ETNPRONET
Popular Education Working Group
What
is Popular Education?
Commonly called "pop ed" for
short, it is social justice education. The notion of pop ed can be confusing.
It is not “popular” in the conventional sense of the word.
Rather, the “popular” in popular education refers to the
fundamental belief that the most authentic and most powerful learning
draws its wisdom from the people. Popular Education involves multiple
modalities and many different expressions. One definition states: “Popular
Education is a group facilitation technique to raise consciousness and
become aware of how an individual's personal experiences are connected
to larger societal problems.” Popular Education was originally
given voice by Paulo Freire in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire's
method encourages participants to recognize that they themselves possess
tremendous information about their real world circumstances and, thus,
the power to act to change those circumstances.
The
Popular Education Research Group describes the process of popular education
as encompassing the following stages:
• Beginning with people's own experiences;
• Moving from experience to analysis;
• Moving from Analysis to encouraging collective action to change
oppressive systems;
• Reflection and evaluation of its own process.
It is in short a model in which all participants are simultaneously
teachers and learners contributing to a collective process of creating
action-oriented social change information.
Click on the link below for other descriptive examples:
From Popular Education
for People's Empowerment
What
is the Pop Ed Working Group Planning?
The group is interested in assembling a pool of popular education resources
to create a resource tank of various tools. This would involve both
the collection and dissemination of such materials utilizing the ETNPRONET
website among other resources. Specifically, the Pop Ed Group is looking
to implement a “Pop Ed Tool Swap" in which different examples
of Pop Ed tools would be made available in a hands on interactive fashion
to regional community members ~ as yet another means of moving regional
progressive organizing to the next level. The next meeting of
the Pop Ed Group will take place from 6PM – 7:30 PM on Wednesday,
November 29, 2006 location in Knoxville TBA.
Want to join the Network's Pop Ed Working Group? Come to the next meeting
or send a message to poped@etnpronet.org.
Popular Education Resource Bank
(a work in progress):
Samples of Resources Shared During Our
Tool Swap Meetings:
CJEF Report Card
Circuit of Capital
Skit
Other On-Line Resources:
Center for Popular
Education Bibliographic Database
Popular Education News
On-line Pop Ed Toolkit
Ten
Chairs of Inequity Weath Distribution Exercise
*Have suggestions for the Pop Ed Resource Bank? Please e-mail URLs,
electronic documents, and annotated bibliography entries to Susan
North. Thanks!