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This paper provides a Latin American perspective on ESD, with a focus on transformative and participatory learning in community contexts. With a long history of critical pedagogies, Latin America provides a fertile ground for exploring alternative forms of education as a means to address deep-rooted challenges in western traditional strands of education. We start by providing an overview of pertinent educational currents present in Latin America, then ground these perspectives in two case studies carried out by the authors – one from Colombia, the other from Brazil – which explore grassroots initiatives in community settings that utilise different forms of education and learning. We then propose an integrative model to foster alternative educational approaches that might lead to decolonial and regenerative praxis, finishing with a discussion on how Latin American-rooted regenerative decolonisation perspective and praxis can inform global ESD discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, drawing on an action research project, argues for the revitalized use of two under-utilized practice frameworks for community development in the pursuit of social change. The two frameworks – Participatory Development Practice and the Spiral Model of Community Education – support a citizen-led approach to practice, one that focuses on the relational and dialogical elements of group processes. Starting with stories of citizens' lived experiences, a structural or community analysis about the root causes of oppression is enabled and supports community action that can be sustained over time. Findings from the action research showed that groups benefitted from foregrounding their own need for social sustainability and that the educational approach of Freire helped them shift from an antagonistic conflict mode to a dialogical or agonistic conflict mode which created confidence to engage in difficult conversations supporting their community development efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 Emancipa movement in their pursuit of democratizing Brazilian universities. The discussion is set within the context of Latin American structural inequalities and the issue of educational exclusion in Brazil. It emphasizes the vital role of contesting culture and knowledge as part of the movement's fight against social injustices perpetuated by peripheral capitalism, including racist violence and gender oppression. The paper adopts emancipatory pedagogy as the method to empower and mobilize grassroots efforts in this transformative endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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), an organisation founded by the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) in Brazil. We argue that the ENFF is not just a set of techniques and methodologies but a formative process that runs through the concrete reality of the subjects involved in the struggle for societal change. We conclude by proposing that the 'inédito viável' that constitutes the ENFF gains meaning from a broad, collective, and dynamic vision of concrete utopia involving a clear and mobilising orientation towards the future, a strong sense of agency, reflection, experimentation, and praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a critical analysis of Freire's Italian reception and argues that reinventing Freire requires us to historicise and to contextualise his legacy, which in Italy makes sense in consonance with the already existing Italian popular education tradition. Based on the case study of his 1989 honorary degree at the University of Bologna, this article investigates Freire's influence in academia by comparing two generations of scholars and activists who have received Freire in different ways. Drawing on interviews to key informants who belong to two generations of educators influenced by Freire, this paper argues that the Italian Freire's renaissance is associated with the growing need for a generation of militant educators to find a theoretical framework to oppose the hegemony of both neo-liberal and neo-nationalist discourses in education. The reasons for Freire's reinvention in the academic sphere are investigated and the profile of the second generation of Freireans in Italy traced out, highlighting both continuities and tensions with the first one. Finally, the motives for Freire's success in today's Italy are presented in seven main theses, showing that many of them are made possible by virtue of the political, cultural and pedagogical background that made Freire's re-invention in an Italian context possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This ethnographic paper navigates the intersections of feminism, urban farm movements, and democratic education at La Granja Puerta del Sol, a small farm near Buenos Aires, Argentina. Under the stewardship of Dani Ramirez, the farm resonates with the ethos of urban agriculture, while actively contesting gender norms and patriarchal structures. In parallel, it functions as a dynamic educational hub and platform for activist causes in their community. Utilising the theoretical perspectives of Michel Foucault's politics of freedom and Linda Zerilli's feminist practices of freedom, I analyze the farm's strategies in fostering sustainability, care work ethics, and collective decision-making. This exploration unveils how La Granja embodies feminist democratic education, underscoring the farm's potential to influence and reshape broader democratic education practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education is central to both the reproduction of capitalism and the revolutionary project of creating a new social order. As revolutionary and leftist activists, organizers, researchers, and academics—along with capitalist and imperialist powers—increasingly turn to educational theory, the pedagogical contents and forms of such theories are of decisive political importance. This article conducts a historical-materialist inquiry into the origins, critiques, and developments of two dominant radical educational theories in imperialist countries—and in much of the world—to advance a revolutionary educational theory adequate to our moment. After establishing the political and strategic significance of the "scholastic apparatus" and its centrality in reproducing and challenging capitalism, this article examines critical pedagogy (the educational spin-off of the Frankfurt School), finding it originated not from Paulo Freire's praxis but as a break from it. This article investigates Marxist responses to critical pedagogy, arguing they're held back by their lack of orthodoxy, as Marxist orthodoxy adheres to limitless flexibility and creativity based on material conditions. Reclaiming Freire's orthodox Marxism, this article homes