Critical Pedagogy and Popular Education: Towards A Unity of Theory and Practice

Studies in the Education of Adults
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Critical pedagogy and popular education: towards

a unity of theory and practice
Noelle Wiggins
To cite this article: Noelle Wiggins (2011) Critical pedagogy and popular education:
towards a unity of theory and practice, Studies in the Education of Adults, 43:1, 34-49, DOI:
10.1080/02660830.2011.11661602
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34 Studies in the Education of Adults Vol. 43, No. 1, Spring 2011
Critical pedagogy and popular

education: towards a unity of
theory and practice
NOELLE WIGGINS
Multnomah County Health Department, USA
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 20:35 06 August 2017
Abstract
In critical and feminist educational circles there has been a lively debate between
those who call for more emphasis on contextualisation and concrete practices and
those who defend a more generalised view of critical pedagogy. The unceasing
march of corporate globalisation and neoliberalism make it absolutely urgent that
educators and organisers dedicated to social justice find ways to work together to
increase our effectiveness and extend our fields of action. Popular education, which
shares histor ical roots with critical pedagogy, can help to resolve some of the endur-
ing dilemmas of critical pedagogy and increase its ability to achieve its goals. In this
paper, the author locates herself within the field of popular education and provides
an introduction to its philosophy/methodology. Next, she reviews what popular edu-
cation has to offer in terms of relevant language, concrete practices, and opportuni-
ties to experience changed social relations, providing examples from her own prac-
tice. Finally, she proposes a synthesis of the two philosophies/practices, which can
be brought about through increased dialogue and joint action between critical and
popular educators.
Hope is well founded only when it grows out of the unity between action that transforms
the world and critical reflection regarding the meaning of that action (Freire, 1978, p. 60)
Introduction
For more than twenty years, a lively debate has been taking place within critical and
feminist educational circles between those who call for more emphasis on context,
more discussion of specific educational practices, and greater accessibility of lan-
guage (Bowers, 1991; Ellsworth, 1989; Gore, 1993, 2003; Lather, 1998), and those who
defend a more generalised vision of critical education (McLaren and Farahmandpur,
2005) and resist calls for accessible language (Giroux, 1992) Popular education, which
sprang from many of the same roots as critical pedagogy but which has historically
occupied a position closer to communities affected by oppression and maintained a
Niace_studies 43(1)_04_Wiggins.indd 34 5/3/2011 2:28:32 PM

Critical pedagogy and popular education 35
stricter focus on practice (Choules, 2007), has the potential to help resolve many of
the enduring dilemmas of critical pedagogy.
Events around the world make it absolutely urgent that educators and organisers
dedicated to social justice find ways to work together to increase our effectiveness
and extend our fields of action. Corporate globalisation, responsible in the 1990s for
forcing farmers in many parts of the developing world to abandon their land and move
to the cities to find work (Asociación Equipo Maíz, 2003), was more recently blamed
for historically low rates of job creation in the US (Folbre, 2011) The ‘structural read-
justment’ techniques rehearsed in Latin America in the 1990s have now made their
way to the industrialised world, where they threaten to increase already soaring rates
of joblessness among young women in the UK (Stewart and Syal, 2011) Deportation
of undocumented immigrants in the US reached an all-time high in 2010 (Vedantam,
2010), while in Arizona, a Mexican-American ethnic studies programme that has fos-
tered retention of students in school was recently declared illegal (Lacey, 2011) This
situation is likely to get worse. In the UK, funding for the English classes that help new
immigrants get jobs will be cut (Helm, 2011) In the US, newly emboldened Republican
state lawmakers are pushing anti-immigrant laws in 15 states, drug testing of welfare
recipients in four states, and constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage
in four more (Blow, 2011) Events like these create an urgent need for effective, pract-
ical strategies that can develop political awareness and commitment to action among
large masses of people, while at the same time respecting their unique cultures and
traditions and integrating these differences into efforts to create a different world.
My goal in this paper is to show how insights from popular education can contrib-
ute to critical pedagogy and make it more effective in its aim of creating a more just
and equitable society. I begin by locating myself within the field of popular educa-
tion and provide a brief introduction to popular education, considering some of its
historical roots, propose a working definition and briefly introduce critical pedagogy,
primarily to draw distinctions between the two. The most substantive portion of the
paper discusses what popular education can offer towards a resolution of some of the
enduring dilemmas and criticisms of critical pedagogy and for this I draw on examples
from my own practice. The next section suggests concrete ways in which popular and
critical educators can work together for common goals. To conclude, I reflect on some
of the difficulties implicit in this project.
Locating myself
Although I had read Freire in college, I learned to practise popular education while
working in a rural, conflictive area of El Salvador between 1986 and 1990. As a volun-
teer with a non-governmental organisation, I helped to train and support promotores
de salud (known in English as Community Health Workers1) Later, we also initiated
a literacy programme. Thus, my conception of popular education is most strongly
influenced by the particular expression of the philosophy/methodology developed by
popular organisations in Central America in the 1980s.
After returning to the U.S., I practised popular education principally in the context
of health promotion projects in both rural and urban settings and in a variety of com-
munities. Currently, I direct the Community Capacitation Center (CCC), a health-pro-
motion programme that is part of a large county health department. I also teach mas-
ters- and doctoral-level university courses in both Education and Public Health using

