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Developing learning tools based on local potential is necessary because it directly relates to students' daily lives. One of them is a Popular Science Book (PSB), which highlights the potential of gastropods in coastal areas as a subject for observing biodiversity. The implementation of assessments and the value of students' critical thinking abilities still need to be improved. This research aimed to implement the PSB based on its practicality and effectiveness in improving students' critical thinking abilities. The research method used formative evaluation, focused on testing the practicality and efficacy of valid development products. Practicality was analysed based on student response tests through the percentage of responses and the implementation of the learning plan (LP) through categorization. Furthermore, effectiveness was analysed based on student learning outcomes through the percentage of completeness and achievement of critical thinking ability indicators through the N-gain test. The research results prove that the PSB developed was practical and effective. Apperception and interpretation were two of the three stages of implementation of the LP that received the highest average, where students could provide theoretical ideas based on appreciation of environmental issues. This was also supported by the student's critical thinking ability tests, where the interpretation aspect obtained the highest N-gain. The development of local potential-based PSB shows positive impacts, especially ease of use, interest in learning, motivation, apperception, and interpretation. However, it is still necessary to study in more depth the causal factors and solutions for the differences in results between the implementation of the LP at the conclusion stage and the indicators of critical thinking in the inference aspect.

The 19th century saw the rise of mass schooling. School acts were published, increasing number of teachers were trained and hired, and children increasingly attended schools. This development was strongest in Europe and North America, with schooling in the USA, France and Prussia leading the way. While this development with its national and regional variations continues to puzzle researchers, it also creates challenges of communication and presentation. What English language terminology should be used when denoting schools, teachers, and pupils in non-Anglo-Saxon countries? In this article, I address a part of this question by examining the case of Swedish 19th-century primary schools. By relating these schools to those in other countries, and the terminology used in the research literature, this article provides recommendations for English-language terms to be used when denoting these schools, the teachers who taught them, and the children who attended them. This terminology includes primary school, parish school and mass schooling, and the terms used to denote teachers and their training include junior schoolteacher, primary school teacher and term teacher training schools. As a result, this article problematizes the use of terms such as compulsory, public, state, and national when describing schools in 19th-century contexts such as that of Sweden, indicates the varying meanings of terms such as popular education, and highlights the problems of not translating terms such as "folkskola."

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 climate justice curriculum in action. We use an ecofeminist analysis to understand the relational entanglement of ecological breakdown, capitalism, colonialism, racism and patriarchy which in part undergird the breaching of planetary boundaries. We identify five inquiry-based themes which are suggestive as coordinates for orientating curricula for adult educators/activists learning climate justice. One of these is the importance of building ecoliterate alliances through collaborative action as we face the 'socio-ecological hurricane' which is bearing down.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the social and professional imaginaries of education, sociopolitical conceptions of it, and educational practices in Spain, began to be influenced by certain elements specific to critical popular education, which had developed in Latin America during the "long 1960s." Paulo Freire's work was particularly prominent among such influences, either directly or indirectly inspiring social and fundamental educational movements in contexts of poverty, marginalisation and social exclusion--for example, street educators. One of the most significant examples of these Freirean practices was Enrique de Castro--a working-class priest who worked in the south of Madrid (Spain) with young people in such a position, from the early 1970s. At the same time, he laboured to bring about social transformation and development; the project managed to Garner the involvement of practically the entire community. This article analyses Paulo Freire's influence in the educational and community principles expressed by Enrique de Castro in his works "¿Hay que colgarlos?" and "Dios es ateo." Particular attention is paid to the notions of awareness-raising, education, social action, community development, social and critical leadership of institutions, which de Castro championed.

The ideas of the Cuban 'School of Literacy' are much less well-known in the west than Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This paper is an exploration of the theoretical and practical links between these two historic examples of popular education. The analysis is informed by our direct experience working and undertaking participatory action research alongside Cuban literacy specialists on adult literacy campaigns in Timor-Leste and Australia. These campaigns utilised a model known internationally by its Spanish name, Yo, Sí Puedo (Eng: Yes, I Can!). We also include material from interviews in Cuba with leading literacy academics and practitioners.

