Rocha Sebastião (Tião)
Organization: Centro Popular de Cultura e Desenvolvimento (CPCD)
Year Founded: 1984
Country: Brazil
Website: www.cpcd.org.br
Geographic Area of Impact: .
Model: Hybrid Non-Profit
Focus: Culture/ Handicrafts,Education.
Social Entrepreneur of the Year, Brazil, 2007 The Innovation Tião Rocha created the CPCD in 1984 to promote informal education and community development through reciprocal learning, play, games, mobile libraries, theatre, and music. CPCD has created more than 2,000 innovative international award-winning educational approaches that have been incorporated into school curricula as well as non-formal educational programs. As a teacher, Rocha was troubled by the high drop out and grade repetition rates among youth, particularly in poor urban and rural communities. He was further troubled by pedagogical approaches in the formal system that viewed students as empty vessels that needed to be filled with facts and figures, primarily through memorization. These approaches overlooked young people’s natural curiosity and enthusiasm for learning skills that added meaning to their lives and created opportunities for advancement. “Is education possible without a school?” “Is it possible to create a school underneath a mango tree?” “Does the school need to be the ‘obligatory military service’ of a child between ages seven and sixteen?” “Can a school be a happy and delightful place?” “Can one teach through play?” “Can we create such a fabulous school that students and teachers insist they be open on Saturday, Sunday and holidays?” To date, Rocha and his colleagues have shown that all these questions can be answered in the affirmative. Over 20,000 young people have gone through CPCD’s programs, and its educational approaches have won multiple awards, including the UNICEF-Itaú Bank award for education and participation as “the most important contribution to Brazilian public schooling”. Today, CPCD is focusing on creating an inter-institutional platform where partnering organizations across the country that have found innovative and effective approaches to poverty reduction come together to focus their diverse strengths on transforming one of Brazil’s poorest territories in the state of Minas Gerais. Background In 1974, Tião Rocha was teaching history in an elite high school in Belo Horizonte. One of his students was Alvaro Prates. Alvaro was an avid reader and an intellectual powerhouse. He read everything he could get his hands on, and continuously challenged his teacher, Tião, drawing him into highly philosophical discussions that few students in the classroom could follow. Alvaro was engaging, handsome, a talented musician and a natural born leader. One day, Tião arrived at the school to find chaos. Alvaro had committed suicide. At his funeral, his parents looked to Tião for reasons for their son’s tragic death. “Professor Tião, Alvaro so loved and respected you. Only you can tell us why he killed himself.” But Tião had no response except, “I have no idea”. Alvaro’s death awoke in Tião the realization that as a “teacher”, he was so focused on imparting knowledge that he had failed to pick up the clues the young man was sending him about his depressed state. From then on, Tião lost interest in whether or not students memorized the appropriate academic texts– what was important was that they understood their own lives and where they fit into the world. Strategy Initially, Tião Rocha was asked by the municipality of Curvelo in Minas Gerais to oversee its office on population development. He began this task by announcing via radio that he would have a meeting in the town square with any who wanted to pursue the following questions: “Is education possible without a school?” “Is it possible to create a school underneath a mango tree?” On the day of the meeting, 26 people showed up. They sat in a circle and started reflecting on these and other questions. Tião took every word down; every person had a negative story to tell about his or her educational experience. Tião collected all their observations in a document that he sent to universities, foundations and friends. He framed it as a “declaration” of the ideal learning environment. The Kellogg Foundation found the challenge intriguing, and agreed to support CPCD in developing a “data bank of exotic learning approaches”. Tião started designing age-appropriate game-based approaches to mathematics and reading. He came up with a “checkers” based game for teaching math that proved to be so successful that initially reticent schools began incorporating the game in its math curricula. Teachers started coming to the CPCD to learn more about its innovative approaches to learning, and in several years, the CPCD had created and systematized over 80 educational games for children between ages 4 and 16, supporting learning in multiple subjects. CPCD has also developed a series of small enterprises where young people (from age 16) can begin to generate an income and prepare for employment. It has created a cooperative “People’s Finger” (Dedo de Gente) to sell the goods produced in the enterprises created by CPCD, and includes an e-commerce window that distributes these throughout the country. This cooperative generates about 40% of CPCD’s annual income (approximately US$2 million). Among the hundreds of other reciprocal learning approaches, CPCD also created the “Book Bank” in Minas Gerais with over 8,000 books. Anyone owning one book can trade it with another book - the book being the “currency” of exchange. CPCD has developed an extensive monitoring and evaluation system whereby all its approaches are tested, refined and perfected for impact and relevance. Its methods are now part of Brazil’s public education system. The Entrepreneur Tião’s experiences with school were never good. At age 11 he lost his father and was sent to a school run by priests in Campo Belo in the south of Minas Gerais. After four years, he returned to Belo Horizonte (capital of Minas). He studied history because he wanted to understand his own. He was convinced that he was the nephew of a queen, a queen of black people. As a youngster, whenever teachers told stories of kings and queens, he would interrupt saying that he also had an aunt who was a queen. But the teachers always dismissed his claims: for these teachers, queens were never black. He eventually learned that his “blue blood” ancestry was not to be found in history books but in the study of anthropology, which he pursued until he received a masters degree in the subject. Not yet satisfied, he further specialized in popular culture and folklore. That was the birth of CPCD.
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