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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.

Integrated river science provides decision-making life-skills for individuals and communities facing environmental change; it is a variant of critical physical geography through its socio-political dimensions. As an example, the frequency and magnitude of river flooding are amplified by climate change: society needs to understand how to cope through learning, adaptative behaviour and planning. Choices should be informed by trusted science that can only be delivered by education, to avoid "knee jerk" post-hazard reactions. We examine curricula and resources in physical geography for England to judge if they make river science more pervasive and persuasive. "Scales" of causation and impact remain a central geographical focus. The concept of "place" is revitalized: environmental processes harnessed to improve resilience. Literacy and numeracy skills to communicate and predict need improving, to ensure that students understand problems sufficiently well to identify the best long-term, rigorously assessed options. Higher education has a hub role for empowering lay individuals, communities and professionals but the core learning principles need to be set at school. We conclude the current physical geography river science content is not fit for future needs, notably at A-Level. Weaknesses include naivety about river processes (water and sediment movement), arcane jargon, absence of a catchment-wide approach to river management, and inadequate links between disciplined fieldwork and databases. Contemporary community dimensions of social learning, argument and countering myths are also weakly developed.

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.

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.

Why develop leaders? What politics are implicit in our practice? This paper uses the history and practice of Popular Education as a comparative framework to survey the politics of intentional emergence leadership pedagogy, surfacing potential alliances for building social change movements. Using a case analysis, the article elucidates the ways the classroom embodies an opportunity to explore and enact a prefigurative politics of significant social change that upends traditional relationships to authority, hierarchy, and decision-making. Exploring the opportunities and dangers of connecting the classroom to broader social movements, the article concludes by advocating that such connections could offer a firmer and more explicit stance to the question: why develop leaders?

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 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.

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.

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.

This article delves into ecopedagogy, grounded in the work of the Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire on popular education and critical pedagogies, to teach students to critically deconstruct the subjectivity and transformability of our world (all humans, human populations) with the rest of Earth (i.e., rest of Nature). As Friere emphasized humans' unique characteristic of 'unfinishedness' with abilities of self-reflexivity through our histories and goal-setting from our dreams, (environmental) pedagogues must teach toward deepened and widened understandings for praxis grounded in socio-environmental justice and planetary sustainability, including disrupting anthropocentricism. This 'unfinishedness' has made humans agents of world-Earth unsustainably and dominance in constructing the Anthropocene, but also allows for possibilities of transformation to counter them. I argue that ecopedagogy is essential in disrupting the following falsely taught ideologies that justifies the Anthroposphere: (1) false commonsense that separates environmental and social violence (i.e., "socio-environmental violence") and instills anthropocentrism that separates humans from the rest of Nature (i.e., world-Earth distancing); (2) fatalism that extinguishes hope of ending humans' acts of unsustainable environmental violence; (3) 'development' for sustaining hegemony and planetary unsustainability (i.e., Development rather than development); and (4) epistemological dominance that legitimizes the first three ideologies given (e.g., epistemologies of the North).

In contribution to a body of scholarship that examines teaching as a form of learning, the paper addresses a central question: What can be learnt from organised mobilisation to educate in communities eager to strengthen their unique biocultural heritage? The question is explored through an examination of two grassroots education projects in Latin American provincial locations rich in history. Studied ethnographically over a period of fifteen years from the point of view of the educators who run them, these two projects offer a unique opportunity to examine the formation and the mobilisation of value in education. I show how popular education and agroecology methods are used in both cases to face socio-ecological conflicts and refocus developmental tensions. I conclude with a short reflection on UNESCO's 2020 approach to education and its vital role in radically reconfiguring humanity's place and agency on planet Earth.

This article builds on a classroom study and interviews with facilitators and students on a travelling Folk High School course on global justice and development, an education that raises awareness about colonial history and contemporality. The study explores how the concept of being 'in and against' presents itself in the narratives of the research participants, and what those narratives can say about institutional and global conditions for transnational popular educational engagement. The results mirror the ambiguities of criticising the global, structural, and institutional conditions, while also relying on the same prerequisites, to conduct the course. It shows how working in and against the classroom, as expressed from the different perspectives of the students and the facilitators, entails countering both global and institutional material orders as well as prevailing hegemonic knowledge, and working in and against a gendered, classed, and racialized classroom.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

