This paper discusses insights from a larger study of popular educators' deployment of Freire's pedagogical principles during facilitator training. The paper focuses on data from two facilitators and attempts to examine how popular education principles are applied in two different socio-economic and political contexts, Canada and South Africa.…

This literature review engages mental illness in adult education (AE) to locate what research exists and to suggest a research agenda moving forward. This structured review located research related to mental health issues published in the conference proceedings of the Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education (CASAE) and the Adult…

This article has emerged from a research partnership between Filipino activists and an academic researcher and ally. In this discussion, we explore a unique arts-based feminist popular education project that used the format of a fashion show (not usually associated with women's emancipation) to tell stories about the colonization of the…

Using discourse analysis, the author identifies contradictions in privatization discourse in order to highlight how state-based educational reform has used a normative language of student interests to fundamentally redefine the nature of the university's mission and its faculty based governance structures. The author proposes a counter-discourse…

Engaging students as actors in rather than audience of their education. This is both the primary feature of experiential education as John Dewey envisioned it and its underlying link to education for democracy: the flourishing of democracy requires citizens who are empowered actors, and such citizens cannot be produced through educational…

For almost two decades, the Prairie School for Union Women (PSUW) has operated in Saskatchewan, Canada. Its use of feminist popular education, adult learning principles in facilitation, and mentoring and support for activist practices make it unique from other labour schools in many respects. This paper focuses on a community-based participatory…

Trade unions and other sites of community-labour organizing such as workers centres are rich, yet contested spaces of education and knowledge production in which both non-formal and informal / incidental forms of learning occur. Putting forward a critique of dominant strands of worker education, the authors ask what spaces exist for social…

This is a collective interpretive record of a graduate course in Social Work on participatory action research (PAR) offered during the winter of 2007. It is written by 14 individuals including the instructor. It was inspired by the image of a chickadee bird borrowed from Jonathan Lear's (2006) book "Radical Hope." The chickadee is a…

Popular education contributes to democracy by helping people respond to the demands of a society in the midst of evolution, by turning the right to learn into a reality, and by being a tool for personal development and community growth. (SK)

Native and nonnative Canadians participated in a series of workshops on reexamining 500 years of history and redefining Canada. Assumptions about history, spirituality, education, solidarity, and collective action have been challenged and processes of personal and social change set into motion. (SK)

Describes Paulo Freire's influence on adult literacy education in Latin America and gives examples of the practice of his ideas in Scotland, Canada, the United States, and New Zealand. Examines the co-option of Freire's work by mainstream adult educators. (SK)

Presents a history of four phases of Canadian adult education: (1) agrarian radicalism, 1910-1945; (2) women's organizations and community development sites; (3) adult education and the crisis of democracy, 1929-1945; and (4) community building in Nova Scotia, 1954-1957. (SK)

In a Nova Scotia fish plant, a group primarily made up of women used cartoons and soap operas to educate plant workers on union issues, domestic violence, and health issues, demonstrating the effectiveness of using people's own culture as a vehicle for their education. (SK)

Critical environmental adult education brings together the philosophies of adult, popular, feminist, and indigenous education to examine the causes of environmental crisis, conduct sociopolitical analysis, foster connections with nature, link the global and the local, stimulate reflection, and motivate action. (SK)

A British Columbia preemployment program for women on welfare focused on engaging them in identifying their needs and determining content. Brainstorming and popular theatre techniques demonstrated the relevance of learning, helped them discover the extent of their experience and knowledge, engaged them in problem solving and reflection, and…