RIGHTS THREATENED: SOCIAL MOVEMENTS DEFEND PUBLIC EDUCATION INTRODUCTION In 2014 idea celebrated 15 years as a space for the convergence of struggles for public education throughout the Americas. In defense of education as a social right, we have built spaces for interchange, analysis, and debate regarding privatization and the policies of dispossession of rights, and we have advanced in generating alternatives for emancipatory education as a central element for the construction of democratic societies. In this issue, the reader will find articles about ten emblematic struggles carried out by diverse labour and social organizations from Canada to Argentina. In the face of offensives by transnational financial capital and its governments…

NEW COMMUNICATION AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AND EDUCATION: HEGEMONY AND RESISTANCE INTRODUCTION Technology, globalization, and neoliberal capitalism cannot be separated from the central issues of education in the 21st Century. What is the purpose of education? What is the content of education? What are the pedagogies, tools, and resources? Whose interests are served?Unless the question of purpose is examined and challenged, the dominant discourse rules by default. That default is generally one of education preparing workers for a globalized economy. The logical assumption thatfollows is that students should be integrated into expertise in using the new information and communications technologies that are the tools of the global economy.In this globalized framework,…

PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS INTRODUCTION This edition of the Intercambio magazine focuses one of the most relevant issues in the contribution that education must provide to solve social problems. The environmental crisis, treated this way for not being a natural phenomenon but a result of a particular moment in human society that is living a systematic and multilateral crisis, places us in front of risks that were unimaginable in past centuries, which include threats to the existence of the human species itself.It´s important to understand the characteristics and origins of this crisis in order to act over it. This is why, not only is it required that educative…

INDIGENOUS EDUCATION SPECIAL ISSUE ON INDIGENOUS EDUCATION INTRODUCTION Within the Initiative for Democratic Education in the Americas (IDEA) there are several structures with different foci, but which share common goals. One of them is the Continental Network of Indigenous Educators (REI), a hemispheric alliance of teachers, students and community organizations that struggle for a public education that responds to the cultural needs, worldview and aspirations of the aboriginal peoples. From November 9th to 12th of 2012, the REI facilitated the Third Continental Encounter of Indigenous Educators in Tikal, classic city of the Mayan people located in the jungles of Guatemala’s El Peten province. The Encounter allowed discussion on indigenous pedagogies…

ALTERNATIVE PEDAGOGIES INTRODUCTION The IDEA Network promotes various spaces of resistance to attacks on public education as a fundamental right. Intercambio functions as an informative tool for various intrinsically related concerns: to make visible denunciations and proposals to counter neoliberalism and its ruthless effects on education, amongst others.This edition focuses on alternative pedagogical proposals, some still in the ideas stage and others in the process of being implemented, in the face of neo-liberal cuts and policies that promote the commodification of education. Although each proposal has its own specificities rooted in its particular context, we are trying to build a bridge between peoples, a meeting-point, with praxis as a guiding…

CAMPAIGN FOR A DEMOCRATIC, FORMATIVE AND PARTICIPATORY EVALUATION INTRODUCTION This edition of “INTERCAMBIO” is inscribed within the IDEA Network campaign against standardized testing as a form of exclusion and control of students and professors. The campaign also has the parallel objective to construct evaluation alternatives that foster an integral, humanistic, and democratic education.This issue also aims to continue follow-up to the work of the International Seminar on standardized evaluation and teacher performance organized by the IDEA Network in February 2009 in Mexico City. The central focus is on the struggles against standardized and teacher-performance evaluation and the promotion and articulation of ongoing processes to construct alternatives, developed through the education…