Name: Rebecca Tarlau
Title: Associate Professor of Education (Lifelong Learning and Adult Education)
Department: Learning and Performance Systems
Phone: 814-865-2246
Email: rtarlau@psu.edu
Office address: 305C Keller Building
Directory entry: https://ed.psu.edu/directory/dr-rebecca-tarlau
Rebecca Tarlau was inspired to pursue a career in education by her experiences with community organizing in Latin America and the United States, where she witnessed the potential education has to advance economic and racial justice in poor communities. She is compelled by the question, "what role does education play in facilitating social change, both within formal school systems and in informal contexts?" She entered a doctoral program in social and cultural studies in education at the University of California, Berkeley, to examine how class, race and gender hierarchies are reproduced through schools, as well as how social movements use both nonformal education and formal education institutions to contest these inequalities.
Tarlau’s research agenda has three broad areas of focus: theories of the state and state-society relations; social movements, critical pedagogy and adult education; and Latin American education and development. Her scholarship engages in debates in the fields of political sociology, international and comparative education, social movements, adult education, global and transnational sociology, and social theory.
Over the past decade, Tarlau has done extensive ethnographic research on the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST). The MST is famous globally for forcing the government to redistribute land to more than 300,000 poor rural families; less well known are the MST’s educational initiatives. Tarlau’s book, “Occupying Schools, Occupying Land: How the Landless Workers Movement Transformed Brazilian Education” (Oxford University Press 2019), explores the movement’s attempt to transform public education across the country. Based on 20 months of ethnographic data collection, Tarlau analyzes the micro-politics of grassroots educational reform, that is, the strategies activists use to convince state actors to adopt their initiatives and the political and economic conditions that affect state-society interactions. Tarlau’s book won five international awards: the American Sociological Association Sociology of Development Book Award, the Latin American Studies Association Brazil Section Best Book in the Social Sciences Award, the Brazilian Studies Association Robert Reis Book Award, the Comparative and International Education Society Globalization and Education Book Award, and the American Political Science Association Michael Harrington Book Award.
In 2018-19 Tarlau was a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow, working on her new research project, “Teacher Activism Across the Americas,” which compares teacher’s movements and their unions in Brazil, Mexico and the United States. This research focuses on teachers as political actors, and the role they are currently playing challenging the global shift to more conservative and reactionary policies, both in education and the broader political sphere. Tarlau examines the conditions and strategies that enable teacher’s unions to transcend narrow economic interests and participate in broader struggles for social justice.
Tarlau also is working with her students and colleagues on several other research projects on social movement-led education programs in the United States, including on education initiatives led by the U.S. labor movement, Black Lives Matter movement, and the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance. Along with her colleague John Holst, associate professor of education (lifelong learning and adult education), and several faculty in the College of the Liberal Arts and at the Penn State Center Philadelphia, she is the co-founder of the Penn State Consortium for Education and Social Movements Research and Practice.