The article focuses on the rural/country education developed inside popular social movements. It deals with the experiences of the CFRs - Casas Familiares Rurais (Rural Family Houses) and EFAs - Escolas Famílias Agrícolas (Agricultural Family Schools) linked to rural workers unions, non-governmental organizations and community associations. It also deals with the experiences of the FUNDEP - Fundação de Desenvolvimento, Educação e Pesquisa da Região Celeiro (Foundation for the Development, Education and Research of the Celeiro Region) and of the ITERRA - Instituto de Capacitação e Pesquisa da Reforma Agrária (Institute for Training and Research of the Land Reform), both linked to the Via Campesina-Brasil (Campesino Way - Brazil). The objective is to capture, in the experiences of formation that articulate labor and education carried out by these movements and organizations, the contradictions expressed in the practices/conceptions of the Pedagogy of Alternating. These contradictions have the potential to shed light on the projects of society envisaged by the collective subjects that build their pedagogical proposals upon the relation between productive work and schooling. In this sense, the Pedagogy of Alternating can point to a work-education relation of a new kind, based on cooperation and self-management. It can nevertheless, also mean forms of control of social tensions, signaling with the possibility of the rural worker remaining in the land, as well as of masking unemployment by alternating professional education and paid apprenticeships through alliances with companies, which then become agents of formation.
Labor; Social movements; Education