Advanced Diploma in Right to Education and Public Policy

CLASS 1: The right to education: central debates for Latin America

Teacher: Pablo Gentili

Conceptual summary of the class
The inaugural class of the diploma program will present the main challenges for the democratization of education, recovering the main programs and effective institutional responses built and under construction by progressive governments to overcome the exclusionary projects of the neoliberal right in the region.
Given that governing is about setting priorities, the meeting will focus on the importance of building a new fiscal architecture and a progressive tax reform that allows for increased resources for education, health, the promotion of decent work and dignified housing, guaranteeing sustainable development and environmental protection. It will discuss policies to combat institutional racism and sexism, as well as the diverse mechanisms of social selectivity operating in the political and educational spheres. With the priority of broadening the horizons of democratic hope, it will present alternatives to the state capture imposed by neoliberal governments and explore the challenges of responding to demands for social justice throughout Latin America and the world.

CLASS 2: The right to education: historical configuration, conceptual perspectives and international regulation

Teacher: Fernanda Saforcada

Conceptual summary of the class

The right to education is a theoretical and political category that encompasses multiple meanings, historically constructed from diverse and even antagonistic social and pedagogical perspectives. The disputes surrounding it, which developed alongside the creation and expansion of national education systems, have resurfaced in the 21st century within the context of the various political cycles in Latin America. Furthermore, the right to education represents a culmination of both the debates and struggles for the democratization of education and the analyses of educational policy, as well as the propositional discourses that seek to ground or legitimize themselves through it.
In this class, we will explore the conceptions of the right to education that have developed historically and the disputes surrounding them, as well as their relationship to the role of the State and the definitions of public and private in education. Subsequently, we will examine the international regulation of this right through various legal and political instruments developed from the mid-20th century to the present (declarations, pacts, conventions, and initiatives of international organizations such as the Sustainable Development Goals or the 2030 Agenda), and we will analyze how current debates about the meaning of the right to education and the struggles being waged by various social organizations to influence this global agenda are reflected in these instruments.
Finally, we will explore various perspectives, proposals, and debates surrounding the alternatives and dimensions of monitoring the right to education, understanding that the ways in which diagnoses are evaluated or constructed in relation to the right embody the dispute over the meanings of education and, ultimately, over the ways of conceiving society.

CLASS 3: The right to education and teacher policies

Teacher: Alejandra Birgin

Conceptual summary of the class

In this class, we will explore the relationship between the right to education in Latin America and the various perspectives and conceptions surrounding teaching, understanding this relationship as a space that articulates conflicts, interests, and proactive viewpoints that are part of these disputes. We will trace its historical development and focus on the tensions and conflicts from the 90s to the present.
To this end, as well as considering the different national traditions, we will address the interplay with global agencies that intervene in the definition of teaching policies, especially the discourses circulated by international organizations and their trajectories in the region.
We will explore the relationship between the definition of the right to education constructed in different educational policies and its connection to teacher policies, especially the public position they construct for those who teach (authorization and recognition policies). How are these links configured? How do they change according to the traditions of schooling and rights in different countries? We will also formulate pedagogical questions, debates inherent to an agenda where what is included and what is not, how a problem is characterized, the referential frameworks, and possible courses of action are all shaped by power relations and constructed within the interplay of tensions between diverse (and unequal) agents and agencies, including governments, unions, international organizations, NGOs, and many others.

CLASS 4: Educational policies and inequalities: conceptual debates from the perspective of school democratization

Teacher: Nora Gluz

Conceptual summary of the class 

Concerns about how the dynamics of inequality affect the effective enjoyment of the right to education have intensified with the expansion of compulsory schooling from the 90s to the present. This class will focus on how educational policies not only influence but also shape educational inequalities, conditioning the meaning and scope of the right to education. In this sense, it is important to understand the impact of public policy choices on expanding or restricting the conditions for the democratization of education.
From a multidimensional and dynamic perspective on inequalities (in their material, cultural, and subjective dimensions), the dynamics of their production, reproduction, and resistance within the political and educational field will be discussed. To this end, the main conceptual debates surrounding inequalities in contemporary capitalism—poverty, inequality, exclusion, and fragmentation—will be examined. Within this common framework, the conceptions of social and educational inequalities that underpin the main policy orientations, programs, and lines of action currently comprising the global agenda with an impact on the region will be analyzed. The analysis of contemporary policies will delve into how different understandings of inequalities are expressed in complex, overlapping, and even contradictory ways within the institutions and instruments of various public policies aimed at addressing social issues in the field of education.

