A Discussion with Miguel Angel Marca, National Advisory General Education, Fe y Alegría Bolivia

July 20, 2012

Background: As part of the Education and Social Justice Project, in July 2012 undergraduate student Lisa Frank interviewed Miguel Angel Marca, national advisor for general education for Fe y Alegría Bolivia. In this interview Marca discusses the organization's work to incorporate environmental and intercultural elements into the education it offers, key characteristics of the Fe y Alegría approach to education, and the challenges that come with following national education policy.

How did you decide to be an educator?

Above all, for service. I had three options to study, to serve my community: medicine, agriculture, or education. I was most interested in medicine but with the time and cost it required, I couldn’t do it. Education was where there was an opening the soonest, so I did that. Also, I have two sisters and a brother working in education, and I loved teaching.

What is service for you?

I’ve always understood service in the framework of a common good. It is the job of building a new society, with equity, in which we can all have a level playing field. This country does not meet these conditions, and much inequality existed and still exists. That was reflected in how rural people lived in relation to the city, and workers, on the other hand, versus those who do not work but have a lot of money. This generates many injustices in society, so you have to build a new society. And in this new society, the questions should be what can I contribute and how much can I contribute.

What role does education play in the work of building this new society?

My education has formed my opinions a lot on this topic. The experience, for all we've been through at John 23, today marks the life of each of us. One thing that is understood is the role that many professions, such as education, play in shaping a new society. There are professions that help with this transition, and others perhaps do not. Being in the military may not be doing much for social justice, or being a lawyer, even though they work in the area of justice is not always helpful, because there is an injustice in justice. So it was there at John 23 that I began to think about service and the three careers that I considered as a possibility to help. The potential of education implies personal development of the individual, in all levels, skills, and knowledge. That is to me the role that education plays: this role of individual training, but in society, not only for the individual. We become agents to focus on the needs of the other, and the common good for all.

How does faith enter into these conversations about education for social justice?

I trained with the Jesuits and worked with them in Fe y Alegría and Colegio San Calixto. I have also been part of a research center of the Jesuits, an ecumenical institution. In this experience of working with the Jesuits, there are two things that have always impacted my decision to be with them. The first is the magis, that they seek staff who can always see the magis, doing more. The second is the magis for service, and social service characterized by belief, religion, and the choice to have faith in God. It is the choice to serve, but also a political option for the poor from the Catholic vision of building the kingdom [of God]. It’s not an ideal construction that is simply moralistic, but it includes everyone who seeks justice and tries to become closer with their brothers.

What distinguishes Fe y Alegría’s educational programs from other educational programs?

Using what the Jesuits say about the magis, it always means finding something good and something better. Fe y Alegría is seeking a quality education for the poor. Currently I think they’re taking it more seriously than the state. The state has always been oriented to urban education, very little for the countryside. Fe y Alegría’s option is this: offer a quality education, but for these poor sectors, which is the people. There is also the state's education for the poor, but with these characteristics: poor management, materials, and poor infrastructure; inadequate teacher training; lack of technology; lack of many resources. The poor have little access to the tools of postmodernism.

Fe y Alegría chooses to serve the best we can under the conditions we have, but with a clear orientation towards serving those who are most marginalized by discrimination, poverty, migration, ethnicity, or disability.

Can you tell me more about the work you did in bilingual intercultural education (EIB)?

The EIB is now a part of Fe y Alegría work, focusing on the Quechua cultural context, in Potosí and Cochabamba. We do this work with 46 educational units. Fe y Alegría has chosen to work on intercultural education, which allows recovery of knowledge and expertise of the culture to be employed through interaction with others, including Western knowledge. It is a cultural and community education, and also interactive. We worked from the perspective of the cultural and natural environment, and all that it offers as a teaching resource—the reality they live, with the resources they have in their community.

We also place great emphasis on bilingual education in contexts where the mother tongue is Quechua and Castilian language is secondary. We support the maintenance and development bilingualism. They not only learn to read and write in Quechua so that later it is easier to read and write in Castilian, but rather to develop the whole person and their culture and language.

In addition to the environment and emphasis on bilingualism, are there other differences between Fe y Alegría curriculum and state schools?

Not many, because we have the same structure of knowledge areas—e.g. language, mathematics, life sciences, technology—but sometimes we have a slightly different emphasis. First, the development of knowledge in our schools is a comprehensive development, parting from a complex reality that is not just linguistic, or scientific, or literary. We work on interdisciplinarity, and I think now it will be important to enter transdisciplinarity, but it is a very complex thing.

Second, we emphasize a pedagogy that emerges from dialogue and interaction. You learn not only from what is repeated and taught, but mainly from how students interact between them in context. A constructivist approach to learning also emphasizes the other, and that learning is a social learning experience. It is a popular education methodology of knowledge construction.

