critical pedagogy and popular education

Studies in the Education of Adults Vol. 43, No. 1, Spring 2011

Critical pedagogy and populareducation: towards a unity oftheory and practice

NOËLLE WIGGINS

Multnomah County Health Department, USA

AbstractIn critical and feminist educational circles there has been a lively debate betweenthose who call for more emphasis on contextualisation and concrete practices andthose who defend a more generalised view of critical pedagogy. The unceasingtnarch of corporate globalisation and neoliberalism make it absolutely urgent thateducators and organisers dedicated to social justice find ways to work together toincrease our effectiveness and extend our fields of action. Popular education, whichshares historical roots with critical pedagogy, can help to resolve some of the endur-ing dilemmas of critical pedagogy and increase its ability to achieve its goals. In thispaper, the author locates herself within the field of popular education and providesan introduction to its philosophy/methodology. Next, she reviews what popular edu-cation has to offer in terms of relevant language, concrete practices, and opportuni-ties to experience changed social relations, providing examples from her own prac-tice. Finally, she proposes a synthesis of the two philosophies/practices, which canbe brought about through increased dialogue and joint action between critical andpopular educators.

Hope is well founded only when it grows out of the unity between action that transformsthe world and critical reflection regarding the meaning ofthat action (Freiré, 1978, p. 60)

IntroductionFor more than twenty years, a lively debate has been taking place within critical andfeminist educational circles between those who call for more emphasis on context,more discussion of specific educational practices, and greater accessibility of lan-guage (Bowers, 1991; Ellsworth, 1989; Gore, 1993, 2003; Lather, 1998), and those whodefend a more generalised vision of critical education (McLaren and Farahmandpur,2005) and resist calls for accessible language (Giroux, 1992) Popular education, whichsprang from many of the same roots as critical pedagogy but which has historicallyoccupied a position closer to communities affected by oppression and maintained a

Critical pedagogy and popular education 35

stricter focus on practice (Choules, 2007), has the potential to help resolve many ofthe enduring dilemmas of critical pedagogy.

Events around the world make it absolutely urgent that educators and organisersdedicated to social justice find ways to work together to increase our effectivenessand extend our fields of action. Corporate globalisation, responsible in the 1990s forforcing farmers in many parts of the developing world to abandon their land and moveto the cities to find work (Asociación Equipo Maíz, 2003), was more recently blamedfor historically low rates of job creation in the US (Folbre, 2011) The structural read-justment' techniques rehearsed in Latin America in the 1990s have now made theirway to the industrialised world, where they threaten to increase already soaring ratesof joblessness among young women in the UK (Stewart and Syal, 2011) Deportationof undocumented immigrants in the LIS reached an all-time high in 2010 (Vedantam,2010), while in Arizona, a Mexican-American ethnic studies programme that has fos-tered retention of students in school was recently declared illegal (Lacey, 2011) Thissituation is likely to get worse. In the UK, funding for the English classes that help newimmigrants get jobs will be cut (Helm, 2011) In the US, newly emboldened Republicanstate lawmakers are pushing anti-immigrant laws in 15 states, drug testing of welfarerecipients in four states, and constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriagein four more (Blow, 2011) Events like these create an urgent need for effective, pract-ical strategies that can develop political awareness and commitment to action amonglarge masses of people, while at the same time re.specting their unique cultures andtraditions and integrating these differences into efforts to create a different world.

My goal in this paper is to show how insights from popular education can contrib-ute to critical pedagogy and make it more effective in its aim of creating a more justand equitable society. I begin by locating myself within the field of popular educa-tion and provide a brief introduction to popular education, considering some of itshistorical roots, propose a working definition and briefly introduce critical pedagogy,primarily to draw distinctions between the two. The most substantive portion of thepaper discusses what popular education can offer towards a resolution of some of theenduring dilemmas and criticisms of critical pedagogy and for this I draw on examplesfrom my own practice. The next section suggests concrete ways in which popular andcritical educators can work together for common goals. To conclude, I reflect on someof the difficulties implicit in this project.

Locating myselfAlthough I had read Freiré in college, I learned to practise popular education whileworking in a rural, conflictive area of El Salvador between 1986 and 1990. As a volun-teer with a non-governmental organisation, 1 helped to train and support promotoresde saiud (known in English as Community Health Workers') Later, we also initiateda literacy programme. Thus, my conception of popular education is most stronglyinfluenced by the particular expression of the philosophy/methodology developed bypopular organisations in Central America in the 1980s.