in on a pillar of his praxis that critical pedagogy and Marxist educational theory avoid: education is only revolutionary within revolutionary organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 received state recognition to issue degrees in 2007, their number increased rapidly to almost a hundred BPs by 2015. Based on a literature review, this article offers a work of a theoretical nature: it deploys the neo-Marxist approach to the commons as a theoretical-analytical framework through the experience of the BP movement. This approach denounces the processes of enclosure (commercialization and privatization) of shared material and immaterial resources while also promoting commoning practices as seeds that anticipate an anti-capitalist future in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 Colombia. It examines the learning and knowledge which have emerged from this initiative, led by a small, radical human rights organisation called Nomadesc, which over the course of two decades has brought together activists from diverse movements and territories across southwest Colombia in order to empower them to deal with the violent context, reimagine alternatives, and strengthen and interweave their struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 often highly specific institutional and political contexts, as though all movements learned in the same way across space and time and popular education's role in fostering this learning is simple. Unchecked, this leads to the reification of 'critical' theory and the reduction and flattening of emancipatory practices to methods or even predefined goals. This paper constructs a dialogue between the work of Choudry, Freire and other authors in both fields, aimed at both celebrating and problematising their contribution to learning from our struggles. By developing a conversation between them, we want to explore how their insights might be usefully integrated for contemporary social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 and scientific rigour and the validity demanded by academic standards. The rich work and experience of Aziz Choudry contribute directly to overcoming these obstacles and challenges, as he conceptualised research and knowledge production as an activity not exclusive to academia or research institutes, but widely present within social organisations and social movements. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences of conducting research within community organisations as graduate scholars. Building on our respective research experience, including popular education in our research practice, we highlight how popular education spaces offer opportunities for scholars to disseminate their research results and contribute to raising awareness, but also to achieve the standards of intellectual rigour expected by academia. The main goal of this paper is to position the field of social movement learning and knowledge production as key for students who want to develop engaged and relevant research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 strategy operated symbiotically and evidence parallel occurrences in Post 9/11 Western-led military/development activities. Drawing on 'education' examples, I reflect on our fields entanglements in the messy politics, partnerships and funding regimes of our unequal global order and the ways that we, as both researchers and practitioners, become 'implicated'. I also explore sites of counter-hegemony that span similar timeframes, including my engagements with popular education in social movements in Colombia, and make the case for a radical educational internationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 close cooperation with ABF. Drawing on the theory of practice architectures, the preconditions for involvement of migrant study circle participants in ABF are analysed using participant interview data. The analysis of cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements shows how the study circles are highly integrated into various ethnic associations, thus preconditioning societal involvement with upholding an ethno-cultural heritage. Societal involvement is enabled as the participants can share social resources, information, and knowledge for both navigating in and relating to the local community and society at large. Societal involvement is constrained by scarce resources and challenges related to maintaining and developing constructive relationships, both within the group and in relation to the surrounding society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Structural competency is used to train health professionals on how social, political, and economic dynamics create conditions that negatively impact a population's health. In the Global South, this approach has historical roots in social movements, popular education, social medicine, and human rights. In 1982, during a time of extreme poverty, inequality, and violence under the Chilean military dictatorship, Educación Popular en Salud (EPES), developed a programme for training community health promoters to address common illnesses and analyse the underlying causes of poor health. In 2010, EPES began using the same model to train international and Chilean health professionals. The approach advanced four competencies. Evaluations show that training contributes to transforming health professionals' mindsets and leads them to question their practices. However, educating practitioners does not change the underlying structures that generate poor health. This article examines the intersection between EPES' competencies and the structural competency framework, highlighting two major contributions of EPES to structural competency: a methodology that narrows the gap between a theoretical analysis of social determinants of health and implementing action plans; and organic long-term links with social movements that strengthen collective action in poor neighbourhoods to advance social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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). Blending historical and sociological methods, it is shown that the SdEP emerged when a movement-based legacy of popular education initially forged as an extension of the labour movement in the francophone community during the late nineteenth century converged with new sets of movement-based actors and ideas emanating from a contentious wave of youth- and student-led protest around 1968. Additional insight is also given into a series of political processes that empowered the efforts of social movement actors working in the field of adult education: regionalisation and Europeanisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 provided a beneficial space for K-12 teacher activists. The second aim is to contribute to the teacher-activist literature by providing an analysis of