Against All Odds

In 1987, I visited Brazil for the first time. I spent eight months in the least Brazilian of all cities, Brasilia, and still was thoroughly enchanted by the people, the culture, and the language, and intrigued by the politics and the economics. Several years later, I returned to Brazil to undertake the project of a lifetime—researching an aspect of Paulo Freire’s tenure as municipal Secretary of Education in São Paulo.¹ Of the many research questions to pursue, I opted to look at school and teacher factors affecting the implementation of an ambitious curriculum reform called the Interdisciplinary Project. The Inter Project, as it was known by its Brazilian practitioners, has been subject to critical analysis elsewhere (Freire, 1993, 1997; O’Cadiz, Wong & Torres, 1998; Wong, 1995). As part of my introduction to this text, I would simply like to report that this experience gave me a profound sense of “democracy envy.”