Learning from Cooperative Pedagogies in Patagonia

Peroline Ainsworth

Encuentro de Integración y Capacitación para Cooperativas Escolares de Villa La Angostura

We received the Engaged Researcher grant from OSUN during the third year of my PhD, which documents the pedagogical practices of Don Jaime de Nevares, a secondary school in a remote part of Argentine Patagonia. This school has a flourishing, pupil-run cooperative at its heart, which has been generating income and organizing actos solidarios to support pupils and their communities since 2011. I had been working with the school community for a year – teaching the advanced English students and helping set up a radio studio which plays out on ‘Cooperative Fridays’ – and was beginning to understand the scope of their ambitions, as well as of the material struggles they face. In that period economics teacher Marcelo – the driving force behind the initiation of the Don Jaime cooperative – and his colleagues at the Instituto Superior Formación Docente (ISFD) were run ragged; striving, on a shoestring, to share their learning about solidaristic cooperative pedagogies and to support other local schools to experiment with the approach. Their vision is ambitious: a network of schools grounded in cooperative values and supporting income-generating, pupil-run cooperatives, that might better prepare young people for the economic and social turbulence of Argentina. A network which might be a nexus of solidarity and material support when things get rough.

During the pandemic Don Jaime pupils organized food bundles to be distributed across the town – buying wholesale, selling close to cost-price, and spending the excess on bundles for families struggling to make ends meet. These compras communitarias continue to this day.

But making concrete this vision in the context of social and economic precarity post-COVID 19 is extremely challenging. Bus fares, printing and other small initial outlays can quickly bankrupt a project before it gets going, and stretched teachers cannot always pick up the slack. Crucially, the kinds of events and celebrations that bring different groups together in mutual solidarity were unaffordable, especially when inflation can mean daily price rises.  We were all excited about this rare opportunity to develop a project together that might both enrich my own PhD research and materially supported the pedagogical and community work of my research collaborators.

We each noted down what we would like to achieve in the coming months, if only we had the resources. I wanted a substantial structured discussion event in which I shared with staff and pupils what I had learnt, both to fulfil the ethical imperative of transparency and as an opportunity for collective reflection on the challenges and benefits of all our work. Marcelo and his team wanted to organize events that engage different parts of the community and bring local schools together to reflect on the challenges and benefits of the work they were doing. With these collective aims in mind we agreed a programme of activities which, with the funds from OSUN, were implemented between April and October 2024. ISFD trainer Fernanda explains how much these small seed funds were able to achieve:

La posibilidad que nos dio el dinero de la beca fue poder generar espacios más convocantes y también en localidades más lejanas, que antes no podíamos acceder. Usamos el dinero para diferentes acciones …. organizamos encuentros donde participaron las cooperativas escolares de la localidad…. Encuentros de formación para estudiantes de nivel superior. En esos encuentros se gestionó refrigerio, materiales de librería, alquiler de sonido y espacio …. visitas a localidades cercanas con actividades de difusión y promoción del proyecto …. y comprender mejor las barreras a las que se enfrentan. También nos permitió a nosotros y a nuestros alumnos participar en el Encuentro Regional de Cooperativas Escolares. Estas nuevos vínculos están generando nuevos proyectos e ideas que prometen grandes beneficios para nuestras comunidades en el futuro …

The grant money enabled us to create welcoming spaces in distant locations that we could not access before. The money has been used for many different things. It enabled us to hire space for events, buy refreshments and materials for meetings which brought local school cooperatives together. We organised training sessions for student-teachers. We were able to visit nearby towns with activities to disseminate and promote the project….and also understand the barriers these schools face with this kind of work.  The funds also enabled us and our students to participate in the Regional Meeting of School Cooperatives this year. These new links are generating new projects and ideas that promise great benefits for our communities in the future…

The OSUN grant gave me and my research collaborators opportunity to collaborate in a more horizontal and meaningful way than was possible during my main PhD fieldwork. It enabled us to co-design a project that brought together our interests and priorities, had practical benefit as well as academic, and created a shift in our relationship from ‘researcher-research participant’ to compañerxs with shared projects and goals. As activities drew to a close this week, Fernanda and I reflected on the idea of Engaged Research, and the challenges and benefits of collaboration:

Understanding the benefits and challenges of school cooperatives for young people

What does ‘engaged research’ mean to you?

