Gandin-Wilkinson

This paper deals with the issue of participation in governance structures conceived as a way of struggling against intersecting inequalities (class, race and gender) and discusses the way participation and knowledge building takes place for the mothers and for the students of the municipal schools of Porto Alegre, Brazil. During 16 years, the Popular Administration (a coalition of leftist parties led by the Workers’Party) adopted and advanced the Citizen School model of public schooling. Within this model the Popular Administration opened schools to provide access to more children, created transformed school governance mechanisms and curricula, including site-based governance teams called Schools Councils, and empowered parents and students through participation on the school councils in the local schools. Through a multi-sited study of the Citizen School experience we focus on the crucial relationship between participation and the reality of poverty which shapes the lives of the female School Council representatives—mostly mothers—and their children who occupy these spaces. At this intersection between poverty and participation, we specifically examine the issue of knowledge (and what is understood as knowledge) as a key element for participation both in the newly created democratic structures (for women) and in the classrooms (for girls and boys).