In the third part, we emphasize values education. Knowledge is very important, experience is very important, but values are essential, coming from the choice of Fe y Alegría for faith in God. This gives us certain principles and completes the integrity of the person in Fe y Alegría.

A fourth element is critical is participation and citizenship training. Our pedagogy exists from reality, problems and conflicts of reality, and the ability to analyze and find solutions in reality. For example we talked a few days ago of the TIPNIS march [a protest against a proposed road through Isiboro Secure Indigenous Territory and National Park]. The society is very dynamic, and we must be allowed to learn languages, sciences, mathematics, for example. We learn reading reality and having conflicts in reality. Education is not only something teachers do with students. Educational communities are constructed and provide answers to the education desired, to the problems communities have.

What does it mean to be a community school?

We propose a model of participatory management, starting from the decision to have a school be part of Fe y Alegría. It isn’t our decision; rather, it is a process in the community that wants to belong to Fe y Alegría. That leads us to continue working on the goal of having participatory management. It is not always ideal; it is difficult to agree, and that creates conflict. Sometimes the dialogue breaks down and negative attitudes start rising. That permanent conflict challenges us to not lose the vision of a community school. We try to do this in classroom pedagogy and school dynamics. The community is involved in reflecting on how to improve the school and education.

What are the biggest challenges in this proposal to provide quality education to the poor?

Educational communities know how to discover their problems themselves, to which the school has to respond. Sometimes this analysis was done 15 years ago, and we believe that the school must continue responding to these problems that have arisen many years ago, but also the neighborhoods change. The kids from back then are now adult professionals, and we must find new problems and answers. It is a challenge to know how to change and not stick with something static.

The second challenge may be in how we work in line with the current education policy in Bolivia. This requires recognition of our capabilities and faults. The current educational proposal has raised some very interesting challenges, but it has a low operational level right now. We have always said that we propose a liberating education, but the law says to provide a decolonizing education, which has different connotations. It also proposes a change of participatory education to community education, which is not necessarily the same. In terms of training for work, we have experience with technical education but not in all our educational institutions, and it would be a challenge to have technical education throughout all of our coverage.

The third challenge is to give us the possibility of relocating Fe y Alegría’s focus on the poor. It puts us in conflict as this is now the official discourse. It is a rather complex dilemma. Who are the poor? From the classical tradition the poor are those who have no money and no access to certain goods and services. But I think they are not poor. There are faces of women, indigenous people, those living in isolation and hunger. We have to make a more dynamic analysis of who are the poor and what choosing to serve the poor implies.

Does Fe y Alegría need to change in order to respond to these challenges in the future?

I don’t think that the structure has to change, but it is like a fan, always turning. We should continue responding, focusing on the capabilities we have but also looking at how we can be better. The biggest challenge for me is in the centers for special education—to deepen their analysis of the problems of the community and know how to respond.

To return to policy for a minute, are there intangible effects of the new education policies, or from the current government more generally?

The current policy is not yet in practice, so you don’t see the effects yet. They have proposed a very interesting idea but is not yet operational. In 2006 the current government decided to put aside the old law, Act 1550, then five years passed without enacting a new law. In 2010 the new law was enacted, but we are in the second year, and nothing. Nor is the government clear on what to do. They said they were going to start training in March, but we are in August, and nothing.

They’re not initiating structural change in the government, but there are some programs that help. The government has placed great emphasis on eliminating illiteracy in Bolivia, and in 2010 said we were now a country with zero percent illiteracy (although in practice we’re not), and we are in a phase of post-alphabetization. Illiteracy is gone, but it remains.

The Bono Juancinto Pinto [a voucher for school-age children] is another program which deals with permanency and access to education. There are some indicators that it is fulfilling this proposal, but in 2006 the primary school attendance was down. Maybe there are problems in the records, or in politics, but it is a policy that aims to help many sectors of the population keep access to education.

There is also a program called “a computer for each teacher,” which is a very important issue.

Do you see some effects of Bono Juancinto Pinto in Fe y Alegría programs?

In general, no, because there is a very high demand for Fe y Alegría service, so it’s not very direct for us. What I do notice is the effect of alleviating poverty. Sometimes we are not aware of the conditions under which many of our students are living, those who are with one loaf of bread per day, or week. There was silence in many families, sometimes for shame, or for other reasons, so it is not very visible. The bonus is very small, but it gives the student a little hope. You can buy more bread, or have better resource management because they think, "That's mine. I'll buy the shoes I could not buy before." I think in that, it’s helping.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

I think it is very important to make visible what is our decision in Fe y Alegría, our religious and Catholic decision that is fundamental, but is closely linked to our people in Bolivia. Fe y Alegría, to me, should be seen through these eyes. It is for those who need more. In Bolivia there is diversity. We have cultural, geographical, and linguistic diversity; it’s not homogeneous. The poor may be those who do not have money but also those with a lot of money. It is important to see the fellowship we have with others, that from them we learn and also we can teach them.

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