After returning to the U.S., I practised popular education principally in the contextof health promotion projects in both rural and urban settings and in a variety of com-munities. Currently, I direct the Community Capacitation Center (CCC), a health-pro-motion programme that is part of a large county health department. I also teach mas-ters- and doctoral-level university courses in both Education and Public Health using

^^ Noëlle Wiggins

popular education as my educational paradigm and methodology In 2007 1 was inter-ested in learning how popular education in Latin America had changed since 1990, andI spent two months working with Educación Popular en Salud (EPES) in Chile andtwo months participating with the Landless Rural Workers Movement in Brazil.

My experience of popular education has several implications. My location for thelast eight years within a government bureaucracy means that, like Mayo (1999) andFreiré (2003) before me, I have been attempting to use popular education within theexisting system to change that system. Finally, as a non-Latin American, I speak andwrite from the position of Other vis-a-vis the partictilar version of popular educationwhich has had the strongest influence on my own practice.

What is popular education?

The term popular education is derived from the Spanish educación popular (or edu-caçâopopular in Portuguese) In Latin America, the definition of popular education haschanged as the connotations of the word 'popular' have changed. The phrase populareducation had its origins in efforts to laicise and universalise elementary education,which were undertaken by Liberal Latin American governments after independenceand which were inspired by similar efforts in Europe. As Brauch (1994) points out,these early efforts were strongly influenced by the Europeanising currents prevalentamong upper class Latin Americans of the 19th century These currents character-ised the popular classes', which were composed largely of indigenous people and thedescendents of African slaves, as completely lacking in culture and desperately in needof the civilising influences of European-inspired formal education (Burns, 1980)

By the early 20th century, the influence of Marxism resulted in students in severalLatin American countries setting up popular universities' to provide instruction ina wide variety of subjects and exposure to socialist practices such as self-criticism(Gómez and Puiggrós, 1986a) In Peru, for example, university students were respon-sible for the creation of the Universidad Popular Gonzalez Prada, which had as itsgoal the education of the popular sectors for the project of liberation' (Gómez andPuiggrós, 1986a, p. 83)

The term educación popular was also applied to efforts to promote socialist edu-cation and universal literacy undertaken by political and military leaders during theearly 20th century (Gómez and Puiggrós, 1986a) In Mexico, Lázaro Cárdenas ener-getically promoted the creation of socialist schools during his time as governor of thestate of Michoacán and later as president of the republic (Becker, 1995) The role thatCárdenas assigned to primary and secondary school teachers - to teach adults to readand write and mobilise them to take advantage of land reform - prefigured the rolethat Paulo Freiré would envision three decades later. Motivated by his belief that allhis soldiers should know how to read and write, Nicaraguan anti-imperialist leaderAugusto Sandino established the Academy of El Chipote in 1926 (Gómez and Puiggrós,1986a) The Academy emphasised the importance of improving practice through col-lective reflection in which officers and soldiers participated as equals.

This is the legacy that Paulo Freiré inherited when he began his work in adultliteracy in northeastern Brazil in the 1950s. Freire's biography has been addressed ina number of sources (e.g. Kane, 2001), and his thought and practice thoroughly expli-cated in numerous books and articles (e.g. Wallerstein and Bernstein, 1988) and hisown prolific writings (Freiré, 1973, 1978, 1985, 1990, 2003) In relation to the current

Criticaipedagogy and popular education 37

argument, two aspects of Freire's thought and work are particularl'y germane: hiseclecticism and his international influence.

While Freiré was predisposed to a variety of thinkers there is general agreementthat his most important influences were liberation theology and a particular brand ofhumanist, idealist Marxism which drew deeply on Hegel (Mayo, 1999) For Marxistslike Youngman (1986), Freire's eclecticism - specifically, his combining of Christianitywith Marxism - was his downfall, the thing that prevented him from constructing thesort of consistent socialist pedagogy to which Youngman aims. I would like to positthat, on the contrary, the eclecticism that was already part of popular education andwhich Freiré strengthened is precisely the characteristic that can allow popular edu-cation to facilitate a rapprochement between critical pedagogy and some of its critics,and make it relevant and useful to people striving for social justice.

