Collective Reading: a Popular Education Approach to Literature at a Secondary School for Youth and Adults in the City of Buenos Aires

Abstract

This paper explores possible linkages between some aspects of Latin American Popular Education  (Educación Popular latinoamericana) and classroom approaches to literary texts, based on the analysis of classwork around the reading of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (Spanish title: Un Mundo Feliz) at a working-class secondary school for youth and adults (Bachillerato Popular) in Pompeya, City of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The educational process, documented through an ethnographic lens, takes place in an interdisciplinary course that connects literature with the cooperative movement and the solidarity economy. This curricular option, in the context of a secondary school for youth and adults whose political/pedagogical stance recognizes the value of self-government, horizontalism and popular participation as some of its ruling principles, has an impact on the production of critical knowledge, on  pedagogical relationships within the classroom, and on the structuring of the educational process, including its evaluation. From a reading conception as a cultural practice framework, this paper identifies the potentials and tensions in the pedagogical strategies displayed in the classroom, with the goal of developing collective knowledge between concrete individuals, on and through literature