Selected Books & Manuals
A few of our favorite foundational books and manuals related to the history, theory, and application of popular education techniques for progressive organizing.
Arnold, Rick and Burke, Bev. A Popular Education Handbook: An educational experience taken from Central America and adapted to the Canadian context. CUSO-Development Education; Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Discusses philosophy, program examples in Central America and Canada, offers tools and group process exercises, and bibliography. Free digital copy on-line. http://persuasionsanddesigns.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/A_Popular_Education_Handbook.pdf
Boal, Augusto. Games for Actors and Non-Actors, translated by Adrian Jackson, Routledge. This classic work describes how theater can be used to address oppression and liberate everyone. It includes instructions for many types of exercises as part of “Theater of the Oppressed” and “Forum Theater,” as well as other dramatic formats.
Ellis, Pat, Getting the Community into the Act: 72 Participatory Activities for Field Workers and Trainers, University of the West Indies, Women and Development Unit (WAND), 1983.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Seabury Press. Freire is considered one, if not “the,” founder of popular education. This is his critique of traditional pedagogical methods and his argument for learners being co-creators of knowledge –a foundational principle of popular education.
Highlander Center. The HIghlander Education Team partnered with artist Gabriela Hurtado-Ramos to illustrate and simply explain the six educational methodologies at the heart of Highlander’s work: Popular Education, Cultural Organizing, Language Justice, Participatory Action Research, Intergenerational Organizing, and Land, Legacy and Place. Each section offers an inspiring painting, as well as a brief list of principles, practices and a few questions related to the methodology. This is available for free in Spanish and English at: https://highlandercenter.org/#
Hope, Anne and Timmel, Sally. Training for Transformation: A Handbook for Community Workers – Volumes 1-3, 1984, Gweru, Zimbabwe: Mambo Press. (Sally later published a 4th volume in 2020.) Anne and Sally were pioneer faith-rooted popular educators and organizers, first working with rural women in Kenya in 1974. By 1982, more than 50,000 people were participating in 2,000 groups using their methods. Today, their influence is global.
Jacobs, Dale, editor. The Miles Horton Reader: Education for Social Change, Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press. 2003. Horton co-founded the Highlander Folk School in 1932, a trail-blazing center for radical education and organizing of unemployed and working people in the South, and then in the 1950s, became an early beacon in the civil rights movement.
Kane, Liam, Popular Education and Social Change in Latin America, Latin American Bureau, 2000. This book explores one of the most successful social movements to use popular education – the Landless Rural Workers (MST) in Brazil and discusses the importance of using this approach in new social movements around identity.
Mayo, Marjorie, Community-based Learning and Social Movements, Popular Education in a Populist Age, Bristol University Press, 2020. This book has gotten praise for providing hope to activists, educators and popular educators working against the upsurge in populist governments and movements that have given rise to xenophobia and nativism.
Rappaport, Joanne, Cowards Don’t Make History: Orlando Fals Borda and the Origins of Participatory Action Research, Duke University Press, 2020. This book combines sociological and historical research to describe the process of Fals Borda and colleagues becoming researcher-activists with peasants in Columbia – and how their path-breaking work in PAR continues to be relevant today around the world.
VeneKlasen, Lisa with Valerie Miller. A New Weave of Power, People & Politics: The Action Guide for Advocacy and Citizen Participation. This 346-page treasure trove of easy to understand exercises and explanations runs the full spectrum of facilitation needs from understanding basic political and power dynamics, to crafting an advocacy strategy, to handling the basics involved in doing advocacy.