The actual and potential international scope of popular education is the secondof Freire's significant contributions to popular education. Both indirectly, by influen-cing a generation of young people growing up under colonialism (Macedo, 2003), anddirectly, through his work in places like Guinea-Bissau and his conversation' bookswith people like Myles Horton, (Freiré, 1978; Horton and Freiré, 1990), Paulo Freirétook popular education beyond its home base in Latin America and made it a truly glo-bal philosophy/methodology. It is now common to see allusions to Freiré in researchemanating from places as far-flung as Canada (Travers, 1997), Norway (Aambo, 1997),Senegal (Aubel, Touré and Diagne, 2003), and Taiwan (Chang, L., Li, I., and Liu, C,2004), along with more expected settings in Latin America (Wiggins, in press).

During Freire's lifetime popular education became intimately connected to a vari-ety of social and revolutionary movements; this association has continued since Freire'sdeath in 1997. Following the triumph of the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979, the Sandinistagovernment launched a massive adult literacy campaign based on popular educationprinciples (Gómez and Puiggrós, 1986b) It has also been widely used in health promo-tion programmes like the ones in which I worked. Popular education programmesundertaken by El Salvador's Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN)recalled Augusto Sandino's efforts to teach his soldiers to read and write between bat-tles (Hammond, 1998) More recently, Mexico's Zapatistas and Brazil's Landless RuralWorkers' Movement have used popular education extensively in their efforts to raiseconsciousness and organise people to reclaim their rights (Kane, 2001).

In the U.S., educator and organiser Myles Horton (2003) eventually adopted thename popular education' to describe the work he had begun in the CumberlandMountains of Tennessee in the 1920s. Horton's Highlander Research and EducationCenter (formerly, the Highlander Folk School), founded in 1932, has helped to preparegenerations of activists and organisers, among them, Dr Martin Luther King and RosaParks. In the industrialised world generally, popular education has been used in thecontext of labour organising, ESL education, and movements for immigrants' rights(Wallerstein and Auerbach, 2004; Cho et al., 2004).

Popular educators' engagement with the state is not new, although it has increasedsince the fall of repressive dictatorships and the installation of (more or less) represent-ative democracies in Latin America (Kane, 2007) In collaboration with the governmentof President Joäo Goulart, Paulo Freiré was in the midst of the first large-scale imple-mentation of his literacy methods when the military coup in Brazil forced him to flee(Gadotti, 1994) Later, he became Secretary of Education for the city of Sao Paulo. Morerecently, Brazil's MST has worked out agreements with public universities through

- 8 Noëlle Wiggins

which MST militants can enter the university together and study as cohorts, supportingone another ideologically and socially (Pinheiro, personal communication, 2007) Suchcooperation between popular and state education is not unique to Brazil, but ratheris occurring in other parts of Latin America (Kane, 2007) My own experience usingpopular education within a university setting as well as that of educators in the UK andelsewhere (Crowther, Galloway and Martin, 2005) suggest that this endeavour can behighly rewarding for students, teachers and communities outside the academy.

There is no one definition of popular education, however, a working definition isnecessary to speak meaningfully about the philosophy/methodology and differentiateit from other systems of thought and education. I conceptualise popular educationas a philosophy and methodology that seeks to bring about more just and equitablesocial, political, and economic relations by creating settings in which people whohave historically lacked power can discover and expand their knowledge and use itto eliminate societal inequities. Because of its emphasis on the capacity of membersof oppressed groups to author their own destiny, popular education eschews polit-ical and pedagogical dogmatism (Gómez and Puiggrós 1986a), and maintains a shift-itig, sometimes uneasy relationship to hierarchical political parties and organisations.Values such as compassion, discipline, and love for the cause of the people are at theheart of popular education (Caldart, 2004) Methods such as dinámicas (social learn-ing games), sociodramas (social skits), brainstorming, simulations, and problem-posingare important in popular education not only because they increase participation, butalso because they embody the values of popular education and prefigure the type ofsociety popular educators aim to create.

What is critical pedagogy?

