When the Community is in the School: Our 6th Salon with Escola Comunitária Maramar

When the Community Is in the School

At Escola Comunitária Maramar in Bahia, Brazil, learning grows from the knowledge, relationships, culture, and needs of the community itself. In our latest Global Saturday Salon, Maramar educators, a former student, and participants from around the world explored what becomes possible when a school truly belongs to its place.

At Escola Comunitária Maramar, children arrive on foot along a trail from the surrounding community. Their day may begin with fruit from the region, then move through music, dance, academic lessons, planting, and work in the school’s agroforestry spaces. Children play barefoot, climb trees, and take part in local traditions, including São João, one of Bahia’s most important celebrations, when families and the wider community gather around the school.

The school does not treat the life around it as background. The land, local traditions, and knowledge carried by families all enter the classroom.

Before the Maramar speakers began, participants were asked a simple question: What does belonging to a place make possible for learning?

The answers came quickly in the chat.

Kathleen O’Flynn wrote, “Safety to take risks.”

Margaret Blachly wrote, “Being noticed, named, and trusted that I have something to offer. Being invited.”

Sofía Lovaco put it another way: “Being able to learn without having to pretend to be someone else.”

Those ideas became a frame for the conversation that followed.

A school that grew from a local need

Maramar began not as a school, but as an adult literacy effort. In the surrounding region, many families live in poverty and adult illiteracy has historically been high. As adults began learning to read and write, another demand emerged: better education for their children. From there, the school grew.

Fifteen years later, Maramar provides free education from early childhood through sixth grade, along with cultural and environmental programs that reach up to 400 children and their families.

Maramar draws on Waldorf education, but not as a model imported wholesale. The school combines Waldorf principles with local culture, environmental knowledge, art, music, manual work, and what its educators describe as the knowledge of the territory.

For some parents, that approach was difficult to accept at first. Many had struggled with literacy themselves and understandably wanted their children reading as soon as possible. Guilherme Gobatto, one of Maramar’s teachers, recalled parents asking why formal literacy instruction had not begun earlier. Over time, he said, as families saw how the approach worked, their confidence in it grew.

Maramar has also continued to explain its pedagogy through talks and meetings with families. In the discussion, Clarice Sacramento described another complication: Maramar’s own educators, many of whom come from the local community, were not always given the same authority when explaining the school’s methods. Therefore, the school has sometimes invited educators from outside the area to speak with parents about its approach. It was an uncomfortable point in the conversation, and one that participants connected to the persistence of colonial attitudes about whose knowledge carries authority.

The conversation brought up parallels far beyond Bahia. Deborah Meier, who has been part of Educating for the World We Want from the beginning, was also present for the Salon. Jon Moscow, another member of the group, recalled a similar dynamic from his years as a parent at schools founded by Meier in New York City. Some families at Central Park East One were initially unsure about practices that looked very different from the schools they had known themselves. In the end, he recalled, trust grew partly from something straightforward: parents could see that their children were enjoying school and doing well.

When the community is also the staff

Seventy-five percent of Maramar’s team comes from the surrounding community.

As Gisele de Oliveira, a former Maramar parent who now works in fundraising and project development at the school, put it:

“It makes complete sense for us to have the school serve the community, and for the people who work in it to be from the community.”

That idea — that knowledge and capacity are already present in a place — came up again and again.

Irlane Soledade, Maramar’s environmental educator, grew up in a Quilombola community. She spoke about what she had learned from her mother about planting, harvesting, and caring for the land, and about bringing that knowledge with her into the school.

“When I joined Maramar, I started bringing in this context that I carried from my community, which, whether we realize it or not, is a very strong ancestral force.”

Later, she described what it meant to bring that knowledge into her work with children:

“For me, it was something very significant to bring my ancestry into Maramar School in such a rich way.”

