Browsing by Subject "Literacy"

In mid-twentieth century, Colombia’s illiteracy rate was 40% with numbers close to 80% in the rural areas. These areas lacked access to formal education and were isolated from the urban centers due to poor road infrastructure. Radio Sutatenza, an educational radio station, promised to educate and integrate rural communities to the nation through radio literacy campaigns and its pedagogical model of Fundamental Integral Education. Unlike previous sociological, pedagogical, and communicational studies of the Sutatenza project, Intermedial Sutatenza highlights the project’s political and aesthetic dimensions. Dialoguing with theories and concepts from literary, cultural, and sound studies, I analyze cultural and media productions by officials and listeners of Radio Sutatenza. I focus, specifically, on radio dramas produced by the station and on coplas and songs composed by listeners, then broadcast in radio shows, and published in the print weekly El Campesino. I propose that these cultural productions are best described as intermedial narratives to highlight their many inner contradictions and the mediated context in which they emerge. Also, in their blurring of media and genre borders, these narratives dwell between the aural and the written and emerge as embattled fields of meaning production. I argue that Sutatenza’s intermedial narratives show that the radio station undertook both a continuity of and a departure from the Hispanic-Catholic project of a nation put in place in Colombia by the grammarian presidents in the nineteenth century. Likewise, I sustain that Sutatenza reproduced and remediated the literary movement of costumbrismo and the literary genre of the cuadro de costumbres, with its ideological implications, in sonic media for a twentieth century audience. At its core, my dissertation proves that the othering of rural individuals in Colombia took place also in the radio, and that Radio Sutatenza, with its far-reaching pedagogical strategies, had a fundamental role in the construction and circulation of a specific kind of rural individual and of rurality. At the same time, my work shows that, in the interstices, polysemy and the instability of the sign and the word permit for voices of resistance to emerge. Hence, the Sutatenza narratives, on the one hand, strive to unite and homogenize rural communities, and on the other, circulate and broadcast those same communities’ cultural heterogeneity. Through this examination, I clarify the role of Radio Sutatenza in Colombian community-making processes and radio’s part in narrating the nation during mid-twentieth century. Moreover, the questions I explore and the questions the dissertation opens-up are central in a country where unequal land ownership and rural labor exploitation are at the base of a more than half a century-long violent conflict. The ultimate goal and significance of my research is that it will lead to a recasting of the discourses (historical, sociological, cultural) about Colombian rural communities.

In the attempt to plan and mobilize teaching on a massive scale, literacy campaigns bring otherwise implied working theories of human and societal development out in the open. Aside from offering a lens into the role of ideas in political contest during the Cold War, the lessons of literacy campaigns in the United Nations-named “Development Decade” of 1960-1970 are useful for contemporary programs (such as the Algebra Project). This is in large part because literacy campaigns highlight how communities on the periphery of society can conduct planning and mobilize limited staff and resources to meet, replicate, and expand highly targeted goals, shifting the balance of power by setting an agenda when otherwise unable to wield state or monetary influence. The most important problems are which form of planning and which school of pedagogy.

This dissertation studies Septima Poinsette Clark (1898-1987) of Charleston, South Carolina USA and Elza Costa Freire (1916-1986) of Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil as activist-educators who formed—and with their colleagues mobilized—literacy methods as part of a pedagogy of liberation. Clark and Costa Freire represent a “grassroots” school of liberation pedagogy while the Cuban literacy campaign of 1961 represents a “guerilla” school. While Clark and Costa Freire’s methods can be localized to the settings of Charleston and Recife—and also considered apart from the methods of the Ministry of Education in Havana—each one’s process toward campaigning indicates a shared intellectual context of development planning, even “solving” the problems posed by the exact same pre-existing literacy methods. Moreover, these three cities, like distant sisters, each unevenly transitioned from “slave” and “free” society. In the Cold War’s turn toward the “Third World,” literacy campaigns experimented in the politics of freedom where communities once owned could take ownership of their education.