The Limitations and Potentialities of Popular Education Within an Imperial Context

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 11
  In Roundtable Session: Paulo Freire, Critical Pedagogy, and Emancipation Roundtable

Abstract

How does popular education work within an imperial context that systematically operates against it? A context-relevant, student-teacher, teacher-student centered learning process has been used as a crucial tool for wider societal transformation across the world. In the United States, this approach has become popular as well. Yet conducting popular education within the context of the United States is a difficult endeavor given that it is not a society engaged in a process of revolutionary social transformation. This paper reflects upon the history of a community organization in an American urban setting that has operated as a popular education community center for over 50 years and has survived in spite of multiple attempts against its existence.

Author

• Miguel E. Alvelo Rivera, University of Illinois at Chicago