ABSTRACT
Models of education can be pathways to mobilisation against the dominant, market-driven paradigm of industrial agriculture. Recognising this, the organisations that comprise La Vía Campesina have established schools and learning networks that link student investigations of local challenges to broader social movements such as the struggle for food sovereignty and food justice, and thus make learning a political act that interrogates issues of power, scale and history, recognises different cosmologies and celebrates rather than elides difference. After elaborating on the concepts of food sovereignty and agroecology introduced earlier, this chapter applies a political economy lens to the grassroots communication and educational strategies of three La Vía Campesina member organisations: the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement, the National Association of Indigenous and Rural Women in Chile, and the National Association of Agricultural Producers in Cuba. In these examples, it is argued, resistive pedagogical and communication models are employed with the aim of making students, farmers and all citizens technically proficient, politicised individuals who can help their communities sustain, or make the shift to, ecological farming.
