While conducting research on the organizational cultures of elite nonprofit organizations in Rio de Janeiro, the author encountered many access issues identified in the current literature: in particular, difficulty in encountering research subjects due to the transitional nature of educational nonprofits and the role of secretaries and…

This article presents findings from 12 months of ethnographic observations of nonformal adult education classes offered by an internationally funded nonprofit, referred to in this article as Comunidades de Poder (CDP). The primary objective of this article is to examine the various contextual factors that influenced CDP teachers' instruction and…

One of the primary goals of Freirean theory is the achievement of a higher level of political and social consciousness amongst participants in educational programming. Freire himself only loosely defined this sense of consciousness, and interpretations of how this abstract concept might look vary widely. In some organisations, the politically…

While the anglophone academic literature has long engaged in analysis of the role of privilege in the work of educators in the Global North, this article represents an initial foray into such analysis in non-formal educational settings in the Global South. Through a cultural-textual document analysis of 12?months of personal journal entries…

As nonprofit adult literacy programs are often the only options for low-income Latin American immigrants in North America, problems accompanying these programs affect the ability of immigrants to benefit from them. North American nonprofit adult literacy programs often struggle due to the difficulties inherent in using volunteer instructors (often…

Using fieldnotes from the non-formal adult education classes run by a non-profit international education with ground operations in rural Mozambique, this article documents how the comments made by class facilitators and class participants in those classes reflect inherent power inequalities between non-profit staff and local participants. These…