Rebecca Tarlau
Biographic Data
| ID | 173075 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rebecca Tarlau |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rebecca |
| FAMILY NAME | Tarlau |
| SIGNATURE | TARLAU R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3054-9526 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 126 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
From “Sites of Struggle” to “Complicit in Struggle”: Social Movements and the University in Brazil
Background: The formal education of universities on the one hand, and popular education on the other, have been generally understood as two ends of a spectrum in the field of education. Despite these opposing trajectories, in the past two decades novel forms of social movement–university relationships have emerged, with notable yet understudied models from Latin America. Purpose: This article examines whether and how higher education institutions…
Social movements and adult education in the International Review of Education (IRE) and beyond
This article reviews all of the English- and Spanish-language articles on adult education and social movements published in the International Review of Education (IRE) from 1955 to 2023, documenting the shift from functionalist to more critical approaches. The authors highlight both the contributions and limits of these articles in shaping debates about adult education and social movements today. In addition, the authors offer their own analysis …
Teachers’ unions, educator organising, and global struggles for educational justice
In this introductory article we present nine themes that cut through the twenty-one articles in the Special Issue. First, we highlight the continued impact of neoliberalism, austerity, and the casualization of teacher labor on educators and educator organising. Second, we look at how state context shapes teacher unionism, including in authoritarian political regimes. The third section examines how teachers' unions have chosen to relate to the sta…
For Once We’re Asking for More Testing: Organisational infrastructure in the safe schools movement during Covid-19
This article explores organisational infrastructure in the movement for safe schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on several qualitative studies of educator organising during the pandemic, this article shows that educators across the United States have organised through a range of social movement organisations, including national grassroots networks, regional grassroots networks, unions, social justice caucuses, and building-based commit…
Mapping, reflecting, and exploring education for the labour movement: A thematic literature review
We bring in each other's wisdom’: Liberatory praxis and political education for Black lives in Philadelphia
Education is a central aspect of social movements' ability to build individual and collective participation in political struggle. But, how do these processes of learning and consciousness take place? As Choudry (Choudry, A. 2015. Learning Activism: The intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements. University of Toronto Press) argues, it is important to examine the intellectual life of contemporary social movements, their various forms and …
Special issue introduction: Social movement struggles, learning and knowledge-making: in memory of Aziz Choudry (1966–2021)
Race and the political ecology of education in Brazil: A spatial analysis of rural school closures
Education and processes of agrarian change are deeply imbricated processes. While political ecologists have begun exploring education in earnest, questions of race have remain largely unexplored. In this article, we analyze the spatial linkages between education, race, and the permanence of the peasantry in the face of expanding capital. Our focus is the crisis of rural school closures in Brazil. Over the last twenty five years, the state has clo…
Networked Movements and Bureaucratic Unions: The Structure of the 2018 #RedForEd Teachers' Strikes
How do digitally enabled movements of workers reshape, replace, or reinforce the role of unions? Based on a comparative case study of the 2018 #RedForEd teachers' strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona, this article argues that despite the hierarchical and bureaucratic character of statewide teachers' unions, the infrastructure they provided to organize, connect, and legitimize teachers' actions was critical for statewide strikes. Facebo…
Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: Labor Organizing During covid-19
This article explores how crises become opportunities. Through a study of a progressive teachers’ union caucus in New York City during the emergence of covid -19, this piece examines how organizations convert crises into opportunities for political growth. Drawing on sociological theories of political articulation and crisis, this article explores the role of union caucuses to foment political change. We argue that crises become politically signi…
Take or Reject State Power? The Dual Dilemma for Teachers’ Unions in Brazil and Mexico
Contentious Cogovernance and Prefiguration: A Framework for Analyzing Social Movement–State Relations in Public Education
This article offers a framework for analyzing social movement participation in public education through a focus on universities in Brazil. It builds on the literature on social movement–state relations, participatory governance, and community organizing in schools, drawing on the case of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement and the National Program for Education in Areas of Agrarian Reform (PRONERA) to illustrate the need to recenter the idea …
Educating for Ecosocialism: Beyond its renowned direct-action strategies, Brazil’s Landless Workers movement also models political education as an indispensable tool for incubating transformative alte…
The confluence of popular education and social movement studies into social movement learning: A systematic literature review
The purpose of this paper is to systematically review and trace the lineage of theoretical debates around social movement learning in the field of adult education. We compiled articles, books and conference proceedings on adult education and social movements from Google Scholar using the software Publish or Perish and manually filtered the data to only include those that explicitly address the topic. Based on the data, we identified key literatur…
