Academic research can make significant contributions to policymakers and other researchers interested in building evidence-based knowledge. However, it is difficult for students to imagine how their research can effectively contribute to social change while respecting curriculum requirements, especially with regard to maintaining methodological…

Disciplinary pressures within academia often produce specialised and one-sided accounts of complex social processes. Convincing accounts of popular education regularly acknowledge the importance of social movements but without theorising them adequately -- and vice versa. This one-sidedness is compounded by a widespread tendency to generalise from…

This article features an account and analysis of a participatory action research (PAR) project that involved the author and five teacher activist co-researchers. This piece has two principal aims. The first is to contribute to practitioners' knowledge and practice by offering an account of a PAR project, grounded in popular education, that…

Fifty years after he wrote "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" (1970), Brazilian educator Paulo Freire's work is as relevant as ever. But while many of Freire's ideas are well known in the United States, there is limited research on their application in social movement settings, a practice commonly known as "popular education". This…

Based on a case study from southwest Colombia, this paper provides hopeful example of an intercultural social movement popular education initiative which brings together social movements across territorial, political and cultural borders in order to generate unity and collaboration between these counter-hegemonic forces in the southwest of…

This article looks at how social movements in francophone Belgium shaped the institutional contours of adult education 'from below'. It focuses on the integral role played by progressive social movements in the creation of a regional state-based system of adult education in 1976, known as the "Service de l'Éducation Permanente" (SdEP).…

This article discusses the interplay between artivism and media literacy in plural Global South(s) and its fight against marginalisation. It reflects on the production of an experimental animation "Portrait of Marielle" by Kenyan and Brazilian young media activists and artivists. This animated film honours the legacy of Marielle Franco,…

Ecoliteracy is essential for adult educators/activists en route to creating ecoliterate populations. Working cooperatively with other networks in the spirit of a 'solidarity economy', a group within the PIMA network has run a climate justice education programme through a series of webinars. We describe and analyse a case story of an emergent…

The article focuses upon analysis of educational experiences of an international group of labor movement activists over a ten-year period. A key rationale for the research activity is to help rescue and revitalize the tradition of radical popular education and activist knowledge grounded in organized worker movements.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a Florida-based human rights organisation, has significantly improved working conditions for migrant farmworkers on large-scale produce farms in the United States, in part, through its adaptation of applied theatre strategies used in its worker-to-worker popular education programme. The farmworker-devised…

Participation by its very nature is iterative, meaning Participatory Action Research (PAR) must be responsive to the way participation manifests and what actions emerge from this participation. In the article that follows, we share the complex and intertwined stories of PAR in action in two social movement contexts in Ghana, as well as the…

This essay draws from four years of ethnographic fieldwork with women activists in self-defined Paulo Freirean-based popular education schools in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Rather than leaning on the traditions of education activism, modeled on Freire's class-based emancipatory vision, the women in this study sought to turn popular education's focus…

This special issue of the Australian Journal of Adult Learning is a great opportunity to bridge two areas of scholarship that are in close proximity to one another, but have generally failed to establish systematic dialogues and exchanges. These domains, of course, are comprised of educational scholarship devoted to the study of 'adult' and…

This case study explored a pedagogical reinvention and extension of Paulo Freire's popular education approach. To do so, the author drew on interview data with program participants and reflections of his own experiences as one of two adult educators in a yearlong Fellowship program for high school graduates. Relationships, relevance, revolution,…

Learning in social movements has been studied using different approaches, such as critical pedagogy, public pedagogy and adult education (Ollis, & Hamel-Green, 2015). While in the field of formal education, the focus is usually on 'education for citizenship' or 'citizenship education' (Schugurensky, 2006, 2010; Schulz, Ainley, Fraillon,…