Ação educativa

For the defense of educational and cultural rights, and for indicators of educational quality

Ação Educativa, Educational Action, is a São Paulo-based NGO that has worked in the fields of education, culture, and youth, with a human rights perspective, since 1994. 

We train and support groups of educators, youth, and cultural agents. We also develop research and participatory methodologies with a focus on the construction of public policies attuned to the needs and interests of the population.

Defense of educational, cultural, and youth rights is our mission, and we work to promote democracy, social justice, and socio-environmental sustainability in Brazil. 

“The literacy of re-existence... The reinvention of practices that activists undertake, redesigning the matrixes and the tracks of a little-told story, in which the uses of language compose a history of resistance for or against scholarly education”¹Ana Lucia Souza, 2011

Despite legal advances directed toward the recognition of educational rights of all people in all stages of their life, free, quality, public education, appropriate to the singularities of personal trajectories and to the process of teaching and learning, principally for youth and adults, remains an immense challenge for a large part of the Brazilian population.

We believe that the construction of a fundamentally equitable education is the starting point for disputing the concept of educational quality and of the transformation of Eurocentric, racist, misogynist, exclusive education, into a quality social education that believes in the articulation of cultural and scientific knowledge in favor of socio-environmental development and the overcoming of oppression and inequality.

This positioning led us to develop educational quality indicators (in pre-school, primary school, high school, and concerning race relations), as an evaluation instrument that seeks the involvement of the whole school community in the process of improving educational quality. The material consists of a participatory methodological proposal and a system of indicators, through which the community is able to assess the condition of various aspects of their reality, identify priorities, establish an action plan, and implement and monitor results.

This material’s basic premise is that evaluation and participatory planning create conditions for improving the quality of schools according to criteria and priorities established by the school community based on those indicators. We believe in the elaboration of an instrument that allows schools to reflect, propose, and act in search of “quality in education,” a mosaic composed of the relevant dimensions and indicators.

Based in the experience of popular education for human rights and in the accumulation of construction of participatory methodologies, we launched, in 2017, the Popular Education, Culture, and Human Rights Training Center (Centro de Formação: Educação Popular, Cultura e Direitos Humanos), offering semester-long programs with courses, workshops, seminars, and roundtable discussions, developed in partnership with various civil society organizations, as well as social, collective, and activist movements and partners in the fight for the affirmation of human rights in Brazil. 

We seek, through our actions, to contribute to the transformation of public schools into spaces of belonging, of welcoming, and valuing of differences, as hubs of creation and knowledge articulation, in order to contribute to the development of localities and people based in their choices and the valuing of the knowledge produced in their territories.

Ednéia Gonçalves
Adjunct Executive Director