the perceived benefits of popular education and PAR for participating teacher activists. Benefits included stronger relationships, developed knowledge and skills, emotional benefits, and the novel understanding that teacher activism includes forms of cultural activism. Implications include the notion that PAR may be useful for other teacher activists, and the conventional definition of teacher activism is likely too narrow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth arts is a form of education that operates primarily through affect and, perhaps because of this, has not received attention in terms of its capacity to develop young people's employability. In this paper we identify and discuss the much vaunted and highly desirable '21st century skills' learnt in youth arts settings. Drawing on arguments first advanced by Dick Hebdidge and Raymond Williams, we show that while 21st century skills are learnt through affect, the processes through which this learning proceeds produces skills that are seen as valuable commodities. Taking the everyday seriously as a site for learning, we explore youth arts projects as a site for skills development and argue for a framing of micro-credentials that at once recognizes and problematizes this modality of training. We do so by outlining how our reading of cultural studies scholarship can provide a foundation for understanding the everyday spaces of youth arts as critical sites of knowledge production. Examining the intersections of identity, being and culture as pedagogical, we outline how the everyday experiences of diverse youth participating in arts might be captured so as to build pathways into the future based on competency in 'the now'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Colombia, nearly six decades of war have devastated the countryside and induced land-related issues that perpetuate marginalization of rural people. Although the Peace Agreement of 2016 and the Integral Rural Reform offer new prospects for resolving legacies of conflict, the reconstruction of the countryside requires participation of rural communities. Social movements advance agroecology as a suitable territorial management approach for enabling the socio-ecological reconstruction of rural areas. Escuelas Campesinas de Agroecología (ECAs) are farmer-led formative initiatives that emerge around productive, market, and political processes aimed at scaling agroecology by developing new knowledge and learning systems. This qualitative study investigates the potentialities of ECAs as a social learning strategy for empowering farmer communities confronting current post-conflict challenges. Through a systematization of experiences, the work of seven ECAs is analyzed in relation to three phenomena – problematization, social networking, and critical thinking. The different pedagogies are then scrutinized based on identity frameworks. Results evidence that the context-specific approaches of ECAs enable communities to integrate diverse epistemological knowledge into collective learning systems and move it to a broader social context through social networks. We conclude that ECAs represent a suitable approach for transforming postwar environments while facilitating the achievement of peacebuilding goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This purpose of this article is to explore challenges and tensions associated with a participatory action research (PAR) project that occurred in 2019 and involved the author and five teacher activist co-researchers. This article opens with some brief context on the PAR project under focus before specifying the article's analytical methods. Next, the focus shifts to a longer discussion of several tension-producing aspects of this participatory research experience. These include challenges related to this project's recruitment process, relationship building, and the author's attempts to establish credibility within the activist community; tensions related to reflection and action; challenges related to epistemological orientations and facilitation style; and internal conflict and limitations related to the group's concluding action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we direct our focus on some of the recent activities undertaken by popular education institutions in Sweden in relation to the refugee challenge in 2015. The aim is to analyse how these popular education activities are shaped as specific communities of practice, through the ways they are described by those who organised these, and what meaning newly arrived refugees create regarding their participation in these practices. Drawing on a socio-cultural understanding of participation and learning, we analyse interviews with newly arrived refugees, principals, managers, teachers and study circle leaders. Our analysis illustrates how popular education emerge as specific communities of practice different compared to the regular education system; how these practices are shaped as practices of stability and learning; and how newly arrived refugees construe these practices as important in their current engagement across a range of communities in the role as newcomers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. Freire's early work on popular education traditions formed the base of the theoretical lens; Foley's theory of ideology with other critical theorist's concepts and critiques of Freire are drawn upon to analyse the evolution of Freire's critical pedagogy and to examine what factors affect its deployment in different contexts. The research design is grounded in interpretivist epistemology and uses a case study approach to examine Freire's pedagogical approaches in two different contexts. Three forms of qualitative data collection tools were utilised: semi-structured interviews, observations and document analysis. Key findings from this study illuminate the influential significance of facilitators' individual ideologies and organisational cultures and demands. It describes how education's relationship with the state must be analysed to assemble a comprehensive understanding of what social and political factors affect pedagogical choices and styles. This study offers more knowledge to the literature concerning the recontextualisation of pedagogy and the factors that affect it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the concept of 'educational screen practice,' this article aims to integrate the history of modern Chinese media—which has been dichotomised into pre-cinema and après-cinema—the history of lantern slides screenings and film screenings, and the history of educational and entertainment films. Lantern slides were brought to China at the end of the nineteenth century, and soon afterward they were used in Western-style schools and other educational institutions as a teaching tool to impart modern