Philanthropizing’ consent: How a private foundation pushed through national learning standards in Brazil
This article explores how the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (National Learning Standards), entered the policy debate in Brazil and became the most important reform initiative of the Ministry of Education between 2015 and 2017. We argue that this accelerated policy process was contingent upon the practice of philanthropizing consent: foundations’ use of material resources, knowledge production, media power, and informal and formal networks to gar…
The Landless Workers Movement’s itinerant schools: Occupying and transforming public education in Brazil
This article explores how social movement co-governance of public education offers an alternative to neoliberal educational models. The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) is one of the largest social movements in Latin America. We describe one of the many schools that the MST co-governs, the Itinerant School Paths of Knowledge (Caminhos do Saber), located in an occupied encampment in the state of Paraná. We analyze three of the most unique…
Land and freedom: The MST, the Zapatistas and peasant alternatives to neoliberalism / The making of resistance: Brazil’s landless movement and narrative enactment
The struggle continues. And so does the writing about two of the most important social movements in contemporary Latin America, the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) and the Zapatista Army
Food sovereignty education across the Americas: Multiple origins, converging movements
Razões Para Mudar O Mundo: A Educação Do Campo E a Contribuição Do Pronera
A razão neoliberal penetra todas as instituições e dissemina sua visão de mundo impondo a governança corporativa em todas as dimensões do desenvolvimento. A educação é uma das dimensões mais afetadas pela lógica neoliberal. O campesinato brasileiro, com destaque para o Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), junto com professores e pesquisadores construíram o paradigma da educação do campo que tem no Programa Nacional de Educação na R…
If the past devours the future, why study? Piketty, social movements, and future directions for education
In 2014, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century rocked the economic and political world, with its argument that inequality is destined to increase; in the field of education, however, this book has been almost entirely ignored. I argue that Piketty’s treatise is relevant to educational theories for three reasons: his rejection of meritocracy contributes to theories of social mobility; his critique of human capital theory provides fo…
Thomas Piketty’s relevance for the study of education: Reflections on the political economy of education
Beginning in the summer of 2008, the global financial crisis destroyed wealth across the world. Emanating from the world’s financial capital in New York City, as the financial institutions Bear Ste
Not-So-Public Contention: Movement Strategies, Regimes, and the Transformation of Public Institutions in Brazil
This article examines how political regimes structure the strategies activists can effectively utilize to transform public institutions. Drawing on Tilly's concept of "regime space" as a combination of capacity and democracy, the author analyzes the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement's (MST) attempt to implement alternative pedagogies in public schools in two diverse contexts: the state of Rio Grande do Sul and the municipality of Santa Maria da…
Understanding rural resistance: Contemporary mobilization in the Brazilian countryside
Contradictions between impressive levels of economic growth and the persistence of poverty and inequality are perhaps nowhere more evident than in rural Brazil. While Brazil might appear to be an example of the potential harmony between large-scale, export-oriented agribusiness and small-scale family farming, high levels of rural resistance contradict this vision. In this introductory paper, we synthesize the literature on agrarian resistance in …
Education of the countryside at a crossroads: Rural social movements and national policy reform in Brazil
This contribution explores the strategies used by popular movements seeking to advance social reforms, and the challenges once they succeed. It analyzes how a strategic alliance between the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) and the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG) transformed the Ministry of Education's official approach to rural schooling. This success illustrates the critical role of international allies, politica…
The Social(ist) Pedagogies of the MST: Towards New Relations of Production in the Brazilian Countryside
This article explores the social(ist) pedagogies of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), a large agrarian social movement that fights for socialism in the Brazilian countryside, meaning that workers own their own means of production and collectively produce the food and other products necessary for their communities' survival. Over the past three decades, activists in the movement have developed an alternative educational proposal for r…
Understanding rural resistance: Contemporary mobilization in the Brazilian countryside
Contradictions between impressive levels of economic growth and the persistence of poverty and inequality are perhaps nowhere more evident than in rural Brazil. While Brazil might appear to be an example of the potential harmony between large-scale, export-oriented agribusiness and small-scale family farming, high levels of rural resistance contradict this vision. In this introductory paper, we synthesize the literature on agrarian resistance in …
Coproducing Rural Public Schools in Brazil: Contestation, Clientelism, and the Landless Workers’ Movement
The Landless Workers' Movement (MST) has been the principal protagonist developing an alternative educational proposal for rural public schools in Brazil. This article analyzes the MST's differential success implementing this proposal in municipal and state public schools. The process is both participatory-activists working with government officials to implement MST goals-and contentious-the movement mobilizing support for its education initiativ…