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 established order of things. In the process, I question the marginalisation of liberation theology in Paulo Freire's work among some radical educators. There has, I suggest, been a sundering of spirituality, and especially religious insight, from rational enquiry in the academic mainstream, which has influenced readings of Freire. Modernity has privileged intellectualism and critical rationality as the only valid way of knowing; matters of faith and varieties of religious experience have correspondingly been privatised.

The paper reviews the system of popular education in Denmark in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Emphasis is made on the conservative and liberal trends in European education. Scientific and specialized literature on the research topic was used as materials. Methodological basis of the study consisted of the traditional historiography principles, historicism, scientific objectivity and consistency. Methods used in the course of work are as follows: comparative method. It enabled a comparison of the Danish popular education system with similar experiences in other countries. It also helped identify general European trends in education and highlight local features. In conclusion, the authors note that Denmark's system of popular education experienced a dynamic transformational journey in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This period marked ups and downs, such as confrontation among followers of the liberal and conservative concepts in European pedagogy, which culminated in productive activity based on regional conditions. An important note should be made that Denmark was very close to the Russian Empire in areas related to popular education, because both countries were dominated by the German pedagogical system and were about to introduce universal primary education.

When the Australian Association of Adult Education (AAAE) was established in 1960, Australia was locked into a global conflict between capitalism and communism, known as the Cold War. With anticommunism at fever pitch, AAAE's founders who were fighting to retain some influence with Australian universities and with government funding authorities needed an origin story which would appeal to these prejudices. Not surprisingly, therefore, histories of 'the profession' produced in the first decades largely dismissed the role of the many radical adult educators and left-wing organisations which had been instrumental in extending adult education to the working class in the first half of the twentieth century. One of the main sources for these early histories was a memoir of David Stewart, founder of the Workers Education Association, written in 1957 by a university adult educator, Esmonde McDonald Higgins. In this paper, I tell a different story, through a close examination of Higgins' own role in this early history, to show how 1960s 'official' adult education lost touch with its own roots in radical working class politics, roots which are only now re-emerging, through the study of popular education and social movement learning.

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.

Previous studies have documented the personal transformation that many low literate adults undergo when they engage in literacy campaigns. In particular, research has captured how improved literacy leads to a greater willingness and capacity to speak out, or what is often referred to as voice. This paper focusses on the impact of an adult Aboriginal literacy campaign on those responsible for implementing it. Through the words of these 'maestras', we reveal how the teachers and trainers of the campaign, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, experience a similar trajectory of transformation to the literacy students. This transformation, we argue, is the result of the pedagogic relationship between students, local campaign staff and national trainers. This dialectical relationship in which teacher is learner and learner teacher is at the heart of the literacy campaign model and is part of what Giroux (1988) characterises as a radical theory of literacy and voice. We further argue that the impacts of the literacy campaign at the individual and collective levels and crucially, the sustainability of these impacts depend largely on this pedagogic relationship and the new, shared understanding of the world which results.

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, Losito, & Agrusti, 2016; Tawil, 2013), educational studies that focus on social movements can be classified into two large unrelated groups (Niesz, Korora, Walkuski, & Foot, 2018). One explores the influence of social movements in formal education, with diverse approaches and little connection among them. The other studies learning in social movements, mostly inserted in the field of adult education and that form a corpus of interrelated and expanding knowledge. However, there are still few works that arise from an idea of complementarity or that have a double focus on citizen education that leads to activism, and activism as an educational process (Davies, Evans, & Peterson, 2014). Our previous studies arose from the idea of complementarity and an understanding that in order to formulate proposals for citizenship education, the object of study must be how citizenship and participation learning happens. That is, trying to understand the learning experiences of activists and the learning that takes place in spaces of participation, such as social movements, to formulate educational proposals (Gil-Jaurena, Ballesteros, Mata & Sánchez-Melero, 2016; Melero, 2018).

