Feminist Popular Education in Transnational Debates


Book Description

This book is a collection of grounded accounts by feminist popular educators reflecting critically on processes of collective learning andself- and social transformation in various geopolitical settings.The contributorsadd to the debateon the forging of feminist praxis today.




Community-based Learning and Social Movements


Book Description

The rise of Far Right populism poses major challenges for communities, exacerbating divisions, hate speech and hate crime. This book shows how communities and social justice movements can effectively tackle these issues, working together to mitigate their underlying causes and more immediate manifestations. Showing that community-based learning is integral to the development of strategies to promote more hopeful rather than more hateful futures, Mayo demonstrates how, through popular education and participatory action research, communities can develop their own understandings of their problems. Using case studies that illustrate education approaches in practice, she shows how communities can engineer democratic forms of social change.




Working the Margins of Community-Based Adult Learning


Book Description

This volume gathers stories about how various art and creative forms of expression are used to enable voices from the margins, that is, of underrepresented individuals and communities, to take shape and form. Voice is not enough; stories and truths must be heard, must be listened to. And so the stories gathered here also speak to how creative processes enable conditions for listening and the development of empathy for other perspectives, which is essential for democracy. The chapters, including some that describe international projects, illustrate a variety of art-making practices such as poetry, visual art, film, theatre, music, and dance, and how they can support individuals and groups at the edges of mainstream society to tell their story and speak their truths, often the first steps to valuing one’s identity and organizing for change. Some of the authors are community-based artists who share stories thus bringing these creative endeavors into the wider conversation about the power of arts-making to open up spaces for dialogue across differences. Art practices outlined in this book can expand our visions by encouraging critical thinking and broadening our worldview. At this time on the earth when we face many serious challenges, the arts can stimulate hope, openness, and individual and collective imaginations for preferred futures. Inspiration comes from people who, at the edges of their community, communicate their experience.




Feminism in Community


Book Description

The authors draw upon their earlier research examining how feminists have negotiated identity and learning in international contexts or multisector environments. Feminism in Community focuses on feminist challenges to lead, learn, and participate in nonprofit organizations, as well as their efforts to enact feminist pedagogy through arts processes, Internet fora, and critical community engagement. The authors bring a focused energy to the topic of women and adult learning, integrating insights of pedagogy and theory-informed practice in the fields of social movement learning, transformative learning, and community development. The social determinants of health, spirituality, research partnerships, and policy engagement are among the contexts in which such learning occurs. In drawing attention to the identity and practice of the adult educator teaching and learning with women in the community, the authors respond to gender mainstreaming processes that have obscured women as a discernible category in many areas of practice.




Feminism, Adult Education and Creative Possibility


Book Description

This book argues that feminist aesthetics as practices of adult education can inform our responses to gendered, racial, class and ecological injustices. It illustrates the critical, creative, and provocative pedagogical theorising, research, and engagement work of feminist adult educators and researchers who work in diverse community, institutional, and social movement contexts across North America and Europe. This book captures the complexity, diversity, energy, and imagination of those who theorise, decolonise, facilitate, investigate, visualize, story, and create within the politics of gender (in)justice and radical change.




Artistic Mentoring as a Decolonizing Methodology


Book Description

To expand the possibilities of “doing arts thinking” from a non-Eurocentric view, Artistic Mentoring as a Decolonizing Methodology: An Evolving Collaborative Painting Ethnography with Maya Artists Pedro Rafael González Chavajay and Paula Nicho Cúmez is grounded in Indigenous perspectives on arts practice, arts research, and art education. Mentored in painting for eighteen years by two Guatemalan Maya artists, Kryssi Staikidis, a North American painter and art education professor, uses both Indigenous and decolonizing methodologies, which involve respectful collaboration, and continuously reexamines her positions as student, artist, and ethnographer searching to redefine and transform the roles of the artist as mentor, historian/activist, ethnographer, and teacher. The primary purpose of the book is to illuminate the Maya artists as mentors, the collaborative and holistic processes underlying their painting, and the teaching and insights from their studios. These include Imagined Realism, a process excluding rendering from observation, and the fusion of pedagogy and curriculum into a holistic paradigm of decentralized teaching, negotiated curriculum, personal and cultural narrative as thematic content, and the surrounding visual culture and community as text. The Maya artist as cultural historian creates paintings as platforms of protest and vehicles of cultural transmission, for example, genocide witnessed in paintings as historical evidence. The mentored artist as ethnographer cedes the traditional ethnographic authority of the colonizing stance to the Indigenous expert as partner and mentor, and under this mentorship analyzes its possibilities as decolonizing arts-based qualitative inquiry. For the teacher, Maya world views broaden and integrate arts practice and arts research, inaugurating possibilities to transform arts education.