Education of the countryside at a crossroads: Rural social movements and national policy reform in Brazil
This contribution explores the strategies used by popular movements seeking to advance social reforms, and the challenges once they succeed. It analyzes how a strategic alliance between the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) and the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG) transformed the Ministry of Education's official approach to rural schooling. This success illustrates the critical role of international allies, politica…
The confluence of popular education and social movement studies into social movement learning: A systematic literature review
The purpose of this paper is to systematically review and trace the lineage of theoretical debates around social movement learning in the field of adult education. We compiled articles, books and conference proceedings on adult education and social movements from Google Scholar using the software Publish or Perish and manually filtered the data to only include those that explicitly address the topic. Based on the data, we identified key literatur…
Food sovereignty education across the Americas: Multiple origins, converging movements
Networked Movements and Bureaucratic Unions: The Structure of the 2018 #RedForEd Teachers' Strikes
How do digitally enabled movements of workers reshape, replace, or reinforce the role of unions? Based on a comparative case study of the 2018 #RedForEd teachers' strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona, this article argues that despite the hierarchical and bureaucratic character of statewide teachers' unions, the infrastructure they provided to organize, connect, and legitimize teachers' actions was critical for statewide strikes. Facebo…
Philanthropizing’ consent: How a private foundation pushed through national learning standards in Brazil
This article explores how the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (National Learning Standards), entered the policy debate in Brazil and became the most important reform initiative of the Ministry of Education between 2015 and 2017. We argue that this accelerated policy process was contingent upon the practice of philanthropizing consent: foundations’ use of material resources, knowledge production, media power, and informal and formal networks to gar…
The Social(ist) Pedagogies of the MST: Towards New Relations of Production in the Brazilian Countryside
This article explores the social(ist) pedagogies of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), a large agrarian social movement that fights for socialism in the Brazilian countryside, meaning that workers own their own means of production and collectively produce the food and other products necessary for their communities' survival. Over the past three decades, activists in the movement have developed an alternative educational proposal for r…
Take or Reject State Power? The Dual Dilemma for Teachers’ Unions in Brazil and Mexico
Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: Labor Organizing During covid-19
This article explores how crises become opportunities. Through a study of a progressive teachers’ union caucus in New York City during the emergence of covid -19, this piece examines how organizations convert crises into opportunities for political growth. Drawing on sociological theories of political articulation and crisis, this article explores the role of union caucuses to foment political change. We argue that crises become politically signi…
We bring in each other's wisdom’: Liberatory praxis and political education for Black lives in Philadelphia
Education is a central aspect of social movements' ability to build individual and collective participation in political struggle. But, how do these processes of learning and consciousness take place? As Choudry (Choudry, A. 2015. Learning Activism: The intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements. University of Toronto Press) argues, it is important to examine the intellectual life of contemporary social movements, their various forms and …
Contentious Cogovernance and Prefiguration: A Framework for Analyzing Social Movement–State Relations in Public Education
This article offers a framework for analyzing social movement participation in public education through a focus on universities in Brazil. It builds on the literature on social movement–state relations, participatory governance, and community organizing in schools, drawing on the case of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement and the National Program for Education in Areas of Agrarian Reform (PRONERA) to illustrate the need to recenter the idea …
The Landless Workers Movement’s itinerant schools: Occupying and transforming public education in Brazil
This article explores how social movement co-governance of public education offers an alternative to neoliberal educational models. The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) is one of the largest social movements in Latin America. We describe one of the many schools that the MST co-governs, the Itinerant School Paths of Knowledge (Caminhos do Saber), located in an occupied encampment in the state of Paraná. We analyze three of the most unique…
If the past devours the future, why study? Piketty, social movements, and future directions for education
In 2014, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century rocked the economic and political world, with its argument that inequality is destined to increase; in the field of education, however, this book has been almost entirely ignored. I argue that Piketty’s treatise is relevant to educational theories for three reasons: his rejection of meritocracy contributes to theories of social mobility; his critique of human capital theory provides fo…
Not-So-Public Contention: Movement Strategies, Regimes, and the Transformation of Public Institutions in Brazil
This article examines how political regimes structure the strategies activists can effectively utilize to transform public institutions. Drawing on Tilly's concept of "regime space" as a combination of capacity and democracy, the author analyzes the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement's (MST) attempt to implement alternative pedagogies in public schools in two diverse contexts: the state of Rio Grande do Sul and the municipality of Santa Maria da…