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 'popular' education on the one hand, and sociological scholarship on 'social movements' on the other. While the study of popular education has thematic proximity to the social movement literature, it is not a terrain of systematic research and theorising by social movement scholars. A recent search of the terms 'popular education', 'community education' and 'adult education' in both the titles and keywords of two leading social movement journals over the past two decades, for example, yielded zero hits. On the other side of the equation, while scholars of popular education may frequently invoke terms such as 'social movement' and 'activism', the tools of social movement theory are rarely put to use within this literature (cf. Kilgore, 1999). That these two literatures are so close, but so far apart is rather astonishing given their overlapping concerns for issues of resistance, solidarity, democratisation and social transformation. In this essay, I briefly address the gap between social movement studies and popular education studies, and then proceed to engage in some initial bridge-building work by discussing the concept of 'free space' (Groch, 2001; Polletta, 1999; Polletta, & Kretschmer, 2013). In particular, I suggest that by theorising community-based sites of popular education as 'free spaces', scholars can better investigate the ways in which the participants within these sites engage in educational practices that actively promote the reproduction of movement-based strategies, tactics, meanings and identities. From such a conceptualisation, researchers can explore the question of how local-level sites of popular education bolster the broader-level influence of social movements in society, thus shedding important light on the socio-political outcomes of popular education programs.

The global Occupy! actions gave some pause for thought. At first, some thought that this was a global movement that could change the way politics was conducted and maybe see the end of capitalism as we knew it. The hopes for Occupy! were high, but the highest hopes for the movement were short lived. This paper examines Occupy!'s legacy; what potential remains and where educators might go with it. An argument is presented that Occupy! became an empty signifier: a 'bucket' of discontent into which thousands of disjointed, dissenting voices and discontents were poured, ranging from the original Wall Street encampment to the Umbrella revolution in Occupy Central. The paper looks at the power of the 'empty signifier' as a galvanising mechanism and explores what this could mean for education. The notion of occupying the curriculum in HE will be explored as a unifying mechanism for multidisciplinary teaching and learning.

This article reveals the complexities of Indigenous students navigating the neoliberal model of education through an examination of Maori transitions into higher education contexts in Aotearoa New Zealand. In a recently completed doctoral study, the lived transition experiences of Indigenous Maori higher education students were critically investigated from a student voice perspective. Data were collected and analysed through repeated semi-structured interviews, focus groups and visual stories in a semi-longitudinal study with 20 Maori students enrolled in a wananga, a polytechnic and a university. Using a Bourdieuan theoretical framework for analysis, findings revealed that participants experienced their transition as a journey. Students perpetually evolved their identities and agency in relation to the tertiary education environments and social structures they encountered which supported or constrained transition experiences. Within wananga, participants felt their Maori cultural identity was highly valued; within polytechnics, there was a sense that Maori culture is included but more could be done; within universities, a need for more inclusive practices to support Maori learner requirements was identified. This empirical research outlines learning for Maori students in higher education, and is a timely addition to knowledge revealing the complexities of teaching in the neoliberal model of higher education with Indigenous people.

This paper considers the importance of 'in-between spaces' within the academy for challenging dominant institutional culture and hegemonic power relations towards a 'de-colonised' university. It questions 'mainstreaming' of transformational initiatives, as this can bring about regulation, rather than the turbulence that is often what is needed for substantive change to occur. I draw on a case study of the work of the Division for Lifelong Learning (DLL) at University of the Western Cape and in particular two examples of its marginal activities which were hosted regularly over a 10 year period. These are: the "Vice-Chancellor's Annual Julius Nyerere Lecture on Lifelong Learning" and the cross-campus "Annual Women's Breakfast." I use documentary evidence and insider knowledge to reflect critically on the relevance of the spaces that were created for enacting such alternative institutional practices. I employ 'knowledge democracy' as a lens to bring the margins to the centre of the analysis. The argument is made that the work in the 'in-between-spaces' is a critical part of 'decolonising education' through disruptive, political, pedagogical, and organisational transformation.

This article addresses an innovative approach to connecting an urban university with the surrounding neighborhoods comprised of Latino immigrants, who represent potential new students or current students' family members. The National Latino Research Center (NLRC) uses popular education, culturally informed, and linguistically relevant strategies to engage diverse Latino communities in the northern region of San Diego County in California. Methods of engaging the Latino community include cultivating long-term relationships, responding to time-sensitive community crises, facilitating inter-generational connections, presenting material in a culturally informed and relevant way, providing hands-on experiences with civic engagement, and growing partnerships within the university and among non-profits. Preliminary findings described a two-year study on civic engagement testing the effectiveness of a Spanish-language curriculum based on popular education offered (free) to members of urban and rural low-resourced Latino communities. The Center statistically correlated Latino community members' experiential learning, participating in social media, and voting with gains in civic engagement knowledge.