My intention in this section is to briefly explain the origins of critical pedagogy anddelineate it from popular education. In The Critical Pedagogy Reader, Darder et al.(2003) state that critical pedagogy evolved out of a yearning to give some shape andcoherence to the theoretical landscape of radical principles, beliefs, and practices thatcontributed to an emancipatory ideal of democratic schooling in the LInited States dur-ing the twentieth century' (p. 2) Three aspects of that statement are especially key tomy stated intent. First, unlike popular education, which developed and has remainedlargely in the arena of practice, critical pedagogy grew out of a desire to bring coher-ence to theory. Second, the focus of critical pedagogy is on democratic schooling, e.g.public education. While early definitions of popular education did refer to elementaryeducation for all, the majority of popular education work still occurs outside of pub-lic education settings. Finally the authors link the origins of critical pedagogy to theUS (and specifically to Henry Giroux, in a 1983 book) Clearly critical pedagogy hasmoved far beyond those origins; the term is now used in Latin America (Chiesa andFracoUi, 2007), Australia (Choules, 2007), and around the world, and radical educatorsfrom the US, such as Peter McLaren, have developed loyal followings in Latin America(http://www.fundacionmclaren.com/) Nonetheless, the origins of critical pedagogystill mark it as primarily a phenomenon of the industrialised world, and specifically,the Western academy' (Choules, 2007).

Popular education and critical pedagogy occupy largely separate realms in theUS. As proof I would offer the following: first, whereas academics in the UK haveproduced books such as Popular Education: Engaging the Academy (Crowther


et al., 2005), there has been very little consideration of popular education as a discip-line or topic of study within academia in the US, beyond a relatively small group of aca-demics working in community colleges in and around New York City (Kramer, 2007;Shor, 1992) Second, standard texts and readers about critical pedagogy published inthe US do not mention popular education as such (Darder et al., 2003; Kincheloe,2005) Third, a search in EBSCOHost using the terms 'critical pedagogy' and 'populareducation' revealed only one article coming out of the US that referenced both topics,and the article actually concerned work undertaken in Brazil (Barlett, 2005) Finally,if critical pedagogues in the US are aware of the insights offered by popular educa-tion, they are not accessing them. For example, in an excellent article that referencescritical pedagogy, Ochoa and Pineda (2008) describe problems they encountered ina class when they attempted to give voice to all students and de-privilege academicknowledge. While they eventually found solutions, I would submit that using populareducation as the paradigm for the class could have helped to balance participation andreinforce the importance of experiential knowledge/rom the start. Thus, while I amnot saying that critical pedagogues and popular educators never talk to one another, Iam saying that more attention to popular education by critical pedagogues could pro-duce multiple benefits. I will develop this thesis further in the next section.

What does popular education have to offer?The dilemmas of critical pedagogySince critical pedagogy was first recognised as a discipline in the 1980s (Darder et al.,2003), successive generations of critical educators and their detractors have raised aseries of questions about how to achieve its aims. As someone coming to the criticaleducational discourses after a life spent in the practice of popular education, I wouldsuggest that popular education holds some of the answers, if the questioners arewilling to look outside academia. In the three sections that follow, I will show whatpopular education has to offer in terms of relevant language, concrete practices, andopportunities to experience changed social relations. Because I share Lather's (1998)resistance to totalising discourses and Ellsworth's (1997) suspicion of The One withthe right' Story' (p. 137), I do not pretend that the solutions of popular education arethe only solutions. They are, rather, possible solutions, worthy of consideration basedon their demonstrated success in other contexts and situations.

Relevant language^One of the most common criticisms of critical pedagogy from within radical educa-tional circles is the inaccessibility of its language (Bowers, 1991; Darder el ai, 2003;Schräg, 1988) Critical educators have responded to these objections by accusing thecritics of underestimating the ability of classroom teachers and other non-academicsto read and understand complex language. Giroux (1992) states that the critics haveset up a binary opposition between clarity and complexity that assumes a universaldefinition of clarity, oversimplifies the politics of representation, and erases peopleand constituencies by denying that there are different ways of communicating. Othercritical educators have been more open to exploring the ways in which their locationwithin the academy can seduce them into obscurity of language' and make their workinaccessible to those in, or near, the front line of struggle' (McLaren and Leonard,1993, p. 6)

4o Noëlle Wiggins

Regarding the language of critical pedagogy, my experience of community-basededucators confronting academic discourses is not that we can't understand them;rather, it is that, unless we can see their value, we usually don't want to. By making thewillingness to deal with complicated discourses the price of entering the critical peda-gogical circle, many potential allies are excluded. That being said, I am sympatheticto Giroux's (1992) claim that in some cases, new language forms are needed to jar usout of the complacency of our exi.sting paradigms and allow us to think new thoughts.Community-based educators will struggle with complex language if it is relevant toour lives and our practice. Thus, I am not arguing against complexity per se, but ratheragainst the needless complexity which exists only to gain credibility within the acad-emy. Further, if we are going to evaluate an educational system based on its potentialfor mounting an effective counterhegemonic project,' (McLaren and Farahmandpur,2005, p. 21), then we need to seriously question the value of a discourse which will beread and understood by only a tiny fraction of the population.