knowledge. At the beginning of the twentieth century, showing lantern slides and films became a popular leisure activity for students in new-style schools. At the same time, students studied in Japan began to use lantern slides and films for popular education. By the 1910s, the Jiangsu Educational Association and the Shanghai YMCA made active use of lantern slides and films to popularise the practice of visual screenings. The widespread use of visual media for popular education in the 1910s involved personnel that would emerge a decade later as leaders of the Chinese film industry and created a potential audience for cinema. To oversee educational screen practices more effectively, the Commercial Press and the Star Motion Picture Company operated as media conglomerates that encompassed film and print media and contributed to an 'industry of enlightenment' (Leo Ou-fan Lee). Thus, revising Chinese film history in terms of educational screen practices opens up a new horizon in the history of visual culture, connecting the divided histories of cinema and pre-cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a reflection on five feminist schools, popular education platforms, convened between 2017 and 2019 with two women's groups organising in the platinum mines in Marikana, North West and commercial farms in uMgungundlovu in Kwa Zulu-Natal in South Africa. The first part of the article looks at the background to the feminist schools and reflects on the composition of the groups, the self-selection of participants who attended the feminist schools, the co-development of a flexible curriculum and the non-hierachical dialogical learning methodology employed. The second part hones in on the use of local languages and how they enriched our conversations and encouraged full participation. Here we also highlight some of the translation challenges we experienced when dialoguing and drawing from concepts central in feminist theory, analysis and critique, e.g. patriarchy, power, gender. To resolve the challenges, direct translations did not work; we thus used multiple local concepts, and layered these with local expressions that the women felt were close proximates. We argue in this paper that to strengthen activist movements there is a need to think through our "pedagogy of mobilisation" and to co-develop local feminist registers and grammars and "conceptual vocabularies". We thus make a case for the development and refinement of indigenous feminist theories/concepts that are locally grounded but outward-looking, drawing from and in conversation with local languages, realities and activists. We hope this paper adds to debates on feminist popular education and pedagogical questions in feminist activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Language & Intercultural Communication is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Language & Intercultural Communication is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This interview with Coumba Toure, feminist, Pan-African activist, and educator took place as part of a debriefing session at the end of a three day strategic planning workshop that brought together activists, artists, trade unionists, educators and organisations fighting imperialism, sexism and the privatisation of water in the face of the upcoming World Water Forum to be hosted in Dakar Senegal in 2021. The gathering was co-hosted by the Blue Planet Project, an international water justice coalition with whom Koni Benson does organising and education work, and by Africans Rising, a Pan-African movement of people and organisations working to build a continent-wide solidarity for a self-determined future, coordinated by Coumba Toure. This interview inquires about how Coumba thinks about strategies for building connected bottom-up movements across Senegal, and across Africa, that are feminist, Pan-Africanist and intergenerational. Coumba's political journey to achieve this approach to her work is the main focus of the interview where she exemplifies the rejection of conventional boundaries between fields of expertise that often begin to mould and professionalise gender justice experts, teachers, NGO activists and published writers. What accounts for the ways in which she applies the principles of the African Feminist Charter, and the politics of Pan-African liberation to her daily life and work? We discuss why we are opposing and attempting to build a People's Alternative to the World Water Forum which aims to open up Africa's water to marketplaces of the global North. The interview unpacks how Coumba came to employ the approach of bringing older and younger activists, artists, students and communities into the daunting space of water specialists and professionalised NGOs, and what we hope to build through these spaces of connection, opposition and alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 performances themselves are not the drivers of social change. Yet, these seemingly agit-prop skits (teatro) initiate a process of 'collective learning', politicisation, and activism that results in a Worker-driven Social Responsibility model that mobilises direct action and affects social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to systematically review and trace the lineage of theoretical debates around social movement learning in the field of adult education. We compiled articles, books and conference proceedings on adult education and social movements from Google Scholar using the software Publish or Perish and manually filtered the data to only include those that explicitly address the topic. Based on the data, we identified key literature that scholars cross-referenced, which extended the review to include the literature from the 1970s until today. We argue that the theoretical debates about social movements and education can be characterised by four phases: 1) popular education within and for social movements, 2) the Old/New Social Movement debate and its radical influence on adult education, 3) conflict and pushback between scholars, and 4) social movement learning as a confluence of literature. We argue that it is only when scholars writing about popular education interacted with scholars promoting the idea of 'new' social movements that the current proliferation of 'social movement learning' emerged. Thus, the knowledge production of social movement learning itself has been a result of a dynamic and historical movement in the field of adult education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties are essential for the functioning of parliamentary democracy, yet parties have not received much attention in contemporary research on popular education. The aim of this article is to analyse the contemporary role of party-political education as a form of popular education in two labour movement parties in Sweden. The study is