36 Noelle Wiggins
popular education as my educational paradigm and methodology. In 2007 I was inter-

ested in learning how popular education in Latin America had changed since 1990, and
I spent two months working with Educación Popular en Salud (EPES) in Chile and
two months participating with the Landless Rural Workers Movement in Brazil.
My experience of popular education has several implications. My location for the
last eight years within a government bureaucracy means that, like Mayo (1999) and
Freire (2003) before me, I have been attempting to use popular education within the
existing system to change that system. Finally, as a non-Latin American, I speak and
write from the position of Other vis-á-vis the particular version of popular education
which has had the strongest influence on my own practice.
What is popular education?

The term popular education is derived from the Spanish educación popular (or edu-
cação popular in Portuguese) In Latin America, the definition of popular education has
changed as the connotations of the word ‘popular’ have changed. The phrase popular
education had its origins in efforts to laicise and universalise elementary education,
which were undertaken by Liberal Latin American governments after independence
and which were inspired by similar efforts in Europe. As Bralich (1994) points out,
these early efforts were strongly influenced by the Europeanising currents prevalent
among upper class Latin Americans of the 19th century. These currents character-
ised the ‘popular classes’, which were composed largely of indigenous people and the
descendents of African slaves, as completely lacking in culture and desperately in need
of the civilising influences of European-inspired formal education (Burns, 1980)
By the early 20th century, the influence of Marxism resulted in students in several
Latin American countries setting up ‘popular universities’ to provide instruction in
a wide variety of subjects and exposure to socialist practices such as self-criticism
(Gómez and Puiggrós, 1986a) In Peru, for example, university students were respon-
sible for the creation of the Universidad Popular Gonzalez Prada, which had as its
goal ‘the education of the popular sectors for the project of liberation’ (Gómez and
Puiggrós, 1986a, p. 83)2
The term educación popular was also applied to efforts to promote socialist edu-
cation and universal literacy undertaken by political and military leaders during the
early 20th century (Gómez and Puiggrós, 1986a) In Mexico, Lázaro Cárdenas ener-
getically promoted the creation of socialist schools during his time as governor of the
state of Michoacán and later as president of the republic (Becker, 1995) The role that
Cárdenas assigned to primary and secondary school teachers – to teach adults to read
and write and mobilise them to take advantage of land reform – prefigured the role
that Paulo Freire would envision three decades later. Motivated by his belief that all
his soldiers should know how to read and write, Nicaraguan anti-imperialist leader
Augusto Sandino established the Academy of El Chipote in 1926 (Gómez and Puiggrós,
1986a) The Academy emphasised the importance of improving practice through col-
lective reflection in which officers and soldiers participated as equals.
This is the legacy that Paulo Freire inherited when he began his work in adult
literacy in northeastern Brazil in the 1950s. Freire’s biography has been addressed in
a number of sources (e.g. Kane, 2001), and his thought and practice thoroughly expli-
cated in numerous books and articles (e.g. Wallerstein and Bernstein, 1988) and his
own prolific writings (Freire, 1973, 1978, 1985, 1990, 2003) In relation to the current

argument, two aspects of Freire’s thought and work are particularly germane: his
eclecticism and his international influence.
While Freire was predisposed to a variety of thinkers there is general agreement
that his most important influences were liberation theology and a particular brand of
humanist, idealist Marxism which drew deeply on Hegel (Mayo, 1999) For Marxists
like Youngman (1986), Freire’s eclecticism – specifically, his combining of Christianity
with Marxism – was his downfall, the thing that prevented him from constructing the
sort of consistent socialist pedagogy to which Youngman aims. I would like to posit
that, on the contrary, the eclecticism that was already part of popular education and
which Freire strengthened is precisely the characteristic that can allow popular edu-
cation to facilitate a rapprochement between critical pedagogy and some of its critics,
and make it relevant and useful to people striving for social justice.
The actual and potential international scope of popular education is the second
of Freire’s significant contributions to popular education. Both indirectly, by influen-

