Historical pageants were important sites of popular engagement with the past in twentieth-century Britain. They took place in many places and sometimes on a large scale, in settings ranging from small villages to industrial cities. They were staged by schools, churches, professional organisations, women's groups and political parties, among…

Adult education in art galleries sits on a fault line, at once an apparatus upholding the affirmative aspects of museum culture cultivated by global elites, a propellant in the whirring of an increasingly dislocated set of events on trendy and consumable political themes, and a site for 'allyship' and other kinds of radical and socially…

The Anglican Church congresses sought to foster relations between clergy and lay people. They promoted the Church as part of the social fabric of the nation with parades, civic receptions, services and public talks. Women were a presence at the congresses as platform speakers, organisers, hostesses and members of the audience. Congresses provided…

This timely book features rich examples of students and teachers, defined as learning partners, disrupting hierarchy in education by collaborating on social change projects. At the book's core is Paulo Freire's theorization of students and teachers working together toward co-liberation. Co-written by learning partners, each chapter in this…

In this paper, taken from a fuller discussion in my Doctoral Thesis carried out under a bricolage methodology, I will argue, utilising the fictive and imaginative elements of bricolage, that there are possibilities to engender a popular education through several sites of learning: a social movement (Occupy London), a cooperative higher learning…

I consider in this paper the question of balance in popular education between what we can call annunciation and denunciation, inspired by the work of Paulo Freire. By annunciation, I mean the role of love, affirmation, encouragement and profound encounters with otherness; by denunciation, I have in mind the spirit of critique and challenge to the…

The business side of the Lancasterian system of mass schooling has been highlighted by some researchers. However, this feature is usually considered of minor importance compared to other dimensions of that system, namely the social control role of popular education in early nineteenth-century Britain. The present surge of projects and mechanisms…

Brian Simon's "Studies in the History of Education", 1780-1870, published in 1960, set out to counter nearly all work previously produced on the history of education in Britain in this period, and to direct the field towards a new course. It provided a Marxist perspective that drew upon Simon's involvement in campaigns for educational…

This article identifies historical connections between adult learning, popular education and the emergence of the public sphere in Europe, exploring potential implications for adult learning and community development, drawing upon research evaluating programmes to promote community-based learning "for" active citizenship in UK. The…

Born in France in 1997, the ATTAC (Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions to Aid Citizens) movement is popularising IPE (international political economy), the interdisciplinary field of study born in the United Kingdom in the 1970s. The affinity between the ideas and main concerns of ATTAC and IPE can be clearly stated. ATTAC is a…

The article is based on activist research working in an anti-deportation social movement, and on sixteen interviews with both experienced and less experienced activists between 2009 and 2011. The anti deportation social movement made up of a range of organisations, is identified as a left social movement situated in an historic producer…

This paper is about how the transformatory pedagogical practice of popular/liberatory education can be further articulated within geography. It is based on the experiences of a third-year undergraduate course, "Autonomous Geographies", in which the author developed some of the core values of popular education, namely engaging with…

During the Latin American oppression of the 1970s, as the rapidly increasing number of grassroots "popular" social movements sought to profit from and expand the ideas of the radical Brazilian educationist Paulo Freire, there developed, in its own right, a "popular education" movement which engaged in radical education for…

This article reports findings from an ethnographic study of the arts curriculum and pedagogy in a British primary school. The policy context for the study is the school's involvement in promoting creative partnerships between teachers and artists. The pedagogies of three different artist-led projects are analysed, using a Bernsteinian framework,…

Access to higher education is still largely determined by social class. To succeed, social reform movements must include popular education, which has a long tradition in Britain. (SK)