CLASS 5: Right to education, living conditions and integrality of rights

Teacher: Inés Barbosa de Oliveira

Conceptual summary of the class 

Social inequality in Brazil is among the worst in the world and permeates all aspects of social life. The exercise of the constitutional right to education is undermined by the precarious living conditions of our population. Based on this diagnosis, this class will explore reflections centered on the discussion of sustainability, broadening the concept beyond the economic dimension and incorporating it into a social perspective. The notion of social sustainability entails the conviction that social policies addressing different sectors of citizens' daily lives are inseparable from the exercise of the right to education. In this sense, social sustainability is the understanding that the right to a healthy social environment in its various dimensions is fundamental and a prerequisite for the exercise of the right to education.
The centrality of the debate also demands other connections: first, between the principles of the right to education and dignity and official and everyday educational policies, in their pedagogical, epistemological, and environmental dimensions, so that we understand them as intertwined and inseparable. Second, it refers to the right to have the ways of being and understanding the world of marginalized populations recognized as valid. Epistemologies of the Global South and their relationship to Freirean thought allow for a broader understanding of this dialogue and its relevance for considering the right to education from the perspective of social sustainability.
Finally, a reflection that includes the issue of social sustainability to consider educational practices and their possible contributions to social emancipation requires broadening the references and themes in reflections on the right to education, to include the rights to dignity and a healthy social environment, which are essential to an effectively emancipatory or liberating education, as Freire prefers.

CLASS 6: The elusive space of interculturality in the right to education: a policy perspective

Teacher: Ricardo Cuenca

Conceptual summary of the class  

Intercultural education has been implemented in Latin America for just over four decades, albeit with some fluctuations. Primary education is the level that has seen the greatest consolidation, while higher education has been the least developed. This session will focus on the following question: What factors have hindered the full development of interculturality in higher education?
The class takes a critical perspective on the central theme and starts from the premise that incorporating interculturality into higher education is inherent to the right to education. Additionally, the session incorporates a historical approach. The historical trajectory of the concept will serve as a framework for understanding the evolution of intercultural higher education policies.

CLASS 7: The Right to Education and Teaching Work in the Post-Pandemic Era. Contested Perspectives

Teacher: Sofia Thisted

Conceptual summary of the class 

In this class, we propose to study how perspectives on the right to education, as upheld by public policies in Latin America, are articulated with definitions of teaching work, understood in a broad sense, and also with the ways in which its regulation is proposed. We will focus on the processes that unfold in the post-pandemic era.
In Latin America in recent years, there has been a significant rise in governments that came to power with conservative and, in several cases, openly authoritarian programs. Even in those countries where governments that prioritize social justice have come to power or remain in power, they face serious difficulties in maintaining rights won in the first decade of the 21st century, let alone expanding them. This “turn to the right” is expressed, among other things, in an open confrontation between perspectives on the right to education and on the direction that should guide its realization: what educational policies should guarantee it, who the beneficiaries are, through which institutions it should be implemented, and what regulations govern teachers' work, among other things (Feldfeber, 2023).
We will analyze the disputes between those perspectives that think of the right to education in terms of human rights articulated to the economic, social and cultural rights that states must guarantee with criteria of universality and progressivity for the whole population and those that think of it from a sectoral approach supported by international organizations and by neoliberal and conservative governments.
We will focus on the open debates surrounding the right to education and the teaching profession, understood as strategic for popular and democratic educational projects in times of deepening inequalities and attacks on the principles of recognition.

CLASS 8: Teacher Training Policies and the Right to Education

Teacher: Orlando Pulido Chavez

Conceptual summary of the class

In Latin America, teacher training and practice are receiving increasing attention within the framework of educational policies. Efforts have been made to understand them from the broad perspective of the teaching profession, understood as an organic whole, systemically linked to the educational process in general. This situation demands a new approach to addressing the challenges posed by the various dimensions under which it manifests. This requires focusing attention on teachers as active subjects and authorized and decisive actors, capable of influencing the transformations required by our educational systems and the institutions that comprise them, extending their professional practice beyond the classroom, the quintessential sphere of teaching. This implies the need to understand educational systems as complex social, political, and cultural phenomena, embedded in specific conditions of time and place that must be adequately analyzed for a complete understanding of educational realities.
Within this framework, global and regional contexts, political, economic, ideological, and educational trends and currents vying for hegemony in these areas, and national and local circumstances within which educational policies are formulated and implemented—policies that aim to define and govern these systems, particularly those addressing the teaching profession—become crucial. Understanding the meaning and effects of educational policies applied in the region over the last few decades, as well as their relationship to international and regional policies, becomes an essential component of the training offered in this course.