cing a generation of young people growing up under colonialism (Macedo, 2003), and
directly, through his work in places like Guinea-Bissau and his ‘conversation’ books
with people like Myles Horton, (Freire, 1978; Horton and Freire, 1990), Paulo Freire
took popular education beyond its home base in Latin America and made it a truly glo-
bal philosophy/methodology. It is now common to see allusions to Freire in research
emanating from places as far-flung as Canada (Travers, 1997), Norway (Aambo, 1997),
Senegal (Aubel, Touré and Diagne, 2003), and Taiwan (Chang, L., Li, I., and Liu, C.,
2004), along with more expected settings in Latin America (Wiggins, in press).
During Freire’s lifetime popular education became intimately connected to a vari-
ety of social and revolutionary movements; this association has continued since Freire’s
death in 1997. Following the triumph of the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979, the Sandinista
government launched a massive adult literacy campaign based on popular education
principles (Gómez and Puiggrós, 1986b) It has also been widely used in health promo-
tion programmes like the ones in which I worked. Popular education programmes
undertaken by El Salvador’s Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation (FMLN)
recalled Augusto Sandino’s efforts to teach his soldiers to read and write between bat-
tles (Hammond, 1998) More recently, Mexico’s Zapatistas and Brazil’s Landless Rural
Workers’ Movement have used popular education extensively in their efforts to raise
consciousness and organise people to reclaim their rights (Kane, 2001).
In the U.S., educator and organiser Myles Horton (2003) eventually adopted the
name ‘popular education’ to describe the work he had begun in the Cumberland
Mountains of Tennessee in the 1920s. Horton’s Highlander Research and Education
Center (formerly, the Highlander Folk School), founded in 1932, has helped to prepare
generations of activists and organisers, among them, Dr Martin Luther King and Rosa
Parks. In the industrialised world generally, popular education has been used in the
context of labour organising, ESL education, and movements for immigrants’ rights
(Wallerstein and Auerbach, 2004; Cho et al., 2004).
Popular educators’ engagement with the state is not new, although it has increased
since the fall of repressive dictatorships and the installation of (more or less) represent-
ative democracies in Latin America (Kane, 2007) In collaboration with the government
of President João Goulart, Paulo Freire was in the midst of the first large-scale imple-
mentation of his literacy methods when the military coup in Brazil forced him to flee
(Gadotti, 1994) Later, he became Secretary of Education for the city of São Paulo. More
recently, Brazil’s MST has worked out agreements with public universities through

38 Noelle Wiggins
which MST militants can enter the university together and study as cohorts, supporting
one another ideologically and socially (Pinheiro, personal communication, 2007) Such
cooperation between popular and state education is not unique to Brazil, but rather
is occurring in other parts of Latin America (Kane, 2007) My own experience using
popular education within a university setting as well as that of educators in the UK and
elsewhere (Crowther, Galloway, and Martin, 2005) suggest that this endeavour can be
highly rewarding for students, teachers and communities outside the academy.
There is no one definition of popular education, however, a working definition is
necessary to speak meaningfully about the philosophy/methodology and differentiate
it from other systems of thought and education. I conceptualise popular education
as a philosophy and methodology that seeks to bring about more just and equitable
social, political, and economic relations by creating settings in which people who
have historically lacked power can discover and expand their knowledge and use it
to eliminate societal inequities. Because of its emphasis on the capacity of members

of oppressed groups to author their own destiny, popular education eschews polit-
ical and pedagogical dogmatism (Gómez and Puiggrós 1986a), and maintains a shift-
ing, sometimes uneasy relationship to hierarchical political parties and organisations.
Values such as compassion, discipline, and love for the cause of the people are at the
heart of popular education (Caldart, 2004) Methods such as dinámicas (social learn-
ing games), sociodramas (social skits), brainstorming, simulations, and problem-posing
are important in popular education not only because they increase participation, but
also because they embody the values of popular education and prefigure the type of
society popular educators aim to create.
What is critical pedagogy?

My intention in this section is to briefly explain the origins of critical pedagogy and
delineate it from popular education. In The Critical Pedagogy Reader, Darder et al.
(2003) state that critical pedagogy ‘evolved out of a yearning to give some shape and
coherence to the theoretical landscape of radical principles, beliefs, and practices that
contributed to an emancipatory ideal of democratic schooling in the United States dur-
ing the twentieth century’ (p. 2) Three aspects of that statement are especially key to
my stated intent. First, unlike popular education, which developed and has remained
largely in the arena of practice, critical pedagogy grew out of a desire to bring coher-
ence to theory. Second, the focus of critical pedagogy is on democratic schooling, e.g.
public education. While early definitions of popular education did refer to elementary
education for all, the majority of popular education work still occurs outside of pub-
lic education settings. Finally, the authors link the origins of critical pedagogy to the
US (and specifically to Henry Giroux, in a 1983 book) Clearly, critical pedagogy has
moved far beyond those origins; the term is now used in Latin America (Chiesa and
Fracolli, 2007), Australia (Choules, 2007), and around the world, and radical educators
from the US, such as Peter McLaren, have developed loyal followings in Latin America
(http://www.fundacionmclaren.com/) Nonetheless, the origins of critical pedagogy
still mark it as primarily a phenomenon of the industrialised world, and specifically,
the ‘Western academy’ (Choules, 2007).
Popular education and critical pedagogy occupy largely separate realms in the
US. As proof I would offer the following: first, whereas academics in the UK have
produced books such as Popular Education: Engaging the Academy (Crowther