What does popular education have to offer towards the resolution of this dilemma?Consistent with the value that it places on life experience and the knowledge thatalready exists in a community, popular education also values the multiplicity of waysin which people express that life experience, and does not hold them to particularstandards of discourse. The idea of the importance of the language of a given com-munity is at the heart of Freire's (2003) method of problem-posing, which seeks todiscover the most evocative concepts and words in a community context and usethose words as the basis for literacy instruction. True, Freiré himself was not alwaysconsi.stent in his dedication to the language of the community or to linguistic rele-vance. When he wrote his letters to the revolutionary leaders of Guinea-Bissau in themid 1970s, Freiré (1978) endorsed the use of the language of the coloniser for literacyinstruction. However, by the time of his conversations with Uruguayan educators in1990, Freiré was encouraging educators to show respect for popular syntax' as anessential aspect of showing respect for popular culture. While Freiré (1990) agreedthat children needed to learn the dominant syntax in order to better fight the domi-nators,' he also recognised that it is impossible to speak of the topic of language with-out bringing with it the question of power' (p. 88)

One of popular education's attributes is its ability to make complicated topics andconcepts understandable without oversimplifying or talking down to learners. Forexample, health educators throughout the developing world are familiar with thebook. Where There is No Doctor (Werner with Thuman and Maxwell, 2003), a man-ual based on popular education principles that uses pictures and relevant languageto support Community Health Workers (CHWs) to diagnose and treat common ill-nesses. Many North American health educators were introduced to popular educationthrough comic-book style noveias that teach topics like HIV/AIDS. Using the metaphorof a river, my co-worker Teresa Rios-Campos has developed a variety of participatoryand kinae.sthetic activities to explain to CHWs the physiological mechanisms underly-ing diabetes. Demonstrating very specifically how popular education can be used toraise awareness and foment action around some of the issues to which I alluded earlierin this paper, the team of university-trained economists and popular educators at ElSalvador's Equipo Maíz developed a series of engaging booklets on topics like privati-sation, free trade, globalisation, and neoliberalism (e.g. Asociación Equipo Maíz, 2003)As well as teaching around the country using these materials. Equipo Maíz staff alsodeveloped shortened versions which have been included in daily and weekly news-papers. These materials and approaches provide just a few examples of how both the


concepts and the messages of critical pedagogy could be made available to a broaderaudience through popular education methods.

Concrete practicesIn discussing some of the materials that popular educators use to communicate com-plex ideas in relevant ways, I've started to address the way in which popular educationcan strengthen critical pedagogy through the addition of concrete practices designedto achieve the common aims of both pedagogies. Along with the inaccessibility oftheir language, perhaps the most common criticism of critical educators is that theytell teachers what they should or must do, but tell them almost nothing at all abouthow to do it (Ellsworth, 1989; Gore, 1993) Based on her definition of pedagogy as theprocess of knowledge production,' Gore (1993) states that those within the Giroux/McLaren strand of critical pedagogy do not really çv^cuce pedagogy but rather edu-cational theory intended to help (or at least incite) teachers to develop their ownpedagogies. (Gore makes a distinction between this strand and the Freire/Shor strand,which she says is more practice-oriented.)

I am aware that an emphasis on concrete practice runs the risk of reinforcing acommon criticism of popular education, namely, that it has too often been reducedto a methodology and denuded of its political content (Aronowitz, 1993; Kane, 2001)There are certainly multiple examples of the misuse of the methods of popular educa-tion. However, I disagree with Aronowitz (1993) that the idea of a liberating meth-odology' is necessarily paradoxical, and believe that a focus on practices does notnecessarily preclude a focus on principles.

Before proceeding, I would like to offer three additional caveats. First, the effects Iattribute to the practices I describe below are anecdotal and need to be tested empir-ically. Second, I do not mean to suggest that a certain practice alone will always leadto a certain result, as many factors influence the impact of specific practices. Finally,genuinely practicing popular education requires continually rededicating oneselfto its principles. Whether a specific practice will contribute to a specific outcomedepends to a large degree on the intent of the practitioner.

To show how a focus on practices can grow out of a focus on principles, and tobegin to identify some of the specific practices that popular educators use to achieveour goals, I will describe a practice that my co-workers and I developed for our intro-ductory workshops on popular education. We use this practice with a wide variety ofgroups and most find it useful; some participants comment that although they haveread about popular education, they never really knew how to use it until exposed tothis metaphor.