The United States is at a turning point in its history. Insurrection has become a dominant motif describing a country torn between the promises and ideals of democracy and an emergent authoritarianism that trades in lies, lawlessness, and a rebranded fascist politics. In this article, I analyze the contrasting visions, politics, and role of education that are central to both notions of insurrection. In the first instance, I argue that insurrectional authoritarianism is wedded to a fascist legacy that calls for racial purity, militarism, ultra-nationalism, and state terrorism. In the second instance, I analyze insurrectional democracy as a mode of resistance that has a long legacy in the battle for racial justice, economic equality, and a politics of inclusion. The article explores how both positions are motivated by particular understandings of education, agency, and the future. Within this distinctive historical moment, both participate in a landscape in which images, the social media, and the Internet play a decisive role in merging political education, power, and cultural politics. Both notions of insurrection infuse cultural politics with a specific language that narrate their visions and work to produce particular modes of agency, identifications, and social relations. At the core of the article is an analysis of how each narrative uses language and cultural politics to define their different notions of insurrection and how education and politics merge to create militarized identities operating in a warring environment in which the very categories of politics, education and democracy are on trial. I conclude that insurrectional authoritarianism has created the context for a civil war marked by a number of counter-revolutionary interventions in which ideas are married to violence and present a threat to democracy. I conclude with a call for an insurrectional democracy that makes education central to politics in order to produce an anti-capitalist consciousness as the basis for a mass movement in defense of socialist democracy.

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.

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.

This study investigates tenured academics' experiences of science communication--popularization of science, dissemination of scientific knowledge, and collaboration outside academia. Specifically, the study spotlights the written aspect of science communication and explores how scientists approach writing addressing audiences 'beyond academia'. Adopting an ethnographic narrative interview approach, we explore what four researchers in different STEM fields write, how they do it and why, their perceptions about the value and the role of science communication, and the place and space it takes in their career. After presenting their individual experiences, we discuss the common themes that link their personal 'stories' of science communication. First, their motives align with the notion of scholarship of engagement: as a means to educate and share scientific knowledge, science communication has a democratic value. Secondly, they engage in a wide range of writing practices and genres, based on the nature of their work and their field of expertise. Additionally, while they personally value writing science communication, this engagement takes time away from their academic writing and other types of scientific work. We conclude with suggestions for further research and the development of training programs for future scientists that build on established writing pedagogies.

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.

The historical process of consolidation of a Latin American and Caribbean critical social theory is framed, to a great extent, in interpreting our socio-historical formation, identifying the axes that structure the great regional and national problems, with the intention of constructing analytical categories destined to contribute to social transformation. The emergence of popular education and participatory action research strengthened this process, shedding light on education's political dimensions and liberatory implications. Popular movements incorporate the philosophical foundations of social theory and Latin American and Caribbean pedagogical thought into their political struggles and in the formation of a historical subject. Likewise, they advance a social theory rooted in an onto-epistemic paradigm for and by the countryside, which includes a set of knowledges, ways of knowing, and being born in struggle. The objective of this article is to analyze this process and highlight what the popular movements of the region have taught us in terms of a social conceptualization and interpretation that must also be recognized as part of a Social Theory of the Oppressed complemented by a pedagogy of the oppressed.

This essay draws from four years of ethnographic fieldwork with women activists in self-defined Paulo Freirean-based popular education schools in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Rather than leaning on the traditions of education activism, modeled on Freire's class-based emancipatory vision, the women in this study sought to turn popular education's focus toward intersectional oppressions that impacted girls and women in their communities. Through their anger and disillusion with the form Freirean thought had been taken up by social movements, I illustrate how participants were contemplating ways to make room for women's experiences by pinpointing junctures of racism, sexism, and classism as they impressed upon the lives of people living and learning in precarious conditions.

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.

Popular education has a long history in Sweden, dating back to the mid-1800s and having developed in close relationship with the state. This relationship has been sustained over the years by the way popular education is spoken of as being "unique"--as being complementary to formal education. In this article, we focus on how the uniqueness of popular education is shaped today, and how it operates to legitimize further support. We draw on Barthes' notion of myth, analyzing interviews with managers, principals, study circle leaders and teachers working with adult asylum seekers and refugees at study associations and folk high schools. We argue that the myth of the uniqueness of popular education is made up of three rhetorical figures that are mobilized by a range of actors legitimizing state support for popular education. The myth thus becomes a "tool" that commodifies popular education, that is, that turns the myth into monetary funds.

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 results of a descriptive case study of the Union School of the Chilean nongovernmental organization (NGO) Alejandro Lipschutz Institute of Science (ICAL-Spanish acronym). The study contributes to the field of adult education by providing a contemporary example of what Gramscian pedagogy can look like. Theoretically, this case contributes Latin American social movement-based analysis of neoliberalism, and its impact on the nature of work for working-class people. The study presents an example of educational praxis; the dialectical relationship between theory and educational practice that emerges from ICAL's efforts to advance the Chilean union movement's struggle to challenge neoliberalism through educational and leadership development work.

The article begins with the broad context of youth and adult education (YAE) in Colombia, and then discusses the place that educational demands occupy in the political plans of popular feminisms. The article ends with an analysis of the experiences of two community projects, which address YAE for women from the perspective of gender, feminisms, and popular education.