Intercambio No.3

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 principle. Without exception, these proposals have emerged from within educational communities who are participating in democratic action-research efforts, where classrooms become micro-universes and a synthesis of the many contradictions of a world in crisis.
As well as being a link between teacher and student movements in different regions and countries, the magazine provides a pedagogical tour of biographies and geographies, from South to North and from North to South. As Brazilian educator Paulo Freire has taught us, pedagogy is synthesized dialectically in praxis to the extent that it both transcends and forms part of, the political, ideological and the cultural. The reader will obtain new understandings from the reading itself, according to his/her own experiences, knowledge and feelings.

Year 4, No.3, February 2012