CLASS 9: New right-wing movements, neoconservatism and the reactive juridification of teaching work: violence and resistance in a regional perspective

Teacher: Salomão Barros Ximenes

Conceptual summary of the class: 

The conservative restoration in Latin America is a transnational reaction that unites Christian activism and non-religious political actors in opposition to the egalitarian legal advances achieved by popular movements at the national and international levels. The unique characteristics of this process are highlighted in the concept of neoconservatism, linking it to political movements of de-democratization and the restriction of rights. This conservative action has concrete effects on the right to education.
The impacts on public policy vary in each context, depending on factors such as the consolidation and long-standing tradition of democratic institutions, the level of recognition of rights, the balance of power in the religious sphere, and the resistance of popular movements and their allies. Despite the diversity of cases, various studies have highlighted the centrality of the notion of “gender ideology” as a transnational strategy that enables the articulation of conservative coalitions, playing a prominent role in anti-gender mobilizations and in the field of education.
In many countries, clashes surrounding the legalization of education, the shaping of educational policies, and the regulation of teachers' work have become priority battlegrounds for the new right. Through the use of the notion of "gender ideology," these groups have managed to veto human rights topics in the curriculum and establish routines of persecution against teachers. In Brazil, a recent official initiative is the creation of the National Observatory of Violence against Educators, with the aim of investigating and supporting persecuted teachers and proposing public policies for their protection and redress. This class aims to delve deeper into the conceptual aspects that allow us to understand the phenomenon of institutional violence against teachers and the resistance to it.

CLASS 10: Private actors in the public sphere: policy networks and privatization processes in the field of education

Teacher: Myriam Feldfeber

Conceptual summary of the class 

The presence of civil society organizations and private actors seeking to influence public policy is not a new phenomenon. In the field of education, this presence has increased in tandem with the transformation of the State's role as guarantor of the right to education. However, throughout this century, we have witnessed the formation of policy networks that bring together civil society organizations, foundations, and national, regional, and multinational business groups, which, in some cases, along with state actors, are playing an increasingly prominent role in defining the agenda and implementing educational policies.
The formation of these networks, while directing new forms of governance associated with both the interests of civil society and the market, also guides processes of commodification and privatization of and within education, which have intensified since the pandemic. In Latin America, civil society organizations linked to business groups have proliferated, seeking to influence public policy with the aim of changing the course of education under the premise of improving the quality of educational systems.
In this sense, it is necessary to work on new conceptual tools to understand the functioning of these networks in the definition of educational policies at the local, regional and global levels and the role they have been playing in the processes of educational privatization in Latin America in recent decades.

CLASS 11: Networks of union resistance against the dismantling of a right. The proposal of the Latin American Pedagogical Movement

Teacher: Gabriela Bonilla

Conceptual summary of the class 

Four decades of neoliberal models have established a neoliberal concept of education workers, considering them as mere implementers of policies and “educational products” designed by the World Bank, transnational technology companies, international right-wing think tanks, and even religious groups.
In response to this model, education unions have taken on the task of strengthening their capacity to propose solutions by launching the Latin American Pedagogical Movement (MPL), promoted by Education International for Latin America. The MPL considers education workers to be active participants in the educational process and believes that their daily work in the classroom and in their interactions with students allows them to generate extensive knowledge about the pedagogical process. It is this knowledge, derived from classroom experience, that should guide educational policies in the region, not the experiments of international financial institutions or their think tanks. The MPL's strategy for action and mobilization will be presented, outlining how union organizations develop educational policy proposals with a Latin American perspective, built from the classroom through collaborative pedagogical processes. The MPL organizes working groups in educational institutions, neighborhoods and communities, regions or provinces, and at the national and regional levels. In these spaces, joint proposals with a Latin American perspective have been developed to transform the concept of educational quality, to rethink teacher training in terms of the sovereignty of peoples, and to protect academic freedom as a form of resistance to standardized curricula. The labor movement has a privileged position to reclaim the knowledge of its members, who generate pedagogical knowledge every day in the classroom. This class aims to connect research with action in defense of public education as a social right, using the case of the MPL (Popular Liberation Movement) as a starting point.

CLASS 12: Pedagogical movements in Latin America and the struggles for the right to education: historical experiences and projections. 20th and 21st centuries

Teacher: Leonora Reyes Jedlicki

Conceptual summary of the classThe class explores the possibilities of understanding and studying the resistance developed by social and teachers' movements in Latin America against the subsidiary state model and their struggles for the right to education from the perspective of the pedagogical movement. The aim is to spark questions about the experiences of influencing the definition of subject, society, and educational model, and their potential contribution to the foundational principles of a new constitutional charter that proposes structural transformations in the regulation of the right to education.
The class is divided into three parts. The first part proposes an evaluative analysis of the scope of some historical experiences of pedagogical movements in Latin America, and in particular the Chilean experience in redefining the right to education in the 2022 constitutional proposal. The second part addresses key concepts for deepening the reflection on the projection of resistance and transformative proposals such as “state-community public education,” which advocates a redefinition of the State's preferential relationship with public education in order to advance its growth, strengthening, and democratization. The third part promotes collective reflection based on the students' experiences and their perceptions of the possibilities for transforming the educational models in the territories where they live. The class will conclude with a short narrative text about these individual experiences discussed collectively. The aim is to achieve a deep and joint reflection on the review of the public-private relationship in education, which involves not only questioning how to better manage current national education systems, but also deliberating on how we are conceiving education, the role of individuals and communities in these processes, as relevant actors in the educational discussion.