We use the metaphor of 'The House of Popular Education' (see Figure 1) The Househas been through a variety of iterations in both content and form; currently, it is a6-foot by 5-foot (approximately 2-metre x 1.7-metre) outline of a house printed on aplastic material that can be rolled up for easy transport. The House is divided intofoundation stones, which run horizontally, pillars, which run vertically, and the roof.Metaphorically, the foundation stones are the main ideas or principles of popular edu-cation, the pillars are the methods, and the roof is the goal. When participants ini-tially see the House, it is an empty outline. During the course of the workshop, weintroduce the main ideas, which are printed on horizontal strips, and attach them tothe House. For the most part, we introduce one method along with one main idea,but we explain that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between principlesand practices and many methods can be used to support or achieve many principles.

42 Noeiie Wiggins

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Having introduced a principle and a practice, we then use that practice to enhanceparticipants' knowledge of popular education.

An example should serve to illuminate the process. One principle of populareducation is that we all learn better when we feel comfortable and at ease withour fellow-learners. Popular educators use a variety of practices to develop trustand begin to establish equality among participants. Probably the most common aredinámicas. These are sometimes conflated in English with icebreakers but the com-parison is not apt and is usually unhelpful. Dinámicas are social learning experi-ences. They can be short or long, simple or complex, and can involve lots of move-ment or none at all.

A climimica well known throughout Latin America is called. Pina y Naranja(Pineapple and Orange) where participants sit in a circle. The facilitator stands inthe centre of the circle, points to a participant, and says either yjm« or naranja. Ifs/he says pina, the participant must say the name of the person on her/his right. Ifthe facilitator says naranja, the participant must say the name of the person on her/his left. If a participant says the wrong name, s/he comes to the centre and becomesthe facilitator. When the facilitator is satisfied that everyone knows their neighbours'names (or alternately, gets tired of facilitating), s/he says, canasta revuelta ('mixed-up


basket') and everyone must move to another chair and learn the names of those onher/his right and left. After conducting the dinámica, we always ask participantswhether they feel differently now than they did before the activity. Almost invariably,the answer is a resoutiding yes'. When we ask participants how they feel differently,common answers include I feel more relaxed,' I know people's names,' and 'I feelmore awake.' The key point is that when we probe further, participants frequentlycomment on how laughing and acting childlike' serves to equalise differential levelsof power between participants.

Popular educators use a variety of other practices to accomplish particular object-ives. Practices designed to draw out what people know, think or feel include a variety offorms of brainstorming and storytelling. Practices designed to share new informationrange from radio plays to the aforementioned comic books. Practices such as sociodra-mas (unscripted skits planned and enacted by facilitators), photos and pictures are usedto represent or problematise reality. These practices are closely tied to and often usedalong with practices designed to identify problems and their causes such as problem-posing. Methods such as simulations give participants the opportunity to experience asituation as reality so that they can identify and reflect on the physical and emotionalreactions that go along with the experience. Pursuant to Freiré and other populareducators' dictum that we must constantly reflect and improve on our own practice,popular educators use methods such as group evaluations. Around all these practicesthere is xhc praxis of moving from action (current practice) to reflection (theory build-ing) to action (new practice informed by theory) (For a much fuller description seeWallerstein and Auerbach, 2004.) By adopting these methods, critical educators couldrespond meaningfully to their critics and strengthen their own practice.

Changed social relationsPopular education can also assist critical pedagogy to achieve the need for people toexperience changed social relations. According to Youngman (1986), If hegemony isthe result of lived social relationships and not simply the dominance of ideas, then theexperience inherent in educational situations (i.e. the totality of knowledge, attitudes,values and relationships) is as significant as the purely intellectual content' (p. 105)For Youngman, the social relations of the educational situation should prefigure thenew society we are attempting to build, since to change their consciousness, peopleneed both different ideas and different experiences' (p. 71 emphasis in the original)Giroux (1992) echoes this sentiment when he writes that critical pedagogy needs tobe informed by a public philosophy defined, in part, by the attempt to create the livedexperience of empowerment for the vast majority' (p. 73), and that educators need tounderstand more fully how people learn through concrete social relations' (p. 77).

