Pratiche pedagogiche popolari, femministe e decoloniali del Movimento delle Donne Contadine a Santa Catarina. Un'etnografia collaborativa

Through which dimensions does the educational significance of social movements find its own expression? What kind of learning can be built together in their inside? How can the process of the assumption of a socio-political commitment take place? What kind of conflicts does it open and at what levels? What kind of transformations does it generate in people's lives and communities? These are just some of the several starting questions of the collaborative ethnography-based study that I have carried out together with the Peasant Women's Movement in the State of Santa Catarina (Brazil) and that has allowed me to pass through two different national-academic contexts, thanks also to a joint supervision between the University of Verona (Italy) and the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil). The focus on the Peasant Women's Movement ― which arose in Santa Catarina in 1983 and established itself in 2004 on a national level ― starts from an interest in the political-pedagogical practices and thoughts that arise from the commitment of women's communities in the most peripheral and unknown places. In this study, starting from a theoretical perspective, that interweaves the various contributions of the Freirean popular pedagogy, the Italian difference-feminism, and the Latin American decolonial thought, I propose a hermeneutics of the political-pedagogical practices of the Peasant Women's Movement in Santa Catarina, and this hermeneutics finds its location in the relationships between me and my interlocutresses. In particular, this study is made up of three main parts, each one subdivided into various chapters. The first part is dedicated to a theoretical, methodological, and historical contextualization in a process of a stepped approximation to the subject-matter of the study. In the second part, I go deep into the political-pedagogical practices of the Peasant Women's Movement, with a focus on the interpretation of formal, informal and non-formal educational processes in the light of three main pedagogical concepts: commitment, conflict, and transformation. In the third part, I argue about the pedagogical implications of agroecology ― which nowadays forms the core of the struggles of the Peasant Women's Movement ― in a feminist and decolonial point of view. Starting from an inter-subjective process of knowledge construction, which involved both me and some other women in specific contexts, places, and times, I tried to offer a contribution to the construction of an pedagogy of social movements. This pedagogy is emergent in Brazil, where has its roots in Freire's thought, and is almost absent in Italy – despite some fundamental precedents can be found in the theming process of the link between pedagogy and politics by some historical experiences of popular pedagogy (the school of Barbiana, the center Mirto in Partinico, the nonviolent movement) and by critical pedagogy (among them: the thought of Antonio Gramsci, the Problematicism, the Pedagogy of Sexual Difference).