Who has never heard that education can change the world? In Brazil, the phrase is more of a cliché, especially in an election year when promises to make education a priority become part of the political rhetoric. But not for state teacher Rosangela Moura, who decided to put that rule into practice by teaching Portuguese for free to Venezuelan immigrants. And this is in the midst of a pandemic, without structure and online.

The Esperança Venezuela project appeared long before the emergence of the new coronavirus in Brazil. The coordinator of the Rosangela State Government Osasco Center for Language Education (CEL), who holds a USP degree in Literature, began discussing the 2018 Venezuelan crisis with students in Spanish classes. That same year, they decided to collect donations for the refugees arriving in São Paulo.

“Students themselves began to think about how to help, despite the fact that they themselves are from low-income families. I took what we were able to collect in the form of clothes, metro tickets and food to the Casa do Migrante da Missão Paz in São Paulo and there I realized they needed a lot more,” he said.

A few years later, in the midst of a pandemic, the teacher decided to help in what she does best: teaching. “For those who change the country, language is crucial. Not knowing how to pronounce Portuguese, it is difficult to find a job or understand, for example, how to get documents. Words with a circumflex accent, like grandfather, and also with “lh” are difficult for them,” he said.

Determined, Rosangela drew up a curriculum and reached out to the students through her Facebook page. “I joined the (refugee) groups and alerted them to the course that Google Meet will give. Thought it would be about 30 and all. But 100, 200, 500 came. Suddenly, in one night there were 600 applicants. I was surprised and worried because I didn’t know how I would teach so many people,” she recalls.

ACCESSION

The solution was to ask for help and right here at CEL. Eva Cristina Estevez and Daniela Cavalcanti, also government teachers, accepted the invitation, and the trio then split up to initially serve four classes of one hundred students each, the maximum number allowed by the online system.

“And then we found a lot of other difficulties. There were people with communication problems to attend classes, others who urgently needed to learn a certain vocabulary for work, or who were still looking for help translating the curriculum. I even taught the cake recipe to a Venezuelan who had an interview at a bakery.”

The course consisted of 15 lessons of 1 hour 20 minutes each. The focus was on teaching the basics of grammar and, in particular, pronunciation in the group. WhatsApp answered some questions. “We weren’t able to make much progress because we didn’t have enough resources and more people to make that commitment.”

Despite this, Rozangela managed to open three more classes with a total of 650 students. “At the end of the course, we noticed that with the help they improved their pronunciation very quickly and began to feel more secure to speak and look for work. We also learned a lot about how to put ourselves in the place of another. That’s what education does.”

The information is taken from the newspaper. State of Sao Paulo.