based on semi-structured interviews focusing on the reasoning behind the organisation of education in political parties. The interviews were conducted with ten interviewees who represented ABF (the Swedish workers' educational association), the Left Party, and the Social Democratic Party. The thematic analysis resulted in four categories of roles ascribed to education in political parties: ideological training, training skilled members and leaders, training for a social infrastructure, and training for internal positioning and distinction. The first two categories correspond to knowledge-oriented roles, while the two last represent relationship-oriented roles. Findings show that party-political popular education still plays a significant role in contemporary Sweden. The shrinking member base of political parties creates challenges when new members and prospective representatives cannot be expected to have as extensive popular movement experience as previous representatives. In this situation, study activities are, to some extent, attributed more significance than previously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key aspect of teaching 'development' is understanding the conundrums and tensions between balance and imbalance with constructs of global (all humans, all societies, all populations) and planetary (all of Earth, including humans) spheres. This article deconstructs some key tenets of populist post-truth frameworks (termed as post-truthism in this article) as affecting how development and sustainability is taught within ecopedagogies and argues for structural grounding of ecopedagogical literacy within pedagogies as increasingly imperative. Rooted in critical theories and popular education movements in Latin America, through reinvention of Freirean Pedagogy, the literacy's root word ecopedagogy is transformative teaching in which educators dialectically problem-pose the politics of socio-environmental connections through local, global, and planetary lenses. Without deepened and widened readings of development and sustainability viewed within both global and planetary spheres, in conjunction with development's effects upon local societies and ecological systems, developmental actions are unsustainable and defies the definition of development. Discussed will be the ecopedagogical tenets, including emergent ecopedagogical literacies, of critical socio-historical analysis, local and diverse epistemologies, deconstruction of pedagogies on the environment, and problem-posing one's and others' livelihood to counter post-truthism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article illustrates the pedagogical value of employing student narrative writing assignments in the graduate sport management classroom and advocates for cultural studies and critical pedagogy approaches to teaching sport management. The article considers students? autobiographical narratives within a theoretical framework of cultural studies, critical pedagogy, and critical sport studies in order to demonstrate how autobiographical writing exercises can provide students with an additional forum through which to express their individual voices and to link their personal experiences to course content as they prepare to enter a 21st century sport industry characterized by increasing diversity and globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In November 2012, a group of Black women across Cuba came together to form the Red Barrial Afrodescendiente ("Afrodescendant Neighborhood Network", or RBA). Within its group of initiators were educators, academics, artists, writers, scientists, and activists, all who worked at various levels in both governmental and grassroots capacities. The goal of this newly formed network was to form generative discussion opportunities surrounding race, racism, gender, sexuality, and discrimination in Cuba, with a community pedagogy model inspired by Paulo Freire's method of popular education. Since the humble beginnings of the RBA, the group has grown into a vast network of workers and individuals from various sectors of Cuban civil society, from cultural workers and academics to educators and youth, all involved at varying levels to change the landscape of dominant conversation surrounding discrimination, historical memory, culture, and intersecting identities in Cuba. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study concerns the history of Swedish public everyday discourse about knowledge and its benefits for the individual, c. 1920–1974. We examine the value(s) ascribed to knowledge – in economic and/or idealistic terms – using private correspondence institutes as our point of departure. These were immensely popular, yet have hitherto been overlooked by historians. First, we argue that commercially driven correspondence education, which was a mass phenomenon in early and mid-20th-century Sweden, blurred the demarcation lines between general and vocational education, and more importantly between formal and so-called popular education (folkbildning). Second, we examine how knowledge and education were promoted and justified in the widely circulated advertisements for Hermods Korrespondensinstitut, the largest of the Swedish correspondence schools. By analysing and contextualizing advertisements over six decades, we find a strong dominance of individualistic economic valuations from the beginning, a successive increase in idealistic valuations over the decades, and an increasing amalgamation of idealistic and economic justifications for knowledge. We argue that the extensive scale of Hermods' and similar institutes' educational activities offers an important key for understanding the social context in which the overall marketization and capitalization of knowledge in the latest decades was able to take root. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature on Latin American social movements has discussed the contributions of post-Second Vatican Council (SVC) (1963–1965) progressive branches of the Catholic Church in the formation of indigenous movements. However, this literature has largely ignored discussions on the intervention of non-SVC and conservative branches of the Catholic establishment. This article illustrates the role of the modernizing educational program Acción Cultural Popular (ACPO) (1949), a Catholic organization aligned with conservative forces of the Colombian State and developmental agencies from abroad, in the formation of the indigenous movement of the department of Cauca by Misak and Nasa indigenous people, who pioneered the indigenous movement in the country. ACPO provided educational tools and contacts that contributed to the creation of the indigenous movement of Cauca in the 1970s. However, it also promoted problematic technologies that affected indigenous territories and modes of understanding indigenous