Gisele described the school’s own learning process in even simpler terms. Maramar had initially looked outward to ideas such as agroforestry and permaculture. Then educators realized that Irlane already carried much of that knowledge with her, and that families were bringing their own knowledge into the school as well. “It was really a learning process, realizing that the knowledge was already there.” The knowledge was already there.

Learning to question

That same sense of trust extends to students.

Carlos Filipe de Jesus Vilas Boas, a former Maramar student who later completed a technical degree in agriculture and livestock, remembered that students were expected to take part in decisions.

“We students — I can speak for my class — were really listened to. We were always heard.”

He also described one lesson that stayed with him after leaving Maramar: learning how to investigate something for himself.

“They taught us something fundamental: how to research something, how to go after a subject, how to seek knowledge.”

Carlos contrasted that with the more rigid style of teaching he encountered later in technical school.

“When I left Maramar and went into technical school, it was different. What the teacher said was what it was. There wasn’t the same space to question things or go after the subject in your own way.”

An oasis — and a community space

For Guilherme, Maramar’s character is inseparable from the relationships around it. “Maramar School is like a family.”

He also called it “an oasis.” In a region where children have little access to theaters, cinemas, or other cultural institutions, he explained, Maramar provides access to art, music, culture, and forms of learning that are otherwise difficult to find nearby.

That work also extends beyond the school grounds. Gisele explained that Maramar maintains a community space inside the village itself, used by both the school and the wider community. In the afternoons, it hosts cultural activities not only for Maramar students, but also for children attending nearby public schools.

What came back from the breakout rooms

As the discussion widened, Maramar’s story began to be tested against very different educational settings. Participants had joined from Brazil, India, Uganda, Argentina, Spain, the United States, and elsewhere.

After the small-group conversations, several themes resurfaced.

One group focused on Maramar’s close ties to parents, the surrounding community, and the natural environment, but also raised a practical question: whether some of that intimacy depends on the school’s size, and what might happen as a model like this grows.

Another group returned to the way Maramar had adapted Waldorf education rather than simply applying a ready-made method. Participants noted that the process had not been easy and that one of the ideas running through the discussion was that “everyone is a learner” — teachers, students, and the community itself.

The tension around family expectations also came back. David Penberg, a member of Educating for the World We Want joining from New York’s Hudson Valley, described the challenge of balancing families’ hopes that their children will gain the academic skills and opportunities they themselves may have been denied with progressive commitments to play, nature, and development of the whole child. He called it “a real tension, one that cannot be neglected.”

Steven, joining from Uganda, drew attention to something else: the advantage of teachers knowing children and their families well. He contrasted that with settings where one teacher may be responsible for very large classes and have little chance to build those relationships. “Children learn more when there is a relationship… between a child and a teacher.”

Usha Krishna, reflecting on her experience with Agastya in India, said that “a place where I live can become a teacher.”

And Juan Mora, a member of Educating for the World We Want joining from Buenos Aires, offered a different way of naming what Maramar had made visible:

“When we think of a local school, it's normal to think of the school that is in a community. But you reminded me… that a local school also means the community that is in the school.”

Turning the question back home

By the end of the Salon, the discussion had turned back toward the participants themselves.

Juan wrote one final question in the chat:

“What needs in my community have I not been noticing?”

Save The Date

Our next Global Saturday Salon will be with Leonard Turton, whose long experience with Summerhill Democratics opens up a rich conversation about democratic education, student voice, and what it means to share power in schools.

What changes when young people are trusted to participate in decisions about their own learning and school life? And what can democratic education teach us about the schools we want to create?

Saturday, November 14

We’ll share the registration link and more details soon!

Resources Shared by Maramar

• Maramar's website

• Maramar's Instagram

• Institutional video (with captions)

• Environmental work video (with captions)

• Make a donation to Maramar

• Maramar's email

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*Quilombola communities have roots in quilombos—settlements founded by escaped enslaved people in Brazil—and maintain their own cultural traditions and connections to ancestral lands.