Explorations of Personal and Collective Transformation
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WE LEARN 2009
WOMEN LEARNERS BECOMING LEADERS: EXPLORATIONS OF PERSONAL AND COLLECTIVE TRANSFORMATION
Abstract: The purpose of this presentation is to foster dialogue, share stories, and generate insights about how community women who come together as adult learners are moved to collectively take action for change. Group discussion will be followed by writing stories that address key themes from the discussion.
Presenters: Janise Hurtig & Meghan Wells
Presenters' Comments:
Related Resources:
Comments/Questions:
SUMMARY
This session focused on the values and techniques of popular education as tools that can be utilized in adult educational settings to stimulate meaningful learning and promote leadership and community action.
The presenters, Janise Hurtig and Meghan Wells, discussed their work with writing circles and adult education programs in IL, giving examples of ways in which students have used opportunities to practice their writing while contributing to personal transformation and social change. They explained that adult learners who don’t see initially themselves as writers and researchers can become empowered as change agents through community-based participatory action research, popular education, and writing for change. For examples, learners formed into action research and evaluation teams in their community, held public forums where they shared their writing, and these programs created the time and space for people who don’t usually have a chance to write to become writers.
The concept of “popular education” comes from Latin American liberation movements and particularly from Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator. Freire believed that the ability to read and write can be either a source of oppression or empowerment, depending upon how it happens. He advocated the need to be able to read both “the word” and “the world.” He demonstrated that education is always political, and developed the pedagogy of the oppressed – a libratory approach to education that is distinct from – the opposite of – the “empty vessel” or “banking” approach to education.
Popular education calls us to ask, “Are you teaching to liberate or objectify people? To teach people to be free and empowered or cogs in a wheel?” The aim is to create agency in every person in the room through processes of learning that comes from learners’ own experiences, interests, needs, and priorities. Consciousness-raising is a core component of popular education, promoting an awareness of oneself as the change agent in one’s own life. Through consciousness-raising, learners come to find universal themes in sharing the experiences of one person. It allows us to see ourselves as “the experts of our own lives”, which is a significant shift away from the dominant tendency to seeing as others as experts over us.
We discussed some specific approaches to integrate popular education into adult literacy situations, such as:
- personal narrative writing and publishing
- community-based and participatory action research
- student-generated themes guide selection of readings and writing assignments
- using reading, writing, and telling stories to critically examine our own lives
- studying history to understand our present struggles and our role in them
- studying current events through critical reading of media and production of written responses
- problem–posing ~ a problem is identified from the group with the belief that “we are the experts”; the group is tasked with breaking down the problem, identifying possible actions to remedy it, considering what would the consequences be, etc.
To close the session, each participant was asked to participate in a writing exercise in which we described (through narrative, poetry, diagrams, etc.) the process by which we have seen a woman we know become empowered as a leader – whether in her own life, in her classroom, her family, community, etc. Several inspiring stories were shared, in which we could identify universal themes of popular education as part of what propelled these women to leadership and action.