cultures that belittled the traditions of the Misak and Nasa indigenous people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to explore the contemporary role of the folk high school as an educational pathway for Swedish MPs. Statistics from the folk high school register at Statistics Sweden are analysed. In summary, there are still quite a large number of former folk high school participants in the Swedish parliament (27%, 2014). The MPs' folk high school participation mainly took the form of short courses. Over time, the folk high schools have increasingly come to be used by members of parties on the left of the political spectrum. The folk high schools are commonly used as meeting places during the MPs' political career, and thus not only as an educational pathway to power, as emphasised in earlier research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 opportunities for informal collaborations and networking between organisations including the National Union of Women Workers, Mothers' Union and Girls' Friendly Society. Dedicated women's sections from 1881 provided a space that was exploited by women activists seeking a voice in the public sphere. The congresses reflected a context of increasing professionalisation amongst women. This article celebrates the contribution made by women in the role of popular educators via congress platforms between 1882 and 1913. In addition, the article seeks to commemorate the unvoiced presence of working class women who engaged with the congresses as members of the audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much radical writing on academia is grounded in a mystified view of knowledge in which an ecosocialist pedagogy would be "theory from above." This article argues for a different understanding of knowledge as materially situated in social and ecological relationships; oriented towards practice; developmental and contested from below, demystifying third-level education from the perspective of movement-generated knowledge. Concretely, this means starting from participants' existing praxis and "learning from each other's struggles"—using "frozen" movement theory and activist experience—to move towards a wider, more radical understanding. In Ireland such pedagogy is rooted in working-class community self-organising, rural environmental justice alliances, women's and GLTBQ activism, and the anti-capitalist "movement of movements," encapsulating Audre Lorde's dictum, "There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives." The article focusses in particular on a "Masters for activists." The course supports movement participants to deepen and develop their activist practice but also to situate it within these wider and more radical understandings and emancipatory alliances. Taking movement praxis—rather than "contemplative" knowledge—as a starting point raises very different questions about theory and practice, forms and distribution of knowledge and the purpose and shape of learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This investigation draws from Mouffe's [2005, On the Political. London: Routledge] theoretical work on the politics of public togetherness, together with Biesta [2011, "The Ignorant Citizen: Mouffe, Rancière, and the Subject of Democratic Education." Studies in Philosophy and Education 30 (2): 141-153] and Kamat's [2014, "The new Development Architecture and the Post-political in the Global South." In The Post-Political and its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticization, Spectres of Radical Politics, edited by J. Wilson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press] insights on democratic discourses centered on empowerment, inclusion, and participatory democracy, to show how popular education and social change movements in Buenos Aires conceive of partnership building in communities under the impediment of neoliberal governance. It provides an empirical account of former popular educators who together built the first and only school in Latin America to offer educational opportunities for transgender men and women, how they secured government recognition, but eventually how they lost their power within it. In making the shift from a community-based popular school, to one run under the thumb of Argentina's Ministry of Education, these educators were forced to drop the more radical aspects of their work in favor of a pedagogy aligned with patriarchal, neoliberalist-sanctioned reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we have analysed the ways a discourse on individualisation is taking shape within adult education in Sweden, how it operates, and what effects it has in terms of shaping student subjectivity. Drawing on a post-structural theorisation we analyse interviews with teachers and students in municipal adult education and folk high schools (FHS). The analysis illustrates how both institutions contribute to the shaping of individualised subjectivities, although differently. At the end, a general question is raised about what happens with the democratic function of adult education in general when a discourse on individualisation operates in the ways described and, more specifically, asks what is happening to FHS as an educational practice that upholds its self-image as a last bastion of a collective notion of learning and subjectivity and nurturing an educational practice of learning democracy? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

North American community health academics encourage the use of emancipatory education for the community development with vulnerable populations. Topics such as critical consciousness-raising, social justice, and political action constitute a significant part of the curricula. They often refer to Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed. However, Freire has too often been presented as quasi-synonymous with a conception of critical education that de-emphasizes the context and ignores the history of his praxis. He has been made into a non-historical creator who invented a fully-formed point of view out of nothing. A self-reflection in Northeast Brazil revealed that Freire’s ideas were rooted in a Brazilian tradition with which he was familiar and which served him as a point of reference, most notably the ideas of Alvaro Vieira Pinto, a Brazilian philosopher, as well as a number of Russian and German populists. