"Too often a lack of self-confidence or self-discipline get the blame but, according to Yvonne Bezerra de Mello at the Uere Project in Rio de Janeiro, the real reasons are more complex. Trauma and violence in early life create specific learning difficulties that block children's capacity to learn.
"At her school in one of the city's most impoverished favelas, De Mello has developed an innovative pedagogy that integrates neuroscience with didactics to fill in the learning gaps that prevent such children making progress. The results are so successful it has been adopted as a method in 150 state schools in Rio and has started to attract attention overseas: in 2012, a group of 15 teachers from Cologne visited the project because they were having difficulty adapting old methods to today's multi-racial classrooms....
" The young teachers are warm and tactile with the kids, who shower and eat two meals on the site. In one lesson, De Mello asks teenagers to tell her what happened at home the day before and a girl begins to cry when she recalls a fight between her parents. De Mello explains gently that she is not responsible for her parents' lives and it is clear that no one has ever helped the girl to see her life in this way before...."
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