Abstract

In December 2005, eleven Cuban educational advisers arrived in Timor-Leste to begin work on a national literacy campaign. Adapting the program known in Latin America as Yo, Sí Puedo (Yes I Can), the Cubans trained over 400 local tutors to run classes in every part of the country, using a method they call ‘alphanumeric’, delivered via audiovisual technology. The campaign was launched in March 2007, and the first classes began in June of that year. By September 2010, three years later, over 70,000 adults, over one fifth of the total illiterate population, had successfully completed a thirteen week basic literacy course. Drawing on original research undertaken in Timor-Leste between 2004 and 2009, followed by further investigations in May 2010 in Havana, Cuba, this paper describes the Timor-Leste campaign, locating it within the historical commitment of the country’s independence movement to adult literacy, and the broader context of Cuba’s international literacy work.

Highlights

  • I enter the field of adult literacy with some trepidation, since I am not an adult literacy specialist

  • As someone with a strong interest in radical adult education theory and practice, my focus has been on understanding the role of adult education in social change, which has connected me to the tradition of popular education and the work of Paulo Freire

  • On the basis of this initial work, a partnership agreement was signed between the author’s university and the government of Timor-Leste’s Ministry of Education and Ministry of Labour. This led to an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant for a three year action-research project to work with the two Ministries to collect data and work alongside Timorese nationals to build their capacity to design a national adult education system appropriate to the country’s development goals (Boughton and Spence 2009). As part of this project, the Minister of Education invited the author to organise an evaluation of the national literacy campaign as it rolled out, both to provide a second source of advice to that being received from the Cuban mission, and to assist the Timorese leadership working on the campaign to develop their understanding of adult education principles and practices

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Summary

Introduction

I enter the field of adult literacy with some trepidation, since I am not an adult literacy specialist. As someone with a strong interest in radical adult education theory and practice, my focus has been on understanding the role of adult education in social change, which has connected me to the tradition of popular education and the work of Paulo Freire. This interest, and my history of activism in the solidarity movement, led me to Timor-Leste in 2004, where a new independent government was grappling with the problems of how to build an education system to suit its needs.

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