CLASS 13: New Right: confluences between neoconservatism, neopentecostalism and neoliberalism

Teacher: Cibele Maria Lima Rodrigues

Conceptual summary of the class 

The objective is to analyze the new right wing in terms of its articulatory practices within the framework of Hegemony Theory, particularly Laclau's approach to mythical discourse in politics. It highlights the formation of articulations and equivalences between neoconservative and neoliberal positions in the public sphere—centered on the defense of weapons, individualism, and patrimonialism—within an avowedly "conservative" discourse, often with fascist leanings. A deeper look is taken at the religious field, examining the presence of evangelicals, Catholics, and other Christian groups in Latin America, as well as the disputes between neo-Pentecostals and progressives. The impact of conservative groups on the educational field is explored through their approaches to gender issues, including critiques of social movements, such as the groups articulated by the slogan "Don't Mess With My Child." The "School Without Parties" group in Brazil and the discourse of a supposed autonomy of the family in moral education are also examined. Convergences in the defense of homeschooling and privatizations within the framework of necropolitics and the erosion of rights, as in the case of the Bolsonaro government in Brazil. On the other hand, there is the antagonism and the proposals of movements that advocate for the right to education.

CLASS 14: New Right-Wing Movements from a Subjective Perspective

Teacher: Jesus Maria Redondo

Conceptual summary of the class 

The class aims to account for the shift in focus in the struggles and debates between the right and progressive sectors, moving from more structural aspects of educational policies (debate with neoliberal currents): commodification, privatization, choice, curriculum reduction; to cultural aspects: subjectivities and meanings of education (debate with authoritarian populisms): security and coexistence, “gender ideology”, comprehensive sex education, partisanship, religion or science in schools, emotions in schools,
From the subjective aspects and the meanings of education, the aspects in dispute over educational rights with the authoritarian right are addressed, focusing on the extreme polarization of societies and its relationship with political psychology: fear, violence, racism, etc.
Some central elements of the ideological debate (ideological myths to be debunked) in educational policies are suggested, as well as some guidelines on the changes in the meanings of education (trust, care and connection) and the reorientation of educational curricula (multiple intelligences).

CLASS 15: Current Right-Wing Movements and the Redefinition of the Meaning of the Right to Education

Teacher: Pablo Martinis

Conceptual summary of the class

The recent rise of right-wing movements has fueled a dispute over the redefinition of key educational concepts, including the “right to education.” Among the various interventions in the public debate, two deserve particular analysis. First, there are the ways in which the political meaning of education is contested through the concept of “secularism.” The French republican tradition, which exerted a strong influence in the southern part of our continent during the 19th century, established secularism as a fundamental principle of educational systems, according to which students should have access to a plurality of perspectives on a wide range of topics, avoiding the dogmatism present in religious discourse. In recent decades, we have witnessed a renewed push to equate secularism with neutrality, fostering a systematic distrust of teachers as agents of “indoctrination” from their political and/or union positions. This resurgence of conservatism, which strongly fuels the current right wing, repositions “parents” as key actors in educational definitions. The concept of “freedom of choice,” incorporated into the Uruguayan Constitution in 1934, lies at the heart of this demand, which challenges the state's capacity to define curricular policies and develop a democratic educational project based on pluralism of perspectives and the ability to shape a republican citizenry. In these developments, the right to education is constructed as a prerogative of parents, the natural custodians of the power to define their children's educational process according to their own values ​​and beliefs. This class will focus on addressing the discursive constructions from which the dispute over the right to education is framed, as well as its implications for building a democratic project through education.

To participate, it is essential that you register using the online form.

Upon completion of the registration process, you will receive a confirmation in your email.

Classes will begin in August and will conclude in November 2024.

All registered participants will receive the necessary instructions to access the classes, bibliography and discussion forums through the CLACSO Virtual Training Space.

Accessing and navigating the Virtual Learning Environment is very simple and user-friendly. In any case, a technical and academic support team will always be available to you.

Exceptional criteria: In exceptional cases, and within the first month of the start of the Advanced Diploma program, students may request to withdraw from the cohort and rejoin the following year. In all cases, the reasons for the request must be submitted in writing. After that period of time has elapsed since the start of the course, no requests will be accepted.

Money paid will only be refunded in cases where the organizing institutions decide to cancel the activity. 

Payment can be made in one installment by credit card, bank deposit, or bank transfer. We also offer the option of paying in 3 installments.

Yes. There will be discounts for students belonging to CLACSO Member Centers and CLACSO Associated Centers, for CLACSO Associate Researchers, and for all those who pay within the discount period.