et al., 2005), there has been very little consideration of popular education as a discip-
line or topic of study within academia in the US, beyond a relatively small group of aca-
demics working in community colleges in and around New York City (Kramer, 2007;
Shor, 1992) Second, standard texts and readers about critical pedagogy published in
the US do not mention popular education as such (Darder et al., 2003; Kincheloe,
2005) Third, a search in EBSCOHost using the terms ‘critical pedagogy’ and ‘popular
education’ revealed only one article coming out of the US that referenced both topics,
and the article actually concerned work undertaken in Brazil (Barlett, 2005) Finally,
if critical pedagogues in the US are aware of the insights offered by popular educa-
tion, they are not accessing them. For example, in an excellent article that references
critical pedagogy, Ochoa and Pineda (2008) describe problems they encountered in
a class when they attempted to give voice to all students and de-privilege academic
knowledge. While they eventually found solutions, I would submit that using popular
education as the paradigm for the class could have helped to balance participation and
reinforce the importance of experiential knowledge from the start. Thus, while I am
not saying that critical pedagogues and popular educators never talk to one another, I
am saying that more attention to popular education by critical pedagogues could pro-
duce multiple benefits. I will develop this thesis further in the next section.
What does popular education have to offer?

The dilemmas of critical pedagogy
Since critical pedagogy was first recognised as a discipline in the 1980s (Darder et al.,
2003), successive generations of critical educators and their detractors have raised a
series of questions about how to achieve its aims. As someone coming to the critical
educational discourses after a life spent in the practice of popular education, I would
suggest that popular education holds some of the answers, if the questioners are
willing to look outside academia. In the three sections that follow, I will show what
popular education has to offer in terms of relevant language, concrete practices, and
opportunities to experience changed social relations. Because I share Lather’s (1998)
resistance to totalising discourses and Ellsworth’s (1997) suspicion of ‘The One with
the ‘right’ Story’ (p. 137), I do not pretend that the solutions of popular education are
the only solutions. They are, rather, possible solutions, worthy of consideration based
on their demonstrated success in other contexts and situations.
Relevant language3
One of the most common criticisms of critical pedagogy from within radical educa-
tional circles is the inaccessibility of its language (Bowers, 1991; Darder et al., 2003;
Schrag, 1988) Critical educators have responded to these objections by accusing the
critics of underestimating the ability of classroom teachers and other non-academics
to read and understand complex language. Giroux (1992) states that the critics have
set up a binary opposition between clarity and complexity that assumes a universal
definition of clarity, oversimplifies the politics of representation, and erases people
and constituencies by denying that there are different ways of communicating. Other
critical educators have been more open to exploring the ways in which their location
within the academy can seduce them ‘into obscurity of language’ and make their work
‘inaccessible to those in, or near, the front line of struggle’ (McLaren and Leonard,
1993, p. 6)

40 Noelle Wiggins
Regarding the language of critical pedagogy, my experience of community-based

educators confronting academic discourses is not that we can’t understand them;
rather, it is that, unless we can see their value, we usually don’t want to. By making the
willingness to deal with complicated discourses the price of entering the critical peda-
gogical circle, many potential allies are excluded. That being said, I am sympathetic
to Giroux’s (1992) claim that in some cases, new language forms are needed to jar us
out of the complacency of our existing paradigms and allow us to think new thoughts.
Community-based educators will struggle with complex language if it is relevant to
our lives and our practice. Thus, I am not arguing against complexity per se, but rather
against the needless complexity which exists only to gain credibility within the acad-
emy. Further, if we are going to evaluate an educational system based on its ‘potential
for mounting an effective counterhegemonic project,’ (McLaren and Farahmandpur,
2005, p. 21), then we need to seriously question the value of a discourse which will be
read and understood by only a tiny fraction of the population.

What does popular education have to offer towards the resolution of this dilemma?
Consistent with the value that it places on life experience and the knowledge that
already exists in a community, popular education also values the multiplicity of ways
in which people express that life experience, and does not hold them to particular
standards of discourse. The idea of the importance of the language of a given com-
munity is at the heart of Freire’s (2003) method of problem-posing, which seeks to
discover the most evocative concepts and words in a community context and use
those words as the basis for literacy instruction. True, Freire himself was not always
consistent in his dedication to the language of the community or to linguistic rele-
vance. When he wrote his letters to the revolutionary leaders of Guinea-Bissau in the
mid 1970s, Freire (1978) endorsed the use of the language of the coloniser for literacy
instruction. However, by the time of his conversations with Uruguayan educators in
1990, Freire was encouraging educators to show respect for ‘popular syntax’ as an
essential aspect of showing respect for popular culture. While Freire (1990) agreed
that children needed to learn ‘the dominant syntax in order to better fight the domi-
nators,’ he also recognised that ‘it is impossible to speak of the topic of language with-
out bringing with it the question of power’ (p. 88)
One of popular education’s attributes is its ability to make complicated topics and
concepts understandable without oversimplifying or talking down to learners. For
example, health educators throughout the developing world are familiar with the
book, Where There is No Doctor (Werner with Thuman and Maxwell, 2003), a man-
ual based on popular education principles that uses pictures and relevant language
to support Community Health Workers (CHWs) to diagnose and treat common ill-
nesses. Many North American health educators were introduced to popular education
through comic-book style novelas that teach topics like HIV/AIDS. Using the metaphor
of a river, my co-worker Teresa Rios-Campos has developed a variety of participatory
and kinaesthetic activities to explain to CHWs the physiological mechanisms underly-
ing diabetes. Demonstrating very specifically how popular education can be used to
raise awareness and foment action around some of the issues to which I alluded earlier
in this paper, the team of university-trained economists and popular educators at El
Salvador’s Equipo Maíz developed a series of engaging booklets on topics like privati-
sation, free trade, globalisation, and neoliberalism (e.g. Asociación Equipo Maíz, 2003)
As well as teaching around the country using these materials, Equipo Maíz staff also
developed shortened versions which have been included in daily and weekly news-
papers. These materials and approaches provide just a few examples of how both the