This article discusses one social movement in Buenos Aires--"Frente Popular Darío Fernández" (FPDF)--whose goal was to assist public school teachers in becoming leaders of their communities by providing them an opportunity to learn about social mobilizing and popular education through a series of Freirean-based workshops. Guided by affect theorists influenced by the writings of Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (Ahmed, 2010; Braun & Whatmore, 2010; Deleuze, 1998; Featherstone, 2010; Goodwin, James, & Polletta, 2001; Gould, 2009; Seyfert, 2012; Sharp, 2007), the author explores what motivated these teachers in Argentina to seek out popular education, a mode of critical learning, as an alternative to the traditional public-school curriculum, and their desire to build solidarity among themselves and their activism-centered projects.

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 conditions that led to inaction in these two stories. This article builds on previous related work, where PAR was described as "moving with the movement" (Langdon & Larweh, 2015), and describes the complexities of trying to move with the movement as conditions and relationships change over time. By sharing challenges and achievements that have emerged from the movement and research, we illustrate how moving with the movement has resulted in rich and unanticipated learnings.

This paper aims to develop an approach on social deviance and Popular Education. In this sense, it assumes a basic analytical statement of the sociology of deviance: social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders. Labelling occurs in all spheres of society. Those groups whose social position gives them weapons and power are best able to enforce their rules. On the other hand, Popular Education has been referring, for instance, to a general practice that covers a variety of social actors - from peasants to workers, women to groups of indigenous peoples and so on - and a variety of topics, whichever generate interest in promoting change. Taking into account such definitions, the paper describes Popular Education as an important alternative for the pedagogical work with outsiders. As an empirical demonstration of this perspective, it focuses on the Black Lives Matter Movement, the drug context and education in prisons.

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 that creates broader discursive forums for those who view the university as a public and democratic intellectual space. A primary aim is to create affinity identities in which the social and moral agency of faculty and students is recognized and used to challenge the ongoing disruptive corporatization agenda in higher education.

This article presents the design of a formal, special and flexible educational model for basic secondary school, aimed at adult victims of the armed conflict and former combatants in Colombia. This model is supported by emergent pedagogies and participatory methodologies which seek to consolidate harmonious relations between communities and nature with a higher purpose: a peaceful coexistence as a support for peace construction in Colombia. It is based on the pivotal element Culture of Peace that contributes to the construction of sustainable peace within the framework of social justice and rights. The pedagogical pillars have three complementary approaches: bio-learning, pedagogical mediation and popular education. The methodology fits into complex thinking that consists in the recognition of networks of relationships existing in knowledge, as well as the impossibility of exhausting it in a single epistemic field, in order to build and share knowledge through an integrative project that engages different academic fields incorporated in the study cycles. Thus, it would be possible to address the pivotal elements, with a multidimensional, contextual and trans-disciplinary perspective in interaction with the areas of knowledge required for these learning cycles.

The strengthening of the European migration policies, the increase of hate speech from ultra-conservative social groups, and the partial victory of the extreme right in the recent elections generate a scenario of constant threats to the human rights of immigrant people. In this context, this study supports the hypothesis that popular education inspired by the theoretical-practical work of Paulo Freire is a powerful tool in the promotion of an antiracist and decolonial education in the associative and community spheres. Through an in-depth interview with a popular educator and the participant observation applied in a community workshop, this study aims to exemplify the connections between Freire's pedagogy and the political struggles for an antiracist education in the Spanish context. The results obtained demonstrate that the application of Freirean pedagogical fundamentals has a substantial transformative potential on the migratory field.