Through the practices mentioned above, and others like them, popular educationallows participants to experience changed social relations and thus come to a differ-ent understanding and expectation of reality. The emphasis on changed social rela-tions is grounded in the idea, explicated by Freiré (2003), that in order for oppressedand marginalised people to truly take control over their/our lives (rather than sim-ply exchanging one master for another), they/we must evict the oppressor who liveswithin them/us and come to see themselves/ourselves as wise and capable subjects."*Freiré explains at length why this cannot occur if revolutionary leaders (read: educa-tors) adopt the same methods of indoctrination formerly used by the oppressors andsimply change the message.

^^ Noëlle Wiggins

Most fundamentally, popular educators attempt to contradict the negative messagesoppressed people receive about their level of knowledge by consistently and genuinelyvaluing the knowledge participants bring and establishing an atmosphere of absoluteequality in the educational setting. (This is not inimical to helping participants dis-cover how their knowledge may be influenced by hegemonic forces. Ciood populareducators will do this as well.) Reflecting on her own experience a Community HealthWorker interviewed for a recent study crystallised the sense of equality at the core ofpopular education, saying, in popular education nobody is talking...down [at you];we're speaking to you, we're all on the same level pretty much' (Wiggins et al., 2009).

While a variety of popular education practices contribute to the experience ofchanged social relations, many are dependent on the behaviour of the teacher. Theappropriate role of the teacher in popular education is controversial, with some peo-ple stressing the need to break completely with traditional models of the teacher assources of knowledge (Gómez and Puiggrós, 1986a) while others encourage populareducators to accept that, while they will necessarily transmit cultural values, theyhave a choice about which values they will select (Brauch, 1994).

This controversy notwithstanding, many popular educators observe certain decep-tively simple practices that reinforce the equality of the educational setting. (I willremind the reader again that whether the practices actually reinforce that equalitywill depend on whether the educator is truly willing to share power.) These includeaccepting all ideas without judgment, arranging chairs in a circle, not privileging someremarks or participants over others, and writing down what participants say in lan-guage that is as close to their own as possible. I unconsciously adopted the practice ofsquatting or kneeling down from time to time when I am facilitating and I have sinceseen other popular educators do the same thing. Participants made me conscious ofthe effect of this practice when they commented that it helped to reinforce the prin-ciple that I did not have greater authority simply because I was facilitating. Anotherfacilitator behaviour that can strengthen the group's ability to act collectively is thepractice of resisting making decisions for the group, even apparently simple ones suchas when to break for lunch. Similarly, when asked a question, popular educators willoften turn the question back to the group, only sharing their opinions or thoughtsafter the group has had an opportunity to speak. In sum, popular education offersvaluable examples of how to make language relevant without being reductionist, howto embody theoretical principles through concrete practices, and how to create egali-tarian social relations in educational settings.

Recommendations for joint actionPart of the unity of theory and practice which I am calling for will be achieved in indi-vidual classrooms, as more university-based radical educators adopt the methods andattitudes of popular education into their practice. Another significant opportunity forachieving a unity of theory and practice, and thus furthering a social justice agenda,lies in research projects conducted jointly by community-based educators, commu-nity members, and radical educators located in universities. We already have excellentmodels of collaborative practice in the field of public health, where community-basedparticipatory research (CBPR) is gaining increasing attention and credibility. Growingout of many of the same roots as popular education (Minkler, 2005), CBPR is basedon a poststructuralist epistemology which views the knowledge of any particulargroup (academics, community members, service providers) as partial, and thus seeks


to involve all interested stakeholders as equal partners in conducting research (Israelet al., 1998). Addressing the underlying causes of problems and working for socialjustice are overt goals of CBPR.

While it bears some relation to the action research models prevalent in the fieldof education, CBPR differs from action research in significant ways. Whereas actionresearch is primarily a model for researchers (including classroom teachers) to engage inresearch to solve specific, localised problems of practice (Wallerstein and Duran, 2003),CBPR has become recognised as a credible research paradigm that can be applied on alarge scale to problems of national significance. Within recent years, both the Centersfor Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health have issuedmajor requests for proposals' that require a demonstrated commitment to the princi-ples of CBPR. In addition, major foundations including WK. Kellogg and the CaliforniaEndowment are increasingly funding major CBPR initiatives and programmes. CBPRhas been applied to health issues as diverse as breast cancer, arthritis management,and tobacco cessation, and used in concert with popular education (Farquhar, Michaeland Wiggins, 2005; Wiggins et ai., 2009). In 2001, the Community-Based Public HealthCaucus of the American Public Health Association was formed to promote communityinvolvement in research and further development of the CBPR model. Organisationssuch as Community-Campus Partnerships for Health present conferences and bringtogether advocates of the model to strategise about its future development.