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 transformative work. Resurrecting Hannah Arendt's question, 'where are we when we think?' this paper explores how we might move from a moment in which the 'space' of the gallery is replaced by the 'time' of the event (Helguera) and towards embedded space-times that attempt to address contemporary urgencies through situated practices that collectively analyse and respond to conditions. Drawn from examples derived from the author's practice, the paper argues for the use of popular education and anti-colonial pedagogies in the production of adult education in galleries, suggesting that such processes support groups in collectively naming and thinking through conflicts to re-shape both the galleries in which they have congregated and the worlds beyond their doors. This paper suggests that the re-construction and use of the often forgotten genealogies of emancipatory education are pivotal to doing social justice work in galleries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the French state’s approach to the “colonies de vacances” between 1944 and 1958. Created in 1876 by the Reverend Bion in Zurich, these summer camps originated as a charitable institution: their initial purpose was to provide rural retreats and to restore the health of poor urban youth. Set up on French soil in 1880, these institutions gradually grew in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Considered both as complements to the republican school and as extensions of the “patronages” (parish unions), they were important for children and adolescents from the industrial city suburbs, and were enshrined in the leisure policies of the Popular Front from 1936 onwards. After the Second World War, summer camps in France became a major social institution (300,000 children went to summer camps in 1945, 900,000 in 1949) in response to both hygiene and educational needs. Based on the archives of the Directorate of Youth Movements and Popular Education (1944–1947) and the General Directorate of Youth and Sports (1948–1958), this article aims to examine the politics behind the organisation of these summer camps and to demonstrate the social and political importance of these popular educational institutions which, in 1957, involved 1.35 million French children and teenagers. Although the history of French summer camp federations (UFCV, CEMEA, CPVC, UFOVAL, etc.) has been widely studied, how the state sees its role and influences these organisations has mostly been considered indirectly. The intention is to show that among the educational, cultural and sports policies implemented during the Fourth Republic in France, those related to the organisation of “colonies de vacances”, and therefore the organisation of holidays for a very large number of children and teenagers, occupy a significant place. In 1944, the summer camps were widely supported by the French state, which also planned to regulate this booming sector. The creation of qualifications for summer camp staff and directors in 1949 obliged organisations to start training schemes: they trained staff and directors to work in the municipal camps, associations, etc. Security issues led to the state tightening control of the summer camps, their recruitment and their activities. There was a great deal of political investment in these “colonies de vacances” during this period, and this was reflected in the creation of a Ministerial Education Committee in 1950, a general and regional body of inspectors for these camps, etc. However, the considerable expansion of summer camps posed increasing problems at the national political level resulting in changes to the initial subsidy policies. The State played a major part in crucial issues such as the sociological diversification of these institutions and the changes in their social role according to evolving sociocultural trend. The fact remains that the “colonies de vacances” were for the French state a centrepiece of the “popular education” that the political actors of the Fourth Republic wanted to implement in order to build the France of the post-war period.. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper arose out of a shared concern about how to explore young children's ways of becoming writers. A framework based on the nomad thought of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari was used to develop the analysis. A situated, relational and nomadic analysis offers insights into how processes of becomingwriters are produced, how they emerge and transform, as shown in this qualitative study of two Swedish early childhood classrooms. The analysis shows how social, cultural, linguistic, material and technological aspects interconnect and transform, and how this interrelatedness influences and forms six-year olds as writers. Young students constitute themselves as writers of classrooms through relating to the conventional norm of writing while simultaneously engaging in exploratory, creative and unpredictable processes of writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to examine teachers' constructions of the literacy competence levels of multilingual students. The study is based on a Latour-inspired theoretical understanding of standardised literacy testing as a social practice, and focuses on teachers' perceptions of and practices concerning compulsory national standardised literacy testing in three Danish primary classes containing a number of multilingual students. The analysis reveals that the teachers embed the national standardised tests and their results in a broader competence framework in which a testbased and an everyday-based construction of competence operate side by side in sometimes conflicting ways. The analysis also shows that the teachers' navigation between the two constructions of competence is closely related to central issues in the international academic discourse about the validity of standardised literacy testing of multilingual students. These findings give reason to question and discuss equality-oriented educational programmes and strategies for multilingual students in which standardised literacy testing plays a central role, and to discuss ethical issues around the production and use of standardised literacy tests in educational contexts which are characterised by linguistic diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces various topics covered in the issue including multicultural and multilingual societies, an increase in technologization of societies, and literacy practices.

