Projeto Uerê, a complementary education school that serves children and adolescents in Complexo da Maré, in Rio de Janeiro, won the David M. Rubenstein Prize, from the United States Library of Congress, in Washington.
The award goes to a pedagogy created by educator Yvonne Bezerra de Mello, founder and president of the project, to teach those who cannot learn because they live under constant violence.
Short classes, with writing at the end
Uerê-Mello Pedagogy is based on the idea that these children's difficulty in learning is not an individual fault. It is a consequence of trauma, a barrier that can be addressed systematically, as the Library of Congress describes.
Yvonne explains that exposure to violence causes trauma that becomes irreversible when not treated in time. Certain areas of the brain stop working in a connected way, and memory is the most affected.
The classroom is reorganized after this. The attention span of primary school children, says Yvonne, is no more than 15 minutes, which is why she argues that 50-minute classes should not exist.
At Uerê, lessons are divided into blocks of 12 to 15 minutes. The class begins with something that sparks interest, because short-term memory lasts a short time and only stores what captures attention. Then comes group work, and writing comes to the end. Throughout the class, teaching is oral, with cognitive exercises.
The students' starting point, according to Yvonne, is far behind. Around 75% arrive at the project without knowing how to read or write, at different ages, with an average school delay of three years.
There are sixth year students who cannot take a third year test. On average, it takes Uerê a year to teach them literacy. According to her, there is no dropout in the project, and the waiting list has 100 names.
Projeto Uerê received the David M. Rubenstein Prize from the Library of Congress, in Washington, one of the most important international recognitions in the area of literacy.
World Reach Award
The Library of Congress announced the award on September 8, International Literacy Day. Uerê is part of the group of 21 organizations awarded at the Literacy Awards 2026, the institution's program sponsored by David M. Rubenstein since 2013 and, since 2023, also by the Kislak Family Foundation.
In the 14th edition of the David M. Rubenstein Prize, Uerê received the highest amount in the program, above the US$100,000 and the US$50,000 given to the other main winners: the Literacy Center of West Michigan and the Read Alliance, in the United States, and the Nal’ibali Trust, in South Africa.
The Library of Congress justified the choice due to the project's measurable contribution to raising literacy levels and restoring the ability to learn to vulnerable young people. Acting Librarian of Congress Robert R. Newlen said the awardees responded thoughtfully to each student's circumstances.
For Yvonne, recognition goes beyond the project.
“The award recognizes a modern way of teaching, in contrast to the traditional school, which has already shown that it does not teach literacy well and leaves Brazil among the worst in world education”, he says.
From the streets to the viaduct, to Maré
The origins of the methodology are in Paris, in the 1970s. A student in the city, Yvonne taught literacy to the children of fellow refugees and noticed something that didn't make sense: the children played, danced and played without difficulty, but they didn't learn to read. I wanted to understand why.
Her search took her to African countries at war, such as Sudan and Eritrea, where she found the same difficulties in children exposed to constant violence. He returned to Brazil in 1982 and spent 13 years working with street children, at a school he named Sem Portas nem Janelas. After the Candelária massacre, in 1993, she says she took the survivors under a viaduct in Mangue.
In 1998, he founded the Uerê na Maré Project, where he again encountered the same block in learning. In 2000, he published the pedagogy book, based on neuroscience studies and field experience.
River and world
In almost three decades, the project has served more than 3,000 children, according to the Library of Congress. The methodology also left Maré. Yvonne says she has trained around 15 thousand teachers, in cities such as Recife, Volta Redonda and Petrópolis, on Marajó Island and in countries such as Sweden, Germany, France, Poland, Cape Verde, Ethiopia, Rwanda and the United States.
In Rio's municipal network, pedagogy was a public policy from 2008 to 2015, under the Escolas do Ajante program. According to the Library of Congress, the method was also taken to European countries to support refugee children from conflict zones.
In 2017, according to Yvonne, the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) recognized the Uerê-Mello Pedagogy as one of the best in the world for vulnerable children and adolescents.