In this article I discuss the vision of education for liberation during the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa. The article focuses specifically on "People's Education" and "Workers' Education". Instead of an instrumental role for education reduced solely to the labour market requirements of business, economic growth and international competitiveness, I argue that the purpose of education is much broader. Embedded in a rich tradition of an educational praxis based on social justice and democratic citizenship, the popular movements associated with people's and workers' education generated alternatives to apartheid's legacy on education. In contemporary South Africa, this apartheid legacy is exacerbated by post-apartheid policies rooted in neoliberalism. While post-1994 education policies established the legislative framework for social justice, equity and adequate resources remain unattainable and elusive. In the face of the desultory state of schooling and the failures of neoliberalism, the article takes issue with the proffered solutions advocated by proponents of neoliberalism, including strident calls for the privatisation of education and resorting back to an apartheid-like disciplinary regime. In forging a pedagogy of possibility, social class analysis and effective community participation in education policy deliberations would need to be reinserted into the conversations about redress and education reform if the country is to overcome its inequalities and social cleavages. To this end, alternatives and possibilities raised during the struggle against apartheid are reiterated, re-examined and offered as prisms through which an alternative education can be practised.

Inherent in the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) document are inferences of transmission and reproduction that run counter to the emancipatory imperatives of core educational policy documents enacted after democracy in 1994. Some structural inadequacies in implementation of the first curricular changes to outcomes-based education have opened the way to reactionary and retrograde pedagogy which appears to privilege the teacher and textbook as sole authorities in the classroom. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to warn against teacher-centred pedagogy and restate the significance of Freirean principles in the establishment of a student-centred educational environment, specifically in the field of critical literacy. In defence of Freirean thought, a re-consideration of literacy and critical literacy grant legitimacy to the learner and demonstrate that individual experience is foundational to knowledge construction in a participatory manner which accords with the vision and original principles of education in the new South Africa

Despite the progress so far recorded on the Education For All (EFA) programme in Nigeria, vulnerable children such as students with disabilities, street children referred to as "almajirai", nomadic Fulani children, orphans, the girl-child particularly in Northern Nigeria are yet to qualitatively access and benefit from the programme. Thus, this paper explores ecopedagogy (an approach to an education of the earth and its citizens) in achieving EFA in the country. In doing this, it critically reviews EFA initiatives in Nigeria vis-à-vis various issues in ecopedagogy as a critical theory in education. The paper concludes by recommending among others popular education and planetary citizenship via the ecopedagogical approach for the attainment of EFA goals in Nigeria.

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 processes that deny participation and power to students. In this article we share and examine examples of experiential learning practices that try to walk the talk of democratic purposes and discuss associated challenges and design principles. Our goals are to encourage and empower the community of experiential educators to understand, enact, inquire into, and continue developing the full potential of our work as it contributes to educating for democracy.

The aim of this philosophical and historical position paper is to discuss the ways in which Popular Education--folkbildning--has contributed to the social transformation of Sweden through self-directed and collaborative educational practices. One of our premises is that individual transformative learning, fostered by folkbildning, has contributed to a collective transformation of Swedish society since the late 1890s and laid the ground for a modern and coherent society with a high level of trust among its citizens.

The objective of this work is a reflection on the ethics of education on the net as a contribution to the face-to-face interaction in the virtual world. We think the ethics is a result of a process of responsible interchange with others. Two important thinkers of the last few decades, Emmanuel Levinas e Paulo Freire contribute each one with one's unique approach to the questions surrounding ethic in the online education: ethic of responsibility and humanist ethic. Almost no attention has been paid to examining their views on ethic in online education, but this article, in part, fulfills a gap and attempts to mediate their two positions towards a broader critique of face-to-face in virtual world. This work shows some implications of interaction in the virtual world and questions the possibility of the paradox of face-to-face being virtual. The experiences as a professor of web-courses about Paulo Freire, at Latin American Council of Social Sciences and the theoretical revision (Freire, 1970, 1999, Levinas, 1980, 1997, Gomez, 2004,) contribute to this reflection. The results suggest that ethics of responsibility does not allow fleeing from the Other who demands attention, listening and dialog to speed up the learning process. By utilizing both Levinas and Freire, it is argued, against a conservative pedagogy based on an instrumental ethic and in favour of a participatory pedagogy that can help strengthen the learning.