This article reviews the effectiveness of two projects:NQT and Beyond; Developing Resilience in Learning and Teaching, and the underpinning conceptual framework (PLSP) in supporting early career teachers’ (ECTs’) development of their research literacy. Evidence of effective integration of research into practice is illustrated through reference to six articles each presenting an individual ECT project, alongside data from a total of 80 ECTs. Thematic analysis of ECTs products from the projects (critically reflective portfolios; resilience pedagogy implementation/analysis) identified three over-arching themes impacting ECTs’ research literacy. These inter-related themes included: (i) adequacy of the pedagogic/project design (i.e. authenticity, relevance, manageability, accessibility, tools to support critical reflection/self-evaluation; focused incremental feedback; modelling research through investigation of beliefs and values); (ii) self (i.e. readiness; energy to effect change; confidence in being able to apply ideas; willingness to act as a broker/change agent; ability to identify and make use of opportunities); (iii) self-in-context (i.e. time and space to effect change; opportunities to use ideas in real contexts; support from pupils, colleagues and senior management; access to a range of support networks). The importance of sustaining ECT research literacy and reconfiguring school – higher education partnerships to facilitate this are emphasised. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This research introduces popular education into a neighborhood planning process in a low-income community in Charlotte, NC. Residents and members of a community–university partnership participated in a two-day workshop at the Highlander Education and Research Center in Tennessee and engaged in popular education exercises there to explore neighborhood issues through a lens of structural inequality. Data include interviews, participant observations, and a focus group. This research adds to the literature on empowerment planning – an approach to urban planning that integrates popular education, participatory action research, and community organizing to increase local control of planning and community development efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background:Within the wider education industry, a large quantity of ideas, practices and products are routinely promoted as useful innovations. These innovations span many forms such as software applications, open source courseware, online learning platforms and web 2.0 technologies. Coupled with this promotion, there is increasing interest and debate around the possibilities that novel innovations can have on changing education practice and providing more effective learning solutions. The media plays an important role in facilitating the travel of educational ideas: the advent of the Internet and social media technologies allows for an abundance of innovation to be promoted and shared with and between educators, and, in classroom settings, the increasing use of technologies such as tablets results in the advertisement of numerous new education applications. For the educator, there is the difficult challenge of knowing how to sift through this material and separate those innovations that may hold value for their classroom situation from those that have gained wide appeal, but may or may not be substantiated. Purpose:The purpose of this study was to explore the persuasion techniques used across a variety of documents promoting a selection of popular education innovations of different types. Questions included: (1) How are popular education innovations promoted in the media? (2) What contributes to the appeal of these innovations? and (3) What is the role of evidence in this process? Design and Methods:The paper examines how seven innovations of different types have been promoted in the mass, professional and social medias through a content analysis (a research technique used to code and interpret text) of 63 documents including non-peer reviewed journal articles (education magazines and trade publications), mass media outlet newspapers and online blog posts. The content analysis involved inductively creating and labelling sub-categories of six ‘persuasion criteria’:compatibility; accessibility; practicality; evidence; credibilityandappeal. The analysis performed was not examining the worth of the innovations themselves, but rather seeking to understand how the innovations were promoted. Findings:The language that was used to promote the innovations was often emotive or descriptive, rather than evidence-informed. Documents tended to emphasise theappealandcredibilityof innovations over and above the evidence that supported, or did not support, them. Where evidence was cited, it was usually anecdotal, related to personal experiences, provided general statistics about problems that the innovation sought to address, or presented statistics related to use of the innovation. Conclusions:The results of this study offer insight into why various kinds of innovations, irrespective of whether or not they are supported by an evidence base, nevertheless ‘catch on’. The study highlights the need for practitioners to develop the evaluative skills to distinguish evidence-based innovations that are effective, and of real value, from those that may simply sound or look good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standardised tests in higher education have become widespread as a mechanism to provide additional information for student placements in appropriate programmes of study. Much has been written about these tests for entry to formative degree programmes. This study contributes to this discussion by determining the alignment between the academic literacy test specifications of a standardised test and reading practices for diploma subjects. Theoretical approaches to standardised testing and academic literacies framed the analysis and findings of this study. The multiple-case study approach was used to explore reading practices of first-year diploma subjects, and semi-structured interviews and document analysis were used for data generation. The findings revealed two dominant content representations - text-dominant and visual literacy-dominant orientations - that influenced the application of different literacy practices. It is concluded that while academic literacy is integral to knowledge acquisition in academia, disciplinary literacies within diploma qualifications have a profound presence and should be accommodated in standardised testing to ensure that what is tested resonates with subject literacies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reflecting on South African experience, this paper develops an analytical framework using the work of Henri Lefebvre and Nancy Fraser to understand why socially just arrangements may be so difficult to achieve in post-conflict reconstruction. The paper uses Lefebvre's analytic to trace three sets of entangled practices (perceived–conceived–lived) as evident in education in post-apartheid South Africa in order to illustrate the complexity that is entailed in a particular moment of social reconstruction. Coupled with this approach, It draws on Fraser's analytic to show how the different forms of social injustice and their different remedies (redistribution–recognition–representation) may easily shift and slip in times of complex change. The paper shows that post-conflict reconstruction in education requires a number of different social practices that are not easily orchestrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]