Alternative educational projects: technical developments and political debate in the everyday workings of nongraded schools in Argentina

PADAWER, ANA

Ethnography and Educational Policy: a view across the Americas

Praeger. Greenwood Publishers

Lugar: Wesport, CT and London; Año: 2002; p. 97 - 120

This article makes reference to some outcomes from an ethnographic research on a series of alternative experiences known as “non-graded schools”. These pedagogical proposals are carried out, in some cases from ten years ago, in public General Basic Education schools (GBE) located in the Argentinean Province of Buenos Aires. All the pedagogical experiences identified under this denomination include a revision of school organization and a promotion methodology. The annual grades in exercise since last century have been changed to flexible groups to enable school promotion at any time during the year.I consider that with these pedagogical proposals the supervisors, headmasters and teachers establish a political local practice in order to overcome students’ failure. These new political ways prompt alliances and confrontations with dominant educational policies in the region. Opposition to political practice is articulated to heterogeneous pedagogical projects, which build a common identity as “non-graded schools”, thus significantly differentiating from the other marginal schools in the region.