Rebecca Clothey Awarded Grant to Study Educational System in Argentina
April 1, 2014
Dr. Rebecca Clothey has been awarded an $11,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation for the project, “Forging Educational Opportunities From Below: Community-based schooling and the struggle for education reform in Argentina.” Clothey is a co-PI; the PI, Dr. Kai Heidemann, is a sociology professor at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who specializes in social movement theory.
This project seeks to understand how grassroots actors in various districts of Buenos Aires, Argentina have worked to create empowering new educational opportunities through the development of alternative community-based schools. The grant will fund two research trips to Argentina to collect data at two local schools. Data collection will include semi-structured interviewing, participant-observation and the discursive analysis of texts published by the schooling organizations (e.g. newsletters, brochures, press statements, etc.). The research will illustrate how local-level community forces have intersected with broader-level social structures in Argentina to create novel approaches to the realization of educational opportunity through the repurposing of the educational system from below.