Women Who Stay Behind


Book Description

Women Who Stay Behind examines the social, educational, and cultural resources rural Mexican women employ to creatively survive the conditions created by the migration of loved ones. Using narrative, research, and theory, Ruth Trinidad Galván presents a hopeful picture of what is traditionally viewed as the abject circumstances of poor and working-class people in Mexico who are forced to migrate to survive. The book studies women’s and families’ use of cultural knowledge, community activism, and teaching and learning spaces. Throughout, Trinidad Galván provides answers to these questions: How does the migration of loved ones alter community, familial, and gender dynamics? And what social relations (convivencia), cultural knowledge, and women-centered pedagogies sustain women’s survival (supervivencia)? Researchers, educators, and students interested in migration studies, gender studies, education, Latin American studies, and Mexican American studies will benefit from the ethnographic approach and theoretical insight of this groundbreaking work.




Forty Years of the International Journal of Lifelong Education, Volume I


Book Description

Over the last forty years, the International Journal of Lifelong Education has become a global leader in the field of research on adult education and lifelong learning. Drawing extensively on articles published in the journal, scholars from Africa, Asia, North and South America, Australasia and Europe reflect in two volumes on how the field has evolved over four decades, and on the strengths and weaknesses of its contributions to knowledge. The first of two volumes, this book offers rich insights into the nature of lifelong education, its development over the forty years of the journal (and more), and what challenges the field will be called upon to address in the future. Chapters cover global trends that have influenced lifelong education; the nature of the field as reflected in publications, based on detailed quantitative analysis; why connection with radical social movements justifies continuing optimism in the field’s capacity to help make a better world; the nature of ethical practice in the field; neuroscience research’s significance for transformative learning theory; international organisations’ role; the importance of critical social theory; and Paulo Freire’s significance for the field. The two volumes will appeal to researchers, teachers and professionals in lifelong learning and adult education, as well as to those interested in the development of knowledge in fields of science and practice.




Participatory Visual Approaches to Adult and Continuing Education: Practical Insights


Book Description

Gain useful practical knowledge of participatory visual methods in adult and continuing education. Bringing together relevant theories and imaginative practices from formal and non-formal adult education contexts, this volume discusses: photo-story, digital storytelling, photovoice, filmmaking, and painting. Also discussed are ways to use fabric, fashion shows as political messages, and engaging adult learners at museums in participatory ways. This sourcebook bridges the theory and practice and seeks ways to provide adult education practitioners with practical insights into the methods of participatory visual approaches. This is the 154th volume of the Jossey Bass series New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education. Noted for its depth of coverage, it explores issues of common interest to instructors, administrators, counselors, and policymakers in a broad range of education settings, such as colleges and universities, extension programs, businesses, libraries, and museums.




Forging Solidarity


Book Description

Animating this book is a twofold question: In what ways are adult and popular educators responding to various harsh economic, political, cultural and environmental conditions? In doing so, are they planting seeds of hope for and imaginings of alternative futures which can connect individuals and communities locally and globally to achieve economic, ecological and social justice? The book illustrates how transformative politics of solidarity often involve actors across vastly different backgrounds. Solidarity is therefore a political relationship that is forged through particular struggles situated in place and time across power differentials. The authors put popular education to work by describing and analysing their strategies and approaches. They do so using accessible language and engaging styles. Popular education is a medium for dreaming, for imagining other futures. It is also essential for countering the wilful spreading of fake news and propagation of ignorance. Pedagogies of solidarity are necessary to building connections amongst people at a time when competitive individualism and alienation are rampant. Forging solidarity with and amongst communities is a means towards that end, and, indeed, an end in itself. “Corporate mines and agribusiness poison the water we drink, the air we breathe and the food we eat. Together with their political proxies they destroy the earth and her peoples – too many are killed because of their military, economic, religious and information wars. How do we stand up for ourselves and the earth that nourishes us against this global system? Forging Solidarity shares inspiring stories that feed our deep connection and power.” – Pregs Govender: Author of Love and Courage: A Story of Insubordination “Forging Solidarity is a critical and timely collective intervention that ponders, prods, pokes, and plays in the most generative ways. In so doing, it invites us to continue deepening our engagements with questions of responsibility and justice in relation to education everywhere.” – Richa Nagar, author of Muddying the Waters: Co-authoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism “This book inspires people to realize that not fighting against socio-economic injustices is to side with oppressors.” – Ntombi Nyathi, Programme Director of Training for Transformation