Cuba's "Yes I Can" mass adult literacy campaign model in Timor-Leste and Aboriginal Australia: A comparative study

Title
Cuba's "Yes I Can" mass adult literacy campaign model in Timor-Leste and Aboriginal Australia: A comparative study
Publication Date
2014
Author(s)
Boughton, Robert G
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7724-7162
Email: rboughto@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:rboughto
Durnan, Deborah
Type of document
Journal Article
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Place of publication
Netherlands
DOI
10.1007/s11159-014-9421-5
UNE publication id
une:16480
Abstract
In the field of international adult education, mass literacy campaigns enjoyed wide support in the 20th century, when they were seen as a way to increase the participation of previously marginalised and excluded populations in national development. Cuba's 1961 campaign achieved iconic status, but was only one of many successful campaigns in Latin America, Africa and Asia. In the 1990s, while mass literacy campaigns continued in many countries, scholarly interest in them declined under the influence of World Bank empirical critiques of their effectiveness and increasing postmodern skepticism towards the socialist "grand narrative" of liberation which underpinned some of the more famous examples. Recently, the mass campaign model has gained new impetus through Cuba's international literacy missions, which use an approach known by its Spanish name, 'Yo, Si Puedo' [Yes, I Can]. This paper reports on the deployment of this model in two very different settings, one being a national literacy campaign in Timor-Leste, a newly-independent island nation in the Asia-Pacific; and the other a pilot campaign in an Aboriginal community in Australia. The authors have utilised participatory action research methods to evaluate the model in both countries, and locate their comparative analysis in the theoretical tradition of popular education.
Link
Citation
International Review of Education, 60(4), p. 559-580
ISSN
1573-0638
0020-8566
Start page
559
End page
580

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