Paulo Freire's concept of "inédito viável" or untested feasibility, refers to the exploration of possibilities to transcend limiting situations and transform realities. In this paper, we examine how this idea is related to the counter-hegemonic pedagogical proposal of popular education by the Florestan Fernandes National School (ENFF),…

Bachilleratos Populares (henceforth BPs) are free and self-managed high schools by grassroots social organizations after the Argentine crisis of 2001 to provide an option for youth and adults to finish their secondary education as a response to the gap the neoliberal reform left in this educational modality during the 1990s. After some BPs…

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…

This article embodies a kind of backward travelling by revisiting the history of workers' education in a mining community as part of our contemporary struggle to reinvigorate notions of the common good and popular education. Its focus is the complexities of working-class history, disparaged in neoliberal condescension and oversimplified in some…

Why develop leaders? What politics are implicit in our practice? This paper uses the history and practice of Popular Education as a comparative framework to survey the politics of intentional emergence leadership pedagogy, surfacing potential alliances for building social change movements. Using a case analysis, the article elucidates the ways the…

This article studies the role of the village teacher in three rural parishes in eighteenth-century western Sweden. Earlier research has shown that the clergy and parents were important in reaching high literacy rates in early modern Sweden. However, many parishes were sparsely populated, and many villages were far from the church, affecting…

This article builds on a classroom study and interviews with facilitators and students on a travelling Folk High School course on global justice and development, an education that raises awareness about colonial history and contemporality. The study explores how the concept of being 'in and against' presents itself in the narratives of the…

This article delves into ecopedagogy, grounded in the work of the Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire on popular education and critical pedagogies, to teach students to critically deconstruct the subjectivity and transformability of our world (all humans, human populations) with the rest of Earth (i.e., rest of Nature). As Friere emphasized humans'…

This article explores the role of popular education for migrants in a social movement context. The aim of this study is to explore how migrants' societal involvement is enabled and constrained by participation in study circles organised in a local branch of the Swedish Workers' Educational Association (ABF). The study was designed and conducted in…

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…

Unlike many other countries, in Sweden there are more significant paths to political leadership than the university degree. Most Swedish political parties offer leadership training programmes that include practical and ideological content and several have a design rooted in the popular education movement. This article explores how party political…

This paper explores the complex relationship between academic researchers working in the area of 'International Development and Education' and foreign intervention in the Global South. I make the case for stronger definitional links between 'colonialism' and 'development'. In this, I pay attention to how 'soft' and 'hard' sides of colonial…

The term 'ideas-informed society' describes democracies in which citizens believe in the value of staying well-informed and up-to-date with current affairs. They also put these beliefs into action: critically engaging with new ideas and perspectives, delving into scientific discoveries or emerging technologies and exploring aspects of history and…

This paper is a written dialogue among four activists from the Emancipa Popular Education Movement in Brazil, following the principles of Freirean pedagogy as a "circle of culture." It delves into how "popular knowledge can be experienced as popular power," narrating the history, struggles, and strategies employed by the…

In this article, we explore a pedagogical and conceptual tool we have refined and developed for the fields of peace, social justice, and human rights education: "the possibility tree." Initially introduced in our 2021 book, we explore this tool in more depth in this article to show how such pedagogical and conceptual processes are key…