Pero: For me, research can only be ‘engaged’ if, first of all, the project is at least partially rooted in the concerns and priorities of those involved who are not formal academic researchers – stakeholders, communities, whatever word you want to use. Secondly, I think it requires a research practice that is trying to create more power-aware horizontal research relationships between researchers based in academic institutions and research interlocutors. This practice needs to formally recognize everyone that is part of a research process as knowledge-producers and valorize different knowledges, without defaulting to dominant academic perspectives and ways of knowing as gold standard.  It requires a certain political position I suppose, a position that is trying at least to counter social injustices, including cognitive injustice, where some people’s perspectives are elevated, and others are ignored….

Fernanda: Para mí… “Investigación comprometida” significa muchas cosas. Pasión, amor, compromiso por el trabajo que cada uno hace. Significa, salir de la teoría para abordar la práctica, “lo real”. Significa investigar desde adentro…  A veces, las instituciones de investigación académica y lxs investigadores académicos pueden estar muy desconectados de las realidades sobre el terreno, y de los proyectos e investigaciones locales y comunitarios…para superar la desconexión se debe dar un intercambio continuo entre todxs lxs investigadores. Lxs investigadores académicos deberían no sólo dedicarse a la investigación teórica, sino también poder “visitar el campo” de investigación y observar y conocer el estado actual de situación de su objeto de estudio…desde allí podemos hacer proyectos mas ‘engaged’, mas ’comprometidos’.

What have been the challenges of this ‘engaged research’?

Pero: It is challenging to do engaged research within a PhD programme. Doctorates tend to be framed as solo efforts, and the different hoops and processes we have to go through are not really designed to support collaboration, or full engagement. I came up with my research questions before I really knew your work …and no matter how much I share and acknowledge and credit you all most of the material benefits of getting a PhD will be mine….so there is always unbalance. Another challenge is trust, I think there has to be trust. I don’t think it is realistic to just turn up and do ‘engaged’ research. Lots of communities are very suspicious of researchers and with good reason … it helped that we knew each other when we made the application.

Fernanda: Lo más desafiante para este equipo de trabajo es poder darle continuidad al interés generado en estas primeras instancias de trabajo en lxs docentes y futuros docentes. Y también poder sostener y acompañar la continuidad de funcionamiento de las cooperativas escolares creadas…. La realidad es que mantener nuestro trabajo es muy difícil, por lo que creo que sería de gran ayuda que la investigación comprometida fuera más sostenida y a más largo plazo…. Tratar de cumplir con la enorme cantidad de requisitos administrativos de las instituciones formales también requiere mucho trabajo y energía.

Pero: Yes, navigating the financial systems of universities is quite challenging! The evidence and paperwork they need can be almost impossible to sort out on the ground – especially in a context where prices change every day, and most things operate in cash … I understand there needs to be accountability but work needs to be done to make administrative systems able to cope with research that is strongly engaged with local communities in diverse contexts….

Besides accessing much-needed resources, what has been most positive about this engaged research and collaboration?

Fernanda: Lo más interesante fue poder intercambiar con Peroline nuestras experiencias y escuchar cuáles son las acciones cooperativas que se realizan en otras instituciones educativas en otros países. Este intercambio nos permitió enriquecer nuestra práctica y reflexionar sobre algunos cambios o mejoras a realizar en nuestro proyecto. Nos ha enriquecido muchísimo poder conocer cómo se desarrollan los espacios cooperativos en sistemas educativos diferentes al nuestro, en comunidades diferentes.

Pero: for me the best thing about the OSUN engaged researcher grant was that it enabled me to properly fulfil my ethical commitment to sharing my findings and analysis with everyone, and also to ensure that my time with the school was not only extractive, but of immediate and substantive benefit to my collaborators and interlocutors. I feel like I have been able to get different kinds of insights and that we have developed more of a solidaristic partnership which we can build on in the future…