegría does. Another important development: we’ve always started school in March, and the public schools recently moved their start date back to March as well. There are even some public schools here in Lima whose teachers are participating in our summer teacher development programs. So, bit by bit, we’re having an impact. We share our experiences.

What does Fe y Alegría need to keep growing?

Well, first, financial support. It’s a shame, but that’s a big need. We also need to work with universities to do more systematic research on our practices to be able to have more of an impact. And we need to continue working with the Ministry of Education to keep increasing the legitimacy of our schools.