concepts and the messages of critical pedagogy could be made available to a broader
audience through popular education methods.
Concrete practices
In discussing some of the materials that popular educators use to communicate com-
plex ideas in relevant ways, I’ve started to address the way in which popular education
can strengthen critical pedagogy through the addition of concrete practices designed
to achieve the common aims of both pedagogies. Along with the inaccessibility of
their language, perhaps the most common criticism of critical educators is that they
tell teachers what they should or must do, but tell them almost nothing at all about
how to do it (Ellsworth, 1989; Gore, 1993) Based on her definition of pedagogy as ‘the
process of knowledge production,’ Gore (1993) states that those within the Giroux/
McLaren strand of critical pedagogy do not really practice pedagogy but rather edu-
cational theory intended to help (or at least incite) teachers to develop their own
pedagogies. (Gore makes a distinction between this strand and the Freire/Shor strand,
which she says is more practice-oriented.)
I am aware that an emphasis on concrete practice runs the risk of reinforcing a
common criticism of popular education, namely, that it has too often been reduced
to a methodology and denuded of its political content (Aronowitz, 1993; Kane, 2001)
There are certainly multiple examples of the misuse of the methods of popular educa-
tion. However, I disagree with Aronowitz (1993) that the idea of a ‘liberating meth-
odology’ is necessarily paradoxical, and believe that a focus on practices does not
necessarily preclude a focus on principles.
Before proceeding, I would like to offer three additional caveats. First, the effects I
attribute to the practices I describe below are anecdotal and need to be tested empir-
ically. Second, I do not mean to suggest that a certain practice alone will always lead
to a certain result, as many factors influence the impact of specific practices. Finally,
genuinely practicing popular education requires continually rededicating oneself
to its principles. Whether a specific practice will contribute to a specific outcome
depends to a large degree on the intent of the practitioner.
To show how a focus on practices can grow out of a focus on principles, and to
begin to identify some of the specific practices that popular educators use to achieve
our goals, I will describe a practice that my co-workers and I developed for our intro-
ductory workshops on popular education. We use this practice with a wide variety of
groups and most find it useful; some participants comment that although they have
read about popular education, they never really knew how to use it until exposed to
this metaphor.
We use the metaphor of ‘The House of Popular Education’ (see Figure 1) The House
has been through a variety of iterations in both content and form; currently, it is a
6-foot by 5-foot (approximately 2-metre x 1.7-metre) outline of a house printed on a
plastic material that can be rolled up for easy transport. The House is divided into
foundation stones, which run horizontally, pillars, which run vertically, and the roof.
Metaphorically, the foundation stones are the main ideas or principles of popular edu-
cation, the pillars are the methods, and the roof is the goal. When participants ini-
tially see the House, it is an empty outline. During the course of the workshop, we
introduce the main ideas, which are printed on horizontal strips, and attach them to
the House. For the most part, we introduce one method along with one main idea,
but we explain that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between principles
and practices and many methods can be used to support or achieve many principles.

42 Noelle Wiggins
The goal
A just and equal society
Problem posing
Dramatisations
Demonstration
Brainstorming
Sociodramas
and practice
Cooperative
Simulations
Evaluations
Dinámicas
learning
Games
Songs
We should constantly seek input to improve our teaching.
Education should be immediately applicable to our daily reality.
We all learn more when everyone participates.
Education should help people identify and solve community problems.
We need opportunities to see and reflect on reality.
We learn more when we are having fun.
We learn more when we experience something as reality.
We all learn more when we are actively involved.
We all know a lot. We should always start with what people know.
We learn more when we are comfortable with our fellow-learners.
Having introduced a principle and a practice, we then use that practice to enhance
participants’ knowledge of popular education.
An example should serve to illuminate the process. One principle of popular
education is that we all learn better when we feel comfortable and at ease with
our fellow-learners. Popular educators use a variety of practices to develop trust
and begin to establish equality among participants. Probably the most common are
dinámicas. These are sometimes conflated in English with icebreakers but the com-
parison is not apt and is usually unhelpful. Dinámicas are social learning experi-
ences. They can be short or long, simple or complex, and can involve lots of move-
ment or none at all.
A dinámica well known throughout Latin America is called, Piña y Naranja
(Pineapple and Orange) where participants sit in a circle. The facilitator stands in
the centre of the circle, points to a participant, and says either piña or naranja. If
s/he says piña, the participant must say the name of the person on her/his right. If
the facilitator says naranja, the participant must say the name of the person on her/
his left. If a participant says the wrong name, s/he comes to the centre and becomes
the facilitator. When the facilitator is satisfied that everyone knows their neighbours’
names (or alternately, gets tired of facilitating), s/he says, canasta revuelta (‘mixed-up