Education and Labor in Tension: Contemporary Debates about Education in the US Labor Movement
This article examines the conflicting visions within the US labor movement about the proper function and implementation of labor education programs, and how educational programs are connected to union structure. While this article is primarily based on interviews with union officials, the article also draws on union documents and participant observation in union meetings and educational workshops. The author argues that an analysis of worker educ…
Razões Para Mudar O Mundo: A Educação Do Campo E a Contribuição Do Pronera
A razão neoliberal penetra todas as instituições e dissemina sua visão de mundo impondo a governança corporativa em todas as dimensões do desenvolvimento. A educação é uma das dimensões mais afetadas pela lógica neoliberal. O campesinato brasileiro, com destaque para o Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), junto com professores e pesquisadores construíram o paradigma da educação do campo que tem no Programa Nacional de Educação na R…
Education and Labor in Tension: Contemporary Debates about Education in the US Labor Movement
This article examines the conflicting visions within the US labor movement about the proper function and implementation of labor education programs, and how educational programs are connected to union structure. While this article is primarily based on interviews with union officials, the article also draws on union documents and participant observation in union meetings and educational workshops. The author argues that an analysis of worker educ…
The Social(ist) Pedagogies of the MST: Towards New Relations of Production in the Brazilian Countryside
This article explores the social(ist) pedagogies of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), a large agrarian social movement that fights for socialism in the Brazilian countryside, meaning that workers own their own means of production and collectively produce the food and other products necessary for their communities' survival. Over the past three decades, activists in the movement have developed an alternative educational proposal for r…
Coproducing Rural Public Schools in Brazil: Contestation, Clientelism, and the Landless Workers’ Movement
The Landless Workers' Movement (MST) has been the principal protagonist developing an alternative educational proposal for rural public schools in Brazil. This article analyzes the MST's differential success implementing this proposal in municipal and state public schools. The process is both participatory-activists working with government officials to implement MST goals-and contentious-the movement mobilizing support for its education initiativ…
Not-So-Public Contention: Movement Strategies, Regimes, and the Transformation of Public Institutions in Brazil
This article examines how political regimes structure the strategies activists can effectively utilize to transform public institutions. Drawing on Tilly's concept of "regime space" as a combination of capacity and democracy, the author analyzes the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement's (MST) attempt to implement alternative pedagogies in public schools in two diverse contexts: the state of Rio Grande do Sul and the municipality of Santa Maria da…
Understanding rural resistance: Contemporary mobilization in the Brazilian countryside
Contradictions between impressive levels of economic growth and the persistence of poverty and inequality are perhaps nowhere more evident than in rural Brazil. While Brazil might appear to be an example of the potential harmony between large-scale, export-oriented agribusiness and small-scale family farming, high levels of rural resistance contradict this vision. In this introductory paper, we synthesize the literature on agrarian resistance in …
Education of the countryside at a crossroads: Rural social movements and national policy reform in Brazil
This contribution explores the strategies used by popular movements seeking to advance social reforms, and the challenges once they succeed. It analyzes how a strategic alliance between the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) and the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG) transformed the Ministry of Education's official approach to rural schooling. This success illustrates the critical role of international allies, politica…
If the past devours the future, why study? Piketty, social movements, and future directions for education
In 2014, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century rocked the economic and political world, with its argument that inequality is destined to increase; in the field of education, however, this book has been almost entirely ignored. I argue that Piketty’s treatise is relevant to educational theories for three reasons: his rejection of meritocracy contributes to theories of social mobility; his critique of human capital theory provides fo…
Thomas Piketty’s relevance for the study of education: Reflections on the political economy of education
Beginning in the summer of 2008, the global financial crisis destroyed wealth across the world. Emanating from the world’s financial capital in New York City, as the financial institutions Bear Ste
Food sovereignty education across the Americas: Multiple origins, converging movements
Razões Para Mudar O Mundo: A Educação Do Campo E a Contribuição Do Pronera
A razão neoliberal penetra todas as instituições e dissemina sua visão de mundo impondo a governança corporativa em todas as dimensões do desenvolvimento. A educação é uma das dimensões mais afetadas pela lógica neoliberal. O campesinato brasileiro, com destaque para o Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), junto com professores e pesquisadores construíram o paradigma da educação do campo que tem no Programa Nacional de Educação na R…
Land and freedom: The MST, the Zapatistas and peasant alternatives to neoliberalism / The making of resistance: Brazil’s landless movement and narrative enactment
The struggle continues. And so does the writing about two of the most important social movements in contemporary Latin America, the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) and the Zapatista Army
