Abstract
The pedagogy of adult education set up by the religious agents in charge of the pastoral accompaniment of members of the Movement of Landless Rural Labourers in Southern Brazil, is the subject of this article. This analysis of pastoral pedagogy is engendered and oriented by a theoretical concern: the need to surmount the exteriority of sociological approaches to social mobilization in relation to lived experience and intentional action, by integrating the subject's role into the field of analysis. This implies relativizing the explanation based on “objective” social conditions and centring the approach on mechanisms producing meaning, evaluation and individual decision making. In the analysis in question, the cultural dispositions of the landless peasants and the emotional dynamics, as lived by these actors within the context of land disputes, constitute the analytical fields permitting us to grasp the interaction between agents and peasants in its complexity and to discern the reasons involved in the performance of the pastoral pedagogy. This breaks down into six pedagogical strategies, whose major advantage is the capacity for providing the emotional impulse necessary for the shifting of meaning and, above all, for involvement in collective protest action.