basket’) and everyone must move to another chair and learn the names of those on
her/his right and left. After conducting the dinámica, we always ask participants
whether they feel differently now than they did before the activity. Almost invariably,
the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. When we ask participants how they feel differently,
common answers include ‘I feel more relaxed,’ ‘I know people’s names,’ and ‘I feel
more awake.’ The key point is that when we probe further, participants frequently
comment on how laughing and acting ‘childlike’ serves to equalise differential levels
of power between participants.
Popular educators use a variety of other practices to accomplish particular object-
ives. Practices designed to draw out what people know, think or feel include a variety of
forms of brainstorming and storytelling. Practices designed to share new information
range from radio plays to the aforementioned comic books. Practices such as sociodra-
mas (unscripted skits planned and enacted by facilitators), photos and pictures are used
to represent or problematise reality. These practices are closely tied to and often used
along with practices designed to identify problems and their causes such as problem-
posing. Methods such as simulations give participants the opportunity to experience a
situation as reality so that they can identify and reflect on the physical and emotional
reactions that go along with the experience. Pursuant to Freire and other popular
educators’ dictum that we must constantly reflect and improve on our own practice,
popular educators use methods such as group evaluations. Around all these practices
there is the praxis of moving from action (current practice) to reflection (theory build-
ing) to action (new practice informed by theory) (For a much fuller description see
Wallerstein and Auerbach, 2004.) By adopting these methods, critical educators could
respond meaningfully to their critics and strengthen their own practice.
Changed social relations

Popular education can also assist critical pedagogy to achieve the need for people to
experience changed social relations. According to Youngman (1986), ‘If hegemony is
the result of lived social relationships and not simply the dominance of ideas, then the
experience inherent in educational situations (i.e. the totality of knowledge, attitudes,
values and relationships) is as significant as the purely intellectual content’ (p. 105)
For Youngman, the social relations of the educational situation should prefigure the
new society we are attempting to build, since ‘to change their consciousness, people
need both different ideas and different experiences’ (p. 71 emphasis in the original)
Giroux (1992) echoes this sentiment when he writes that ‘critical pedagogy needs to
be informed by a public philosophy defined, in part, by the attempt to create the lived
experience of empowerment for the vast majority’ (p. 73), and that ‘educators need to
understand more fully how people learn through concrete social relations’ (p. 77).
Through the practices mentioned above, and others like them, popular education
allows participants to experience changed social relations and thus come to a differ-
ent understanding and expectation of reality. The emphasis on changed social rela-
tions is grounded in the idea, explicated by Freire (2003), that in order for oppressed
and marginalised people to truly take control over their/our lives (rather than sim-
ply exchanging one master for another), they/we must evict the oppressor who lives
within them/us and come to see themselves/ourselves as wise and capable subjects.4
Freire explains at length why this cannot occur if revolutionary leaders (read: educa-
tors) adopt the same methods of indoctrination formerly used by the oppressors and
simply change the message.

44 Noelle Wiggins
Most fundamentally, popular educators attempt to contradict the negative messages

oppressed people receive about their level of knowledge by consistently and genuinely
valuing the knowledge participants bring and establishing an atmosphere of absolute
equality in the educational setting. (This is not inimical to helping participants dis-
cover how their knowledge may be influenced by hegemonic forces. Good popular
educators will do this as well.) Reflecting on her own experience a Community Health
Worker interviewed for a recent study crystallised the sense of equality at the core of
popular education, saying, ‘in popular education nobody is talking . . . down [at you];
we’re speaking to you, we’re all on the same level pretty much’ (Wiggins et al., 2009).
While a variety of popular education practices contribute to the experience of
changed social relations, many are dependent on the behaviour of the teacher. The
appropriate role of the teacher in popular education is controversial, with some peo-
ple stressing the need to break completely with traditional models of the teacher as
sources of knowledge (Gómez and Puiggrós, 1986a) while others encourage popular
educators to accept that, while they will necessarily transmit cultural values, they
have a choice about which values they will select (Bralich, 1994).
This controversy notwithstanding, many popular educators observe certain decep-
tively simple practices that reinforce the equality of the educational setting. (I will
remind the reader again that whether the practices actually reinforce that equality
will depend on whether the educator is truly willing to share power.) These include
accepting all ideas without judgment, arranging chairs in a circle, not privileging some
remarks or participants over others, and writing down what participants say in lan-
guage that is as close to their own as possible. I unconsciously adopted the practice of
squatting or kneeling down from time to time when I am facilitating and I have since
seen other popular educators do the same thing. Participants made me conscious of
the effect of this practice when they commented that it helped to reinforce the prin-
ciple that I did not have greater authority simply because I was facilitating. Another
facilitator behaviour that can strengthen the group’s ability to act collectively is the
practice of resisting making decisions for the group, even apparently simple ones such
as when to break for lunch. Similarly, when asked a question, popular educators will
often turn the question back to the group, only sharing their opinions or thoughts
after the group has had an opportunity to speak. In sum, popular education offers
valuable examples of how to make language relevant without being reductionist, how
to embody theoretical principles through concrete practices, and how to create egali-
tarian social relations in educational settings.
Recommendations for joint action

