Creating with purpose

Demonstrating the power of technology to engage middle- and high school-age youth, Adobe Youth Voices provides breakthrough learning experiences using video, multimedia, digital art, web, animation, and audio tools that enable youth to explore and comment on their world. Learn loads more http://youthvoices.adobe.com/

O Teatro Mágico

http://oteatromagico.mus.br/

Tired of Life? Go to Ubatuba!

Ubatuba (“ooba-Tuba”), one of the main cities on São Paulo’s North Shore, has a sinuous shoreline with 92 beaches which are never too far from the mountains in Brazil’s coastal range.

At many points, the hills are covered with native rainforest. Part of Ubatuba is inside Parque Estadual da Serra do Mar, one of the state’s largest conservation areas.

http://gobrazil.about.com/od/braziliancities/p/ubatuba.htm

It is placed in the northern littoral of  Sao Paulo, 334 kilometres from Rio de Janeiro and 234 kilometres from Sao Paulo.  This is a mountainous  area covered by Atlantic vegetation. Its beaches are beloved for many Brazilians. It has 80 beaches over its 90 kilometre coast, from the exited and  dynamic beaches of Itamambuca and Vermelha do Norte, frequented by sportsmen, with strong waves, until the free paradisiacal beaches of La Playa de la Hacienda, with calm waters.

http://www.brasilcontact.com/destinies/saoPaulo/brazil_ubatuba.html

Visit also the beautiful work of photography by Gustavo Asciutti in http://www.wikiaves.com.br/ specially if you’re a bird watcher.

Educators celebrate Paulo Freire’s birthday

Paulo Freire was born in 1921 in Recife, Brazil.  In 1947 he began work with adult illiterates in North-East Brazil and gradually evolved a method of work with which the word conscientization has been associated.

Until 1964 he was Professor of History and Philosophy of Education in the University of Recife and in the 1960s he was involved with a popular education movement to deal with massive illiteracy.  From 1962 there were widespread experiments with his method and the movement was extended under the patronage of the federal government.  In 1963-4 there were courses for co-ordinators in all Brazilian states and a plan was drawn up for the establishment of 2000 cultural circles to reach 2,000,000 illiterates!

Freire was imprisoned following the 1964 coup d’etat for what the new regime considered to be subversive elements in his teaching.  He next appeared in exile in Chile where his method was used and the UN School of Political Sciences held seminars on his work.  In 1969-70 he was Visiting Professor at the Centre for the Study of Development and Social Change at Harvard University.

He then went to the World Council of Churches in Geneva where, in 1970, he took up a post as special consultant in the Office of Education.  Over the next nine years in that post he advised on education reform and initiated popular education activities with a range of groups.

Paulo Freire was able to return to Brazil by 1979.  Freire joined the Workers’ Party in Sao Paulo and headed up its adult literacy project for six years.  When the party took control of Sao Paulo municipality following elections in 1988, Paulo Freire was appointed as Sao Paulo’s Secretary of Education.

Freire died in 1997.

Learn more about his work http://www.freire.org/

“Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects that must be saved from a burning building.” Paulo Freire, from Pedagogy of the Opressed.

I simply loved it!

This beautiful illustration was produced by Migy Blanco who also illustrates children books among other works. I also found an amazing tour guide book about my country.

http://www.migy.com/2011/09/brazil-guide.html

Pois é, pra quê?

We should put a stop to our greed, of course we should.

Programa levará 540 professores de inglês da rede pública para aperfeiçoamento nos EUA

Trata-se de uma oportunidade importantíssima para que o professor de inglês possa aperfeiçoar seus conhecimentos além de vivenciar a cultura que ensina todos os dias, o programa é oferecido pelo governo federal através da CAPES. Participei da versão britânica desse programa, estudei durante cinco semanas na Universidade de Londres e tenho utilizado esse espaço para registrar a experiência vivenciada juntamente com outros professores brasileiros. Saiba mais em outras postagens nesse mesmo site e também no site da CAPES http://www.capes.gov.br/servicos/sala-de-imprensa/36-noticias/5743-programa-levara-540-professores-de-ingles-da-rede-publica-para-aperfeicoamento-nos-eua

Here are we waiting for you

Just to recommend you a great documentary. Yes, we can understand ourselves through the stories we tell. Synopsis
According to director Marcelo Masagão, his film is a “documentary memory” of the 20th century. It consists largely of archive footage: excerpts from classic films, news reports and photographs, complemented by photos and footage that Masagão made especially for the film. Great themes that have shaped the 20th century come up: wars, industrial development and modern art. The film consists of short chapters that center around the lives of all kinds of people, both great and unknown. The general framework of the film is formed by images of a cemetery somewhere in Brazil. We see photos of tombstones with portraits of the deceased, to which the filmmaker adds fictitious names and years of birth and death. Masagão builds his scenes around these images, linking the lives of all these individuals to the history of the century they lived in. These stories are not presented as a chronological enumeration of facts. Instead, the film has the capricious structure of a dream or a memory, with unexpected leaps in time, associative editing, and suggestive music by Wim Mertens. There is no voice-over, but words nevertheless play an important role through text that appears in various places in the frame. From the site http://www.idfa.nl/industry/tags/project.aspx?id=62876eb0-d5c4-4697-8cb3-8003c0e65256

See also http://eyesonbrazil.com/brazilian-films-the-list/

Wise Words

“I am not young enough to know everything.”
by Oscar Wilde

https://www.facebook.com/#!/OscarWildeAuthor

Saudade

According to the dictionary ‘saudade’ means a nostalgic and gentle rememberance of people or things that are distant, or of past events. Being something one can feel rather than see or touch saudade is not something easy to define, it can’t be immediately translated to English or other language. Even though, Almeida Jr, a brilliant Brazilian painter has defined it very accurately in the famous painting bellow: ‘Saudade’.

José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior (8 May 1850 – 13 November 1899) was a Brazilian painter of the 19th century. He is widely regarded as the most important Brazilian realist painter of the 19th century, and a major inspiration for the modernist painters. While most Brazilian academic artists made their fame painting mythological or historical subjects, Almeida Junior would become popular for painting rural figures, especially farmers and the caipira violeiro [1], the countrymen that are a kind of a symbol of the rural areas of the São Paulo state.

You can learn more on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Ferraz_de_Almeida_J%C3%BAnior . If you happen to be in São Paulo, you must visit Pinacoteca, where this and other of his paintings are exhibited. It is very close to ‘Luz’ tube station where you can also find ‘Museu da Língua Portuguesa’ (The Portuguese Language Museum).

Take a look at the site http://www.pinacoteca.org.br/pinacoteca/

Other painting that reminds me a lot about ‘Saudade’ was sent to me by Professor Amos Paran and is called New York Movie, by Edward Hopper.

You can find more information on Edward Hopper on http://www.edwardhopper.net/newyork-movie.jsp. It is impressive how in both paintings the same feeling of ‘saudade’ can be expressed without words.