Fifteen Years of Continuous In-depth Work by the Union School Marina Vilte

The union education and training school Marina Vilte of the Argentine trade union CTERA (Confederation of Education Workers of the Argentine Republic) is harvesting, step by step, the fruits of its 15 years of work. Marina Vilte has done more than defend the rights of education professionals and resist, along with the CTERA, the neoliberal wave of the 1990s that slammed over Argentina. It has also broadened its view of responsibility, broken new paths in epistemological and scientific thinking, trained—and still trains—for awareness to an environmental approach to knowledge, as it promotes proposals of change.

How does it do this? Here are the union school’s main lines of action:

  Participating in the emergence of Latin American environmental thinking, as among others in the “Manifesto for Life - for an Ethics of Sustainability.” This manifesto offers a proposal for deep renewal of the social contract. The Marina Vilte team would like to have it debated among different sectors of society, among others in schools, in association with the Earth Charter and the Charter of Human Responsibilities, which constitute, as highlighted by Guillermo Priotto, the “three fundamental consensual processes to redefine, in terms of ethics, humankind’s responsibilities on the planet.”

  Contributing, alongside regional-integration players such as Mercosur and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), to debates on development, ethics, and the environment.

  Training, at the national level, of education professionals and social leaders through a variety of higher-level training courses in environmental education for sustainable development, and in education and scientific research. The persons having benefited from this training today are spread throughout the whole of the Argentine territory as a networks of teachers and education professionals. Two national conventions have been held so far to extend the circulation of the work and to share experiences.

  Participating in initiatives to reform university curricula in the fields of medical sciences and agronomy.

  Developing public policy for environmental education within the Argentine government’s environment and sustainable-development department.

Is its action contributing to changing directions in Argentina and in the sub-region?

Are there measurable changes? Probably. As the worldview and systems of ideas are definitely in question in the current crises in lifestyles, governance, and development, reforming ideologies will definitely contribute to building alternatives in the long term. And that, precisely, is where the contribution for change of the Marina Vilte project is located: at the point of an in-depth, deep-rooted, and collaborative reform of knowledge.

This reform has yet to turn into collective action, take the road of experimentation, get to the “field,” feed back into knowledge, and build a collective power capable of mustering “a strong enough wind that can change the course of history,” as nicely put by Carlos Galano. [1] There is no doubt that paths have been broken in Argentina and gradually emerged thanks to the capacity of the Marina Vilte school to build trust-based connections with all kinds of players and to place its project to circulate knowledge in a long-term time frame and over the entire Argentine territory. Pilot experiences are there, promoters of alternatives too. In the future, relations will have to be intensified, the structuring power of the school’s partner networks reinforced, their work as an alliance nurtured, and new financial resources sought. Dialog and the pooling of the Marina Vilte school’s proposals with other sectors of society is another priority on the agenda. The last convention that it organized in Argentina in October 2006 highlighted the interdependence of this reform of knowledge with another structural dynamics: that of the renewal of approaches and forms of governance. [2].

Joining efforts and setting off a “valley effect”

This effort is now merging with other dynamics within the Argentine society: environmental dimensions are increasingly present in the political agenda—not without revealing strong contradictions; social demand is enlarging to embrace the environment and protection of natural resources. One of the examples most conveyed by the media and most spectacular was the opposition of the citizen assembly of the city of Gualeguaychú against the industrial project of the company Botnia on the banks of the Uruguay; another is the Argentine government’s having just associated the Marina Vilte team to the development of public policy on environmental education.

There is still a way to go before true collective players emerge who are able to weigh upon the future. It seems that gullies and streams are now merging in the fertile furrow of the valley and enlarging the bed of the torrent.

Drawing on the conceptual and methodological capital of Alliance 21 can facilitate these dynamics

Marina Vilte’s action and the opportunity of designing public policy on environmental education has at least five methodological challenges before it:

 building a legitimate, democratic, and efficient public policy that can place the accent on managing a process, dialog with the different social players, and a creative interplay between unity and diversity;

 structuring the storage and management of information and its sharing through the Internet and other digital formats;

 compiling and capitalizing experience and the passage from experience to knowledge.

 building links among the different proposals and analyses;

 joint fund raising.

Are these not the main lines at the core of the building of Alliance 21? Just a coincidence or an illustration of the structural features underlying collective action? CTERA had indeed been part of the debate: it had entered into Alliance by taking part in the Education and Union Workshops between 1994 and 2001.

Expressing the challenges is one thing, taking them on is another: acting in an environment where election agendas, the margins of innovation, the inertia of institutions, decision-making channels and those for exercising power, mobilizing human and financial resources all fluctuate daily is more of an acrobatic feat than a simple planning task. Traversées, in its long Argentine stopover, is trying to support the team in this adventure on the basis of the experience of Alliance 21 and the Charles Léopold Mayer Foundation with their methodological and conceptual capital.

Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 27, 2008.

Photo by Kimberly Faye, Creative Commons license

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