Part of the unity of theory and practice which I am calling for will be achieved in indi-
vidual classrooms, as more university-based radical educators adopt the methods and
attitudes of popular education into their practice. Another significant opportunity for
achieving a unity of theory and practice, and thus furthering a social justice agenda,
lies in research projects conducted jointly by community-based educators, commu-
nity members, and radical educators located in universities. We already have excellent
models of collaborative practice in the field of public health, where community-based
participatory research (CBPR) is gaining increasing attention and credibility. Growing
out of many of the same roots as popular education (Minkler, 2005), CBPR is based
on a poststructuralist epistemology which views the knowledge of any particular
group (academics, community members, service providers) as partial, and thus seeks

to involve all interested stakeholders as equal partners in conducting research (Israel

et al., 1998). Addressing the underlying causes of problems and working for social
justice are overt goals of CBPR.
While it bears some relation to the action research models prevalent in the field
of education, CBPR differs from action research in significant ways. Whereas action
research is primarily a model for researchers (including classroom teachers) to engage in
research to solve specific, localised problems of practice (Wallerstein and Duran, 2003),
CBPR has become recognised as a credible research paradigm that can be applied on a
large scale to problems of national significance. Within recent years, both the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health have issued
major ‘requests for proposals’ that require a demonstrated commitment to the princi-
ples of CBPR. In addition, major foundations including W.K. Kellogg and the California
Endowment are increasingly funding major CBPR initiatives and programmes. CBPR
has been applied to health issues as diverse as breast cancer, arthritis management,
and tobacco cessation, and used in concert with popular education (Farquhar, Michael
and Wiggins, 2005; Wiggins et al., 2009). In 2001, the Community-Based Public Health
Caucus of the American Public Health Association was formed to promote community
involvement in research and further development of the CBPR model. Organisations
such as Community-Campus Partnerships for Health present conferences and bring
together advocates of the model to strategise about its future development.
Radical educators based in universities working with community-based popular
educators could apply models like CBPR to achieve a common agenda. Just as it is being
applied to the problem of racial/ethnic inequities in health, CBPR could be applied
to analogous problems in the field of education, most notably the ‘equity gap’ (also
referred to as ‘the achievement gap’) that exists between Anglo-European students
and students of colour. Part of the reason that popular education is relatively unknown
in mainstream educational circles in the industrialised world is the relative paucity of
academically credible research and peer-reviewed publications concerning the meth-
odology, although that body of research is growing (Wiggins, in press). University-
based radical educators could help to increase the visibility of popular education by
working with community-based educators to identify pertinent research questions and
appropriate methodologies for exploring these questions, and then jointly implement-
ing projects, analyzing data, and reporting results. At the same time, radical educators
could respond to the criticism that ‘there have been no sustained research attempts
to explore whether or how the practices [critical pedagogy] prescribes actually alter
specific power relations outside or inside schools’ (Ellsworth, 1989, p. 301). Again,
useful lessons could be learned from academics in the field of public health, who have
already created new theoretical constructions of empowerment and applied and eval-
uated these constructions in concrete situations (Eng and Parker, 1994; Wallerstein,
2002; Wallerstein and Bernstein, 1988, 1994; Wiggins, 2010).
Conclusion
I have attempted to show how a synthesis with popular education could strengthen
critical pedagogy and bridge some of the divisions that separate radical educators.
There are a number of difficulties inherent in the project of harmonising critical
pedagogy and popular education. The main ones concern the epistemology and sites
of practice of the two philosophies/practices. Popular education is grounded in the
idea that the wisdom gained through life experience is in no way inferior (and in