Radical educators based in universities working with community-based populareducators could apply models like CBPR to achieve a common agenda. Just as it is beingapplied to the problem of racial/ethnic inequities in health, CBPR could be appliedto analogous problems in the field of education, most notably the equity gap' (alsoreferred to as the achievement gap) that exists between Anglo-European studentsand students of colour. Part of the reason that popular education is relatively unknownin mainstream educational circles in the industrialised world is the relative paucity ofacademically credible research and peer-reviewed publications concerning the meth-odology, although that body of research is growing (Wiggins, in press). University-based radical educators could help to increase the visibilit)' of popular education byworking with community-based educators to identify pertinent research questions andappropriate methodologies for exploring these questions, and then jointly implement-ing projects, analyzing data, and reporting results. At the same time, radical educatorscould respond to the criticism that 'there have been no sustained research attemptsto explore whether or how the practices [critical pedagogy] prescribes actually alterspecific power relations outside or inside schools' (Ellsworth, 1989, p. 301) Again,useful lessons could be learned from academics in the field of public health, who havealready created new theoretical constructions of empowerment and applied and eval-uated these constructions in concrete situations (Eng and Parker, 1994; Wallerstein,2002; Wallerstein and Bernstein, 1988, 1994; Wiggins, 2010).

ConclusionI have attempted to show how a synthesis with popular education could strengthencritical pedagogy and bridge some of the divisions that separate radical educators.There are a number of difficulties inherent in the project of harmonising criticalpedagogy and popular education. The main ones concern the epistemology and sitesof practice of the two philosophies/practices. Popular education is grounded in theidea that the wisdom gained through life experience is in no way inferior (and in

^^ Noëlle Wiggins

some cases is superior) to the knowledge gained through formal study. One of Freire's(2003) insights, echoed later by feminist epistemologists (Alcoff and Potter, 1993), wasthat the powerful had so dominated epistemology that they had actually been able todefine knowledge and ignorance to their own benefit. This insight is profoundly atodds with the will to knowledge' that, according to Gore (2003), is at the heart ofmuch academic discourse, regardless of its political bent. A second, closely relateddifficulty is that critical pedagogy takes place primarily within universities, whereas afundamental principle of popular education is the de-privileging of knowledge gainedin these settings.

Harmonising popular education and critical pedagogy also requires a softeningof the anti-intellectualism that I have noted amongst some popular educators. It willrequire popular educators to give up the view of academics as necessarily out of touchwith the realities of lives in communities. Popular educators have to develop an appre-ciation of how theoretical frameworks can advance our own practice and also increaseour ability to promote our methodology (and thus our ideological goals) to a broaderaudience. The project will also require that critical educators within academia committhe truly revolutionary epistemological act of admitting and accepting that no know-ledge is necessarily superior to any other, that the knowledge gained through formalstudy is no better than the knowledge gained through caring for children or harvest-ing corn or building houses, and that all types of knowledge are equally needed in theconstruction of a better world.

Acknowledgement

I would like to express my sincere thanks to Heather Burns, Francisco (Pancho)Arguelles Paz y Puente, and Eunice Cho for carefully reading the entire text andoffering important insights, comments and suggestions. Stephanie Farquhar pro-vided useful input on the section which deals with participatory research. I wouldalso like to acknowledge the assistance of two anonymous reviewers, who offeredvaluable comments and suggestions. Finally, deep appreciation goes to RaminFarahmandpur, who generously provided the contacts, consultation (and tutorialcredit!) without which this article could not have been written, and to Teresa Rios-Campos, my long-time collaborator, compañera de trabajo, and hermana. Whileexpressing my appreciation to my colleagues, I, of course, take full responsibilityfor any flaws in the text.

Notes

1 Community Health Workers are carefully chosen community members who pro-mote health and social justice in their own communities. Their professionalism isbased on their life experience rather than on formal training (Giblin, 1989)

2 Translations from the Spanish are by the author.3 I am indebted to Francisco Arguelles Paz y Puente for pointing out that the issue is

not "accessible " language but rather 'relevant " language.4 I've adopted this rather cumbersome pronoun usage because, while I am sympa-

thetic to Martin's (2001) point that we all need to reflect on how we are affectedby hegemony, I also do not want to understate my privilege as a white, formallyeducated, middle class, able-bodied. North American person.


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