Comparing popular education in the Philippines and South Korea, it is clear that a number of similarities and differences exist regarding the characteristics, methods, and main fields in which popular education has operated. "Church-related practices," "uniting with CO movements," "an elite-led tendency," and "a disregard for the Left" have all occurred in similar ways in both countries. While introducing the socio-political situation during 1970s and 1980s of these two countries, this paper discusses the theories and practices of popular education. Our findings indicate how popular education in both countries has played a significant role in raising the levels consciousness in the powerless and transforming societies and enabled them to establish a better community. Moreover, each country developed different concepts, initiatives and methods in relation to popular education. In addition, popular educators have been asked to play different roles in each popular education field while most methods were in fact heavily dependent upon elite-led practices. (Contains 17 notes.)

The importance of multiculturalism in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina can be illustrated through a comparative view of the 1967 controversial, seminal, and Academy Award winning film, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner". In the film, a multicultural cast starred in a groundbreaking tale of interracial marriage--then still illegal in some United States states--bigotry, and eventual, qualified tolerance. The film's plot concerned the turmoil that resulted from the definite answer to the question of whom was actually coming to dinner--a young White woman and her new fiance who was a Black man. The dinner was hosted at the home of the young woman's bemused parents who, though well-intentioned liberals, were trying to make sense not only of the pronouncement of a seemingly impetuous interracial love and impending marriage, but of their own race-bound preconceptions. During the story, the young woman's parents gradually soften their narrow-minded views, come to terms with their own biases, and abandoned their strong opposition to the young couple's interracial union. In the conclusion, they go on to behave in a racially tolerant manner; however, despite their apparent newfound enlightenment in the face of the imposed culturally diverse circumstances, the backdrop of cultural and racial intolerance had already been ostensibly sanctioned. This film revealed that the concept of multiculturalism was needed to provide a framework for effective inclusive and interpersonal interactions that would draw on their similarities and their differences to break down stereotypes and prejudices. In this article, the author examines the role of multiculturalism, schools, and teachers in using their similarities and their differences to create an inclusive, supportive and safe environment that is culturally responsive. Additionally, the article issues a continued call to action to teachers who are educating all students who are culturally, linguistically, racially, and ethnically diverse, particularly those upon whom Hurricane Katrina has wreaked havoc. (Contains 1 figure.)

On a cold and wet Friday night in January of 2006, thirteen undergraduate students gathered together in a small room on campus at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) to found Students Informing Now (S.I.N.). S.I.N. was created to support the AB 504 students, labeled in this country as "illegal aliens." Inspired by Paulo Freire's philosophy of popular education, the organizers used an activity called "the flower" to develop their organizational mission and vision statement. This article seeks to show how S.I.N. serves as a vehicle that makes it possible for undocumented students to engage in the growing youth-led movement for greater educational access and equity. This article illustrates how S.I.N. works as a safe space, where testimonies and the creation of trust enable SINistas (members of S.I.N.) to speak freely about their experiences without fear of being judged and without shame. Thus, S.I.N. provides a zone of safety, enabling undocumented students to develop a political identity as AB 540 students. Drawing from the work of Latina feminists (e.g., Dyrness, 2006; Villenas, 2001), this article argues that the students' collective political resistance is made possible, in part, because of the personal transformation that occurs within the context of S.I.N. (Contains 12 notes.)

This article describes how the author engaged a group of high school drama students, in a rural Alberta community of majority Aboriginal population, in doing Popular Theatre as a form of participatory research. Popular Theatre is a process by which members of a community identify issues of concern, analyze conditions and causes, and search for solutions or alternative responses. It draws on participants' experiences to collectively create theatre and discuss issues through theatrical means. Through the research, the author aims to better understand the experiences of youth that might deem them "at-risk," from their perspective, and explore the potential of Popular Theatre in doing so. The author's interest in "at-risk" was based in her prior work with so-called "at-risk" youth, and as this paper reveals, the author's own risky experiences as a youth. She presents two autoethnographic stories that involve risky youth behaviour; two school dance stories, which reflect on her research with students. The first describes an incident that occurred at a school dance while the author was in the community doing the research. The other story describes a school dance experience from her own youth. The two stories juxtaposed show how her autobiographical experiences influenced her response to the research. (Contains 3 notes.)