46 Noelle Wiggins
some cases is superior) to the knowledge gained through formal study. One of Freire’s
(2003) insights, echoed later by feminist epistemologists (Alcoff and Potter, 1993), was
that the powerful had so dominated epistemology that they had actually been able to
define knowledge and ignorance to their own benefit. This insight is profoundly at
odds with the ‘will to knowledge’ that, according to Gore (2003), is at the heart of
much academic discourse, regardless of its political bent. A second, closely related
difficulty is that critical pedagogy takes place primarily within universities, whereas a
fundamental principle of popular education is the de-privileging of knowledge gained
in these settings.
Harmonising popular education and critical pedagogy also requires a softening
of the anti-intellectualism that I have noted amongst some popular educators. It will
require popular educators to give up the view of academics as necessarily out of touch
with the realities of lives in communities. Popular educators have to develop an appre-
ciation of how theoretical frameworks can advance our own practice and also increase
our ability to promote our methodology (and thus our ideological goals) to a broader
audience. The project will also require that critical educators within academia commit
the truly revolutionary epistemological act of admitting and accepting that no know-
ledge is necessarily superior to any other, that the knowledge gained through formal
study is no better than the knowledge gained through caring for children or harvest-
ing corn or building houses, and that all types of knowledge are equally needed in the
construction of a better world.
Acknowledgement
I would like to express my sincere thanks to Heather Burns, Francisco (Pancho)
Argüelles Paz y Puente, and Eunice Cho for carefully reading the entire text and
offering important insights, comments and suggestions. Stephanie Farquhar pro-
vided useful input on the section which deals with participatory research. I would
also like to acknowledge the assistance of two anonymous reviewers, who offered
valuable comments and suggestions. Finally, deep appreciation goes to Ramin
Farahmandpur, who generously provided the contacts, consultation (and tutorial
credit!) without which this article could not have been written, and to Teresa Rios-
Campos, my long-time collaborator, compañera de trabajo, and hermana. While
expressing my appreciation to my colleagues, I, of course, take full responsibility
for any flaws in the text.
Notes
1 Community Health Workers are carefully chosen community members who pro-
mote health and social justice in their own communities. Their professionalism is
based on their life experience rather than on formal training (Giblin, 1989)
2 Translations from the Spanish are by the author.
3 I am indebted to Francisco Argüelles Paz y Puente for pointing out that the issue is
not “accessible” language but rather “relevant” language.
4 I’ve adopted this rather cumbersome pronoun usage because, while I am sympa-
thetic to Martin’s (2001) point that we all need to reflect on how we are affected
by hegemony, I also do not want to understate my privilege as a white, formally
educated, middle class, able-bodied, North American person.

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Critical Pedagogy and Popular Education: Towards A Unity of Theory and Practice

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Studies in the Education of Adults

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Critical pedagogy and popular education: towards

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Download by: [Universite Laval] Date: 06 August 2017, At: 20:35

Critical pedagogy and popular

Niace_studies 43(1)_04_Wiggins.indd 34 5/3/2011 2:28:32 PM

Niace_studies 43(1)_04_Wiggins.indd 35 5/3/2011 2:28:32 PM

popular education as my educational paradigm and methodology. In 2007 I was inter-

What is popular education?

Niace_studies 43(1)_04_Wiggins.indd 36 5/3/2011 2:28:32 PM

of Freire’s significant contributions to popular education. Both indirectly, by influen-

Niace_studies 43(1)_04_Wiggins.indd 37 5/3/2011 2:28:32 PM

to eliminate societal inequities. Because of its emphasis on the capacity of members

What is critical pedagogy?

Niace_studies 43(1)_04_Wiggins.indd 38 5/3/2011 2:28:33 PM

What does popular education have to offer?

Niace_studies 43(1)_04_Wiggins.indd 39 5/3/2011 2:28:33 PM

Regarding the language of critical pedagogy, my experience of community-based

read and understood by only a tiny fraction of the population.

Niace_studies 43(1)_04_Wiggins.indd 40 5/3/2011 2:28:33 PM

Niace_studies 43(1)_04_Wiggins.indd 41 5/3/2011 2:28:33 PM

Education should be immediately applicable to our daily reality.

We all learn more when everyone participates.

Education should help people identify and solve community problems.

We need opportunities to see and reflect on reality.

We learn more when we are having fun.

We learn more when we experience something as reality.

We all learn more when we are actively involved.

We learn more when we are comfortable with our fellow-learners.

Niace_studies 43(1)_04_Wiggins.indd 42 5/3/2011 2:28:34 PM

Changed social relations

Niace_studies 43(1)_04_Wiggins.indd 43 5/3/2011 2:28:34 PM

Most fundamentally, popular educators attempt to contradict the negative messages

Recommendations for joint action

Niace_studies 43(1)_04_Wiggins.indd 44 5/3/2011 2:28:34 PM

to involve all interested stakeholders as equal partners in conducting research (Israel

Niace_studies 43(1)_04_Wiggins.indd 45 5/3/2011 2:28:34 PM

Niace_studies 43(1)_04_Wiggins.indd 46 5/3/2011 2:28:34 PM

Niace_studies 43(1)_04_Wiggins.indd 47 5/3/2011 2:28:35 PM

Niace_studies 43(1)_04_Wiggins.indd 48 5/3/2011 2:28:35 PM

Niace_studies 43(1)_04_Wiggins.indd 49 5/3/2011 2:28:35 PM

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