Alfabetizar(se)nos: caminos y recorridos

Abstract

This paper describes the "Programa de Alfabetización Municipal" (City Literacy Programme -PAM for its Spanish initials) deployed in the city of Esquel, a 35,000- inhabitant community, located in the Andean zone of Chubut province, in the Argentine Republic. The programme aims at being a communitarian experience of voluntary participation, primed and articulated by the city of Esquel, by the means of providing technical equipment and other necessary supplies [both for the PAM and the Service for the Promotion of Voluntary Help (SEPROTV )].

Generally speaking, it is an educational course of action in which reading and writing are conceived "barely" as a means, a bridge, a pretext (in its technical sense) for learning about issues concerning the being and the being able to of teachers and students. It is our belief that a world such as ours, which is still wide but is getting more distant every day, demands an increasing consciousness that no one can help us but ourselves and that true individual welfare is not distant from common welfare.

We think that this can become a significant empirical contribution, as far as this is a public initiative of educational innovation which includes young (and voluntary) literacy teachers. It also encourages a systematic and organized community experience, putting together dialectic development of promising answers to social demands and theoretical problems (epistemological and methodological ones)