REVIEW OF THE MONTH

Popular Education forMovement Building: A Project South Resource Guide, Volume II. Georgia: Project South, 2001.

Project South is a broad-based, community-driven membershiporganization working in [or on] popular political and economic education andaction research for organizing and liberation. They develop indigenous populareducators and movement leaders from grassroots and scholar-activistbackgrounds, bringing them together on the basis of equality to engage inbuilding a bottom-up movement for social and economic justice.

Popular Education for Movement Building: A Project SouthResource Guide, Volume II is a populareducation tool. It is a gatheringof resources, experiences, ideas, lessons learned and visions that can aid inmovement-building work. In its pages you will find suggestions for leadingworkshops, resource materials that will lead you to more tools and information,as well as topic-based activities that have worked successfully in past ProjectSouth Popular Education Institute workshops.

This popular education workbook is written in an easy-to-useformat. The activities are well-designed lesson plans that are easy to adjustfor a variety of audiences. The authors actually advise to: “Use the tools inthis book as a beginning - then change and shape them into an educationalprocess that works for you. Popular education is only effective if it helps move people to deeperunderstanding and action for social change.”

In addition to offering a wealth of ideas and strategies formovement building and leadership development, the workbook provides valuabletraining information for workshop facilitators and community organizers. Thisworkbook is a wonderful blend of organizing strategies, methods for participatoryfacilitation, and leadership training. These three categories are discussedindividually and shown working together as a complementary unit. In short, thisworkbook contains the basic building blocks needed to effectively organize andeducate in a participatory manner. It is a musthave for anyone or anyorganization interested in popular education for movement-building.

(Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty& Genocide, 9 Gammon Avenue,Atlanta, Georgia 30315, 404-622-0602 , www.projectsouth.org)

- Review by KristiPapenfuss

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WHAT IS NEW IN THE COLLECTION?

We have recently added four newitems from Project South. Inaddition to Popular Education for Movement Building: A Project SouthResource Guide, Volume II reviewed above, we alsohave their three popular education toolkits. The topics of these loose-leaf binders containing materialsfor conducting a popular education-style workshop are 1) Today’sGlobalization, 2) Anatomy of a Movement: the Zapatistas, and 3) The PrisonIndustrial Complex. Other recent additions include TheRainbow of Desire: The Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy, an additional book by Boal onideas about theatre of the oppressed; Understanding the Free TradeArea of the Americas,a facilitator’s guide for a workshop; Building Community: A ToolKit for Youth & Adults in Charting Assets and Creating Change, a remarkably thorough and clearguide to initiating community organizing, youth-adult partnerships, andstrengthening community projects in progress; Lesbian, Gay,Bisexual, and Transgender Rights: A Human Rights Perspective - Human RightsEducation Series: Topic Book 3, the latest of the excellent resource books for educatingabout human rights from the Human Rights Resource Center.

We recently received notices fortwo new books on Popular Labor Education and have them on order. Watch for reviews of them in a futureissue of this newsletter.

The Catalyst Centre in Toronto hasrecently reprinted two classic general popular education manuals, CountingOur Victories: Popular Educationand Community Organizing and Naming the Moment (see their online bookstore at www.catalystcentre.ca/index.htmto order).

Big news for the collections isthat we have finally added the materials in Spanish to our database so they areaccessible on the web site. Alsoannotations of many of the books by Paulo Freire have been added in bothEnglish and Spanish.

Reminder: Detailsabout the materials mentioned in this newsletter, including links to sources tobuy them, can be found on www.americas.org(follow the popular education link on the home page)

QUOTES FROM FOLKS ABOUT POPULAR EDUCATION

“For me, popular education isa strong movement to recognize that everyone has knowledge to share. Educationas it is, there are professionals who know everything and there are people whohave to learn everything. That’s not true. There are people who have never been in school but they know a lot.They have experience, they are surviving, and they know how to work. They knowa lot.” (Sandra Moran quoted in Counting Our Victories, p. 4)

“This workshop helpedtransform my sense of being alone and isolated in my work to a new appreciationof working with others who themselves are facing similar problems. I’ve gainedconfidence, self-esteem, new energy, new knowledge, and new friends. I havegained confidence in being able to tackle work that lay ahead.” (Quoted in Educatingfor a Change, p. 166)

LINKS TO POPULAR EDUCATION WEB SITES AND ONLINEBOOKSTORES (*those with onlinebookstores)

*Catalyst Centre (www.catalystcentre.ca/index.htm)

*Highlander Center (www.highlandercenter.org )

*Institute for PeoplesEducation and Action

(www.peopleseducation.org/ )

*Resource Center of theAmericas (www.americas.org )

Project South (www.projectsouth.org )

North American Alliance forPopular and Adult Education

(www.naapae.org )

Center for Popular Educationand Participatory Research (www-gse.berkeley.edu/research/pepr/)

PopularEducation Links Directory

(www.flora.org/mike/links/poped.html)

“WHAT IS POPULAREDUCATION?” DEFINITION OF THE MONTH

POPULAR EDUCATION: WHAT IS IT?* Educación Popular or Popular Education forms part of a current in adulteducation which has been described as 'an option for the poor' or 'educationfor critical consciousness'. Most of the methodology and techniques of populareducation are also those of adult education. But while many adult educationprograms are designed to maintain social systems, even when unjust andoppressive, popular education's intent is to build an alternative educationalapproach that is more consistent with social justice.

Popular Education is called 'popular' because its priority is to workamong the many rural and urban poor who form the vast majority of people inmost Third World countries. It is a collective or group process of education,where the teacher and students learn together, beginning with the concreteexperience of the participants, leading to reflection on that experience inorder to effect positive change.

*We have chosen to formulate the definition primarily in terms of who is taught. Other ways of defining the term relate to what is taught or the objectives…or the characteristics of popular education. - From Rick Arnold andBev Burke in A Popular Education Handbook