The Landless Workers Movement’s itinerant schools: Occupying and transforming public education in Brazil
This article explores how social movement co-governance of public education offers an alternative to neoliberal educational models. The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) is one of the largest social movements in Latin America. We describe one of the many schools that the MST co-governs, the Itinerant School Paths of Knowledge (Caminhos do Saber), located in an occupied encampment in the state of Paraná. We analyze three of the most unique…
Educating for Ecosocialism: Beyond its renowned direct-action strategies, Brazil’s Landless Workers movement also models political education as an indispensable tool for incubating transformative alte…
The confluence of popular education and social movement studies into social movement learning: A systematic literature review
The purpose of this paper is to systematically review and trace the lineage of theoretical debates around social movement learning in the field of adult education. We compiled articles, books and conference proceedings on adult education and social movements from Google Scholar using the software Publish or Perish and manually filtered the data to only include those that explicitly address the topic. Based on the data, we identified key literatur…
Philanthropizing’ consent: How a private foundation pushed through national learning standards in Brazil
This article explores how the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (National Learning Standards), entered the policy debate in Brazil and became the most important reform initiative of the Ministry of Education between 2015 and 2017. We argue that this accelerated policy process was contingent upon the practice of philanthropizing consent: foundations’ use of material resources, knowledge production, media power, and informal and formal networks to gar…
Contentious Cogovernance and Prefiguration: A Framework for Analyzing Social Movement–State Relations in Public Education
This article offers a framework for analyzing social movement participation in public education through a focus on universities in Brazil. It builds on the literature on social movement–state relations, participatory governance, and community organizing in schools, drawing on the case of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement and the National Program for Education in Areas of Agrarian Reform (PRONERA) to illustrate the need to recenter the idea …
Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: Labor Organizing During covid-19
This article explores how crises become opportunities. Through a study of a progressive teachers’ union caucus in New York City during the emergence of covid -19, this piece examines how organizations convert crises into opportunities for political growth. Drawing on sociological theories of political articulation and crisis, this article explores the role of union caucuses to foment political change. We argue that crises become politically signi…
Take or Reject State Power? The Dual Dilemma for Teachers’ Unions in Brazil and Mexico
We bring in each other's wisdom’: Liberatory praxis and political education for Black lives in Philadelphia
Education is a central aspect of social movements' ability to build individual and collective participation in political struggle. But, how do these processes of learning and consciousness take place? As Choudry (Choudry, A. 2015. Learning Activism: The intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements. University of Toronto Press) argues, it is important to examine the intellectual life of contemporary social movements, their various forms and …
Special issue introduction: Social movement struggles, learning and knowledge-making: in memory of Aziz Choudry (1966–2021)
Race and the political ecology of education in Brazil: A spatial analysis of rural school closures
Education and processes of agrarian change are deeply imbricated processes. While political ecologists have begun exploring education in earnest, questions of race have remain largely unexplored. In this article, we analyze the spatial linkages between education, race, and the permanence of the peasantry in the face of expanding capital. Our focus is the crisis of rural school closures in Brazil. Over the last twenty five years, the state has clo…
Networked Movements and Bureaucratic Unions: The Structure of the 2018 #RedForEd Teachers' Strikes
How do digitally enabled movements of workers reshape, replace, or reinforce the role of unions? Based on a comparative case study of the 2018 #RedForEd teachers' strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona, this article argues that despite the hierarchical and bureaucratic character of statewide teachers' unions, the infrastructure they provided to organize, connect, and legitimize teachers' actions was critical for statewide strikes. Facebo…
Mapping, reflecting, and exploring education for the labour movement: A thematic literature review
From “Sites of Struggle” to “Complicit in Struggle”: Social Movements and the University in Brazil
Background: The formal education of universities on the one hand, and popular education on the other, have been generally understood as two ends of a spectrum in the field of education. Despite these opposing trajectories, in the past two decades novel forms of social movement–university relationships have emerged, with notable yet understudied models from Latin America. Purpose: This article examines whether and how higher education institutions…
Social movements and adult education in the International Review of Education (IRE) and beyond
This article reviews all of the English- and Spanish-language articles on adult education and social movements published in the International Review of Education (IRE) from 1955 to 2023, documenting the shift from functionalist to more critical approaches. The authors highlight both the contributions and limits of these articles in shaping debates about adult education and social movements today. In addition, the authors offer their own analysis …
Political science (25 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Politics (18 works) · Law (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Social movement (12 works) · Economics (10 works) · Public Administration (10 works) · Political economy (9 works) · Social science (9 works)