“Meu canto é resistência No ecoar de um tambor Vêm ver brilhar Mais um menino que você abandonou” (Samba Enredo da Escola de Samba Beija-Flor, 2018)
"My singing is resistance In the echo of a drum Come and see shine One more boy you left behind" (Samba Enredo of the School of Samba Beija-Flor, 2018)
Proposals
Subject Areas
Carnival on Praça Roosevelt
Geography (different regions /zone -place, space, territory, memory, identity, expansion: city center and periphery, public policies)
Language: presenting and supporting points of view
Taking photos of “Ourselves”
Geography (city vulnerabilities, cultural, sportive, artistic, political social manifestations)
Language: Oral presentation (multimodality) - photos
“Rolê” / “Going out”
Math (worksheet, spreadsheet, graphs, calculating the average, cross multiplication, currency, problem resolution)
Geography (urban occupation: leisure and occupation, mobility)
Cross disciplinary: Conceptual Map
Language: how to present and support a position
Playing a Blue Whale like game*
Language: how to present and support a position
Cross disciplinar: conceptual Map
De-occupy Crackland
Geography (urban occupation: public policies, job and occupation, mobility)
Language: how to present and support a position; how to disagree, how to strike a deal.
* This was a demand, apart from the topic of the semester, because some of the students in our group got involved with suicidal games. For more discussion on this refer to Liberali (2018, forthcoming).
Tasks
Description of the task
Theoretical concepts worked with
1 - invitation for a Digit-M-Ed carnival activity on the first meeting
Each school was supposed to create a carnival song using the themes from Digit-M-Ed 2017 or their own relationship to the project as the basis topic for the song. This involved sharing the lyrics, a video or a recording of the song created by the school, in our collective WhatsApp group, to be used during the meeting. Also, participants were invited to come to PUC-SP in their carnival outfits.
Multimedia
Situated practice
Play
Social activity
2 - Carnival party at PUC with neighbors complaining and police trying to disperse the activities
PUC auditorium was organized as a carnival place with signs of Praça Roosevelt spread everywhere. However, no mention about it was made.
Situated practice
A game was proposed. People could party as much as they wanted but when the music stopped, they had to freeze and observe what was going on around them. This happened twice.
Play
Music was played, and everybody was singing and dancing. After a few minutes, researchers pretending to be neighbors started shouting against the party goers. Music was stopped, and people froze.
Social activity
After music was resumed, the police entered and started shouting and “attacking” the revelers (mostly other researchers who were violently “arrested”). Once more, music stopped, and participants froze and observed the scene.
The researchers asked everyone to sit and talk about what had happened.
After a while they were asked to compare what they experienced to recent events (“What recent events were similar to our performance?”). They were then asked to present their conclusions to the whole group
3 - Watching videos and discussing the way the two video news clips presented the situation
After participants realized they had participated in a recreation of the episode at Praça Roosevelt, they were asked what they knew of the episode. Some reported their ideas. As a sequencing task they were all invited to watch two pieces of video news by two different tv channels about the same episode. Later, they had to discuss the similarities and differences in the way the episode was reported.
Overt instruction
Multiculturality
Multimodality
(“Observe these two pieces of news about a recent event. Which event is being reported? How were they reported? Are there similarities between the news? Are there differences? What are they?”)
Multimedia
Argumentation
4 - Reading and gathering information as supporting arguments for actions to be taken for 2018
For this task, participants received links to maps, texts, digital book, facebook pages, letters, laws and were also invited to research on their own in order to gather information which could be transformed in supporting arguments on the topic to be discussed: should Praça Roosevelt be a free space for Carnival celebrations?
Overt instruction
Critical framing
First, the big group was divided in four different classes. In each class, in smaller groups, participants from different schools had to be subdivided for discussions with partners with the same position. They were supposed to search for data to support their positions and to counter argue the other perspective. After some time discussing and organizing the data, they had to present their findings to their groups with different positions in oral presentations. As a result of this, the whole class was supposed to build a number of suggestions to be presented for Carnival 2018.
Multiculturality
Multimodality
Multimedia
Argumentation
5 - Performance of the presentations of the deliberations in the plenary with all four classes
Representatives of each of the four classes, from different schools, different ages, social-economic groups, hearing and deaf presented, in 3 minutes, their collective solutions to the whole group who, then, could make their own commentaries in one minute.
Transformed Practice
Multiculturality
Multimodality
Multimedia
Argumentation
Play
Social activity
Tasks
Description of the task
Theoretical concepts worked with
1 - inquiry discussion
In groups of about 15 people, participants were asked to research about the following issues: “what is Crackland and how was it formed?”, “how do people from different backgrounds live at Crackland?”, “who defines the way Crackland is organized?”, and “how is space occupied in Crackland?”. In order to do that, they were presented with printed, TV and radio news, with different interlocutors offering their views. Apart from that, they were invited to research on the internet about the history of the neighborhood where Crackland is situated. The differences in background of the students (some very wealthy and others, very poor) made it possible for them to have access to fresh and vivid ideas about Crack dealers. Participants from poor communities were invited to describe and explain numerous aspect of the lives of those who use, sell and organize drug traffic. Some of the wealthier participants brought to the discussion their perspectives on the issues which many times derived from the fact that they were also users of some types of drugs. This gave support for them to reflect in a more empathic perspective towards the positions expressed.
Situated Practice
Overt Instruction
Critical Framing
Multiculturality
Multimedia
Multimodality
Argumentation
2 - Performance of a lifetime
Participants in each group put together ideas of “ourselves”, “occupying the city” and “de-occupying Crackland” and set up an artistic performance, expressing how they viewed the situation and what perspectives could be set for the topic discussed.
Transformed
Practice
Play
Social Activity
