scholarly journals Back to the Future?: Timor-Leste, Cuba and the return of the mass literacy campaign

1970 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 58-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bob Boughton

In December 2005, eleven Cuban educational advisers arrived in Timor-Leste to begin work on a national literacy campaign. Adapting the program known in Latin America as Yo, Sí Puedo (Yes I Can), the Cubans trained over 400 local tutors to run classes in every part of the country, using a method they call ‘alphanumeric’, delivered via audiovisual technology. The campaign was launched in March 2007, and the first classes began in June of that year. By September 2010, three years later, over 70,000 adults, over one fifth of the total illiterate population, had successfully completed a thirteen week basic literacy course. Drawing on original research undertaken in Timor-Leste between 2004 and 2009, followed by further investigations in May 2010 in Havana, Cuba, this paper describes the Timor-Leste campaign, locating it within the historical commitment of the country’s independence movement to adult literacy, and the broader context of Cuba’s international literacy work.

Author(s):  
Deborah Shnookal

The story of Operation Pedro Pan (or Operation Peter Pan) and the Cuban Children’s Program remains a highly contested one, still regarded in Miami as an urgent humanitarian “rescue” mission while in Havana it is viewed as a scheme that hoodwinked parents into sending their offspring out of the country as unaccompanied minors and sometimes even described as a mass kidnapping. This book moves beyond Cold War tropes about threats to the Cuban family by the revolutionary government and uses the episode to examine in detail the social reforms that unfolded in the wake of the 1959 Cuban Revolution and how these changes encouraged a new revolutionary youth culture of political activism and challenged the United States’ historical, political, and economic control and cultural influence in Cuba. By focusing on the generation of young Cubans who came to maturity in the early 1960s and tracking the parallel trajectories of the Pedro Pan children and their siblings, friends, and classmates who stayed on the island (100,000 of whom participated in the 1961 national literacy campaign), this book for the first time takes a broader view and presents a more nuanced explanation of this history.


Prospects ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-199
Author(s):  
Gudeta Mammo

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bob Boughton ◽  
Donna Ah Chee ◽  
Jack Beetson ◽  
Deborah Durnan ◽  
Jose Chala LeBlanch

In 2012, the remote Aboriginal community of Wilcannia in western NSW hosted the first Australian pilot of a Cuban mass adult literacy campaign model known as Yes I Can. The aim was to investigate the appropriateness of this model in Aboriginal Australia. Building on an intensive community development process of ‘socialisation and mobilisation’, sixteen community members with very low literacy graduated from the basic literacy course, with the majority continuing on into post-literacy activities, further training and/or employment. The pilot was initiated by the National Aboriginal Adult Literacy Campaign Steering Committee (NAALCSC) consisting of Aboriginal leaders from the education and health sectors, and managed by the University of New England (UNE), working in partnership with the Wilcannia Local Aboriginal Land Council as the local lead agency. The pilot was supported by a Cuban academic who came to Australia for this purpose, and included a Participatory Action Research (PAR) evaluation led by the UNE Project Manager. In this paper, members of the project team and the NAALCSC describe the pilot and reflect on its outcomes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (259) ◽  
pp. 39-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Estêvão Cabral

Abstract This article contributes to the strand of research within the New Literacy Studies that has investigated the ways in which adult literacy campaigns are bound up with social and political movements. The focus is on the adult literacy campaign initiated in Timor-Leste in 1974, as the process of decolonisation from Portugal got underway. This campaign was based on a Freirean approach to adult literacy and was initiated by Timorese students returning from Lisbon. The article draws on archival research and oral history interviews with people who volunteered to serve as adult literacy tutors at the time. The analysis presented in the main body of the article provides insights into the nature of the training, and into the tutors’ own understandings of the purpose of the campaign and of adult literacy pedagogy. It also draws attention to the difficult conditions in which this short-lived campaign was conducted in 1974 and 1975. The final section of the article details the worsening nature of the conditions encountered after the Indonesian invasion of December 1975 and concludes that, despite the constraints imposed by these conditions, this campaign has had an enduring symbolic legacy in the field of adult literacy education in Timor-Leste.


2003 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-169
Author(s):  
Samina Nazli

Raising the standards of literacy in the developing world has been a major goal of the less developed countries since most of them became independent in the process of decolonisation that followed World War II. The Human Development Report 2004, brought out by the United Nations Development Programme lists some major improvements in increasing literacy levels of a number of countries between the year 1990 and 2002. For example, low human development countries like Togo increased their adult literacy rates from 44.2 percent in 1990 to 59.6 percent in 2002. Congo saw an increase in its literacy rate for the same period from 67.1 percent to 82.8 percent. The rates for Uganda, Kenya, Yemen, and Nigeria are 56.1 percent and 68.9 percent, 70.8 percent and 84.3 percent, 32.7 percent and 49.0 percent, and 48.7 percent and 68.8 percent respectively. If one examines the breakdown by region, the least developed countries as a group saw an increase in their adult literacy rates from 43.0 percent to 52.5 percent, the Arab states from 50.8 percent to 63.3 percent, South Asia from 47.0 percent to 57.6 percent, Sub-Saharan Africa from 50.8 percent to 63.2 percent and East Asia and the Pacific from 79.8 percent to 90.3 percent. If we look at the increase in the levels of literacy from the perspective of medium human development and low human development, the figures are 71.8 percent and 80.4 percent, and 42.5 percent and 54.3 percent, respectively.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Reynoso

Purpose The purpose of this viewpoint is to discuss the need to evolve from a service marketing approach to a service logic mindset throughout the organization in Latin America. In doing so, it addresses a void in the service literature due to the lack of attention on its uniqueness in this region. Design/methodology/approach To confirm the predominant approach of studying service and the need for a paradigm shift in service organizations, two independent journal article searches during 1989–2020 were conducted. The purpose was to learn where Latin American service researchers are focusing their research efforts and to discuss how the meaning of service applies to this region. Findings Forty-eight journal articles were analyzed and six distinctive groups were identified where service researchers are focusing their work on Latin America. Service has been studied mainly from the marketing perspective; with limited original research published in indexed journals; focused on making product-oriented promises, increasingly enabled by technology. The need for developing a service logic mindset throughout the organization has begun to be emphasized rather recently in the field. The variety of meanings of service and the complex context represent challenges for this enterprise. Research limitations/implications Future research is needed to work on a more comprehensive conceptualization of service at higher levels of analysis. Further context studies are required to enrich knowledge on service in Latin America. Service researchers and organizations should work on these two challenges to continue moving from the marketing perspective of service to a service logic mindset throughout the organization. Originality/value The paper points out the relevance of conducting further service research in Latin America, arguing that service has been studied mainly from the marketing perspective, and claiming the need to move to a service logic mindset. This viewpoint opens a discussion in the service research community toward a paradigm shift that, although inspired in Latin America, may not be necessarily limited to this region.


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