Studies in the Education of Adults Vol. 43, No.

1, Spring 2011

Critical pedagogy and popular education: towards a unity of theory and practice
NOLLE WIGGINS

Multnomah County Health Department, USA

Abstract
In critical and feminist educational circles there has been a lively debate between those who call for more emphasis on contextualisation and concrete practices and those who defend a more generalised view of critical pedagogy. The unceasing tnarch of corporate globalisation and neoliberalism make it absolutely urgent that educators and organisers dedicated to social justice find ways to work together to increase our effectiveness and extend our fields of action. Popular education, which shares historical roots with critical pedagogy, can help to resolve some of the enduring dilemmas of critical pedagogy and increase its ability to achieve its goals. In this paper, the author locates herself within the field of popular education and provides an introduction to its philosophy/methodology. Next, she reviews what popular education has to offer in terms of relevant language, concrete practices, and opportunities to experience changed social relations, providing examples from her own practice. Finally, she proposes a synthesis of the two philosophies/practices, which can be brought about through increased dialogue and joint action between critical and popular educators.
Hope is well founded only when it grows out of the unity between action that transforms the world and critical reflection regarding the meaning ofthat action (Freir, 1978, p. 60)

Introduction
For more than twenty years, a lively debate has been taking place within critical and feminist educational circles between those who call for more emphasis on context, more discussion of specific educational practices, and greater accessibility of language (Bowers, 1991; Ellsworth, 1989; Gore, 1993, 2003; Lather, 1998), and those who defend a more generalised vision of critical education (McLaren and Farahmandpur, 2005) and resist calls for accessible language (Giroux, 1992) Popular education, which sprang from many of the same roots as critical pedagogy but which has historically occupied a position closer to communities affected by oppression and maintained a

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stricter focus on practice (Choules, 2007), has the potential to help resolve many of the enduring dilemmas of critical pedagogy. Events around the world make it absolutely urgent that educators and organisers dedicated to social justice find ways to work together to increase our effectiveness and extend our fields of action. Corporate globalisation, responsible in the 1990s for forcing farmers in many parts of the developing world to abandon their land and move to the cities to find work (Asociacin Equipo Maz, 2003), was more recently blamed for historically low rates of job creation in the US (Folbre, 2011) The structural readjustment' techniques rehearsed in Latin America in the 1990s have now made their way to the industrialised world, where they threaten to increase already soaring rates of joblessness among young women in the UK (Stewart and Syal, 2011) Deportation of undocumented immigrants in the LIS reached an all-time high in 2010 (Vedantam, 2010), while in Arizona, a Mexican-American ethnic studies programme that has fostered retention of students in school was recently declared illegal (Lacey, 2011) This situation is likely to get worse. In the UK, funding for the English classes that help new immigrants get jobs will be cut (Helm, 2011) In the US, newly emboldened Republican state lawmakers are pushing anti-immigrant laws in 15 states, drug testing of welfare recipients in four states, and constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage in four more (Blow, 2011) Events like these create an urgent need for effective, practical strategies that can develop political awareness and commitment to action among large masses of people, while at the same time re.specting their unique cultures and traditions and integrating these differences into efforts to create a different world. My goal in this paper is to show how insights from popular education can contribute to critical pedagogy and make it more effective in its aim of creating a more just and equitable society. I begin by locating myself within the field of popular education and provide a brief introduction to popular education, considering some of its historical roots, propose a working definition and briefly introduce critical pedagogy, primarily to draw distinctions between the two. The most substantive portion of the paper discusses what popular education can offer towards a resolution of some of the enduring dilemmas and criticisms of critical pedagogy and for this I draw on examples from my own practice. The next section suggests concrete ways in which popular and critical educators can work together for common goals. To conclude, I reflect on some of the difficulties implicit in this project.

Locating myself
Although I had read Freir in college, I learned to practise popular education while working in a rural, conflictive area of El Salvador between 1986 and 1990. As a volunteer with a non-governmental organisation, 1 helped to train and support promotores de saiud (known in English as Community Health Workers') Later, we also initiated a literacy programme. Thus, my conception of popular education is most strongly influenced by the particular expression of the philosophy/methodology developed by popular organisations in Central America in the 1980s. After returning to the U.S., I practised popular education principally in the context of health promotion projects in both rural and urban settings and in a variety of communities. Currently, I direct the Community Capacitation Center (CCC), a health-promotion programme that is part of a large county health department. I also teach masters- and doctoral-level university courses in both Education and Public Health using

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popular education as my educational paradigm and methodology In 2007 1 was interested in learning how popular education in Latin America had changed since 1990, and I spent two months working with Educacin Popular en Salud (EPES) in Chile and two months participating with the Landless Rural Workers Movement in Brazil. My experience of popular education has several implications. My location for the last eight years within a government bureaucracy means that, like Mayo (1999) and Freir (2003) before me, I have been attempting to use popular education within the existing system to change that system. Finally, as a non-Latin American, I speak and write from the position of Other vis-a-vis the partictilar version of popular education which has had the strongest influence on my own practice.

What is popular education?

The term popular education is derived from the Spanish educacin popular (or educaopopular in Portuguese) In Latin America, the definition of popular education has changed as the connotations of the word 'popular' have changed. The phrase popular education had its origins in efforts to laicise and universalise elementary education, which were undertaken by Liberal Latin American governments after independence and which were inspired by similar efforts in Europe. As Brauch (1994) points out, these early efforts were strongly influenced by the Europeanising currents prevalent among upper class Latin Americans of the 19th century These currents characterised the popular classes', which were composed largely of indigenous people and the descendents of African slaves, as completely lacking in culture and desperately in need of the civilising influences of European-inspired formal education (Burns, 1980) By the early 20th century, the influence of Marxism resulted in students in several Latin American countries setting up popular universities' to provide instruction in a wide variety of subjects and exposure to socialist practices such as self-criticism (Gmez and Puiggrs, 1986a) In Peru, for example, university students were responsible for the creation of the Universidad Popular Gonzalez Prada, which had as its goal the education of the popular sectors for the project of liberation' (Gmez and Puiggrs, 1986a, p. 83)^ The term educacin popular was also applied to efforts to promote socialist education and universal literacy undertaken by political and military leaders during the early 20th century (Gmez and Puiggrs, 1986a) In Mexico, Lzaro Crdenas energetically promoted the creation of socialist schools during his time as governor of the state of Michoacn and later as president of the republic (Becker, 1995) The role that Crdenas assigned to primary and secondary school teachers - to teach adults to read and write and mobilise them to take advantage of land reform - prefigured the role that Paulo Freir would envision three decades later. Motivated by his belief that all his soldiers should know how to read and write, Nicaraguan anti-imperialist leader Augusto Sandino established the Academy of El Chipote in 1926 (Gmez and Puiggrs, 1986a) The Academy emphasised the importance of improving practice through collective reflection in which officers and soldiers participated as equals. This is the legacy that Paulo Freir inherited when he began his work in adult literacy in northeastern Brazil in the 1950s. Freire's biography has been addressed in a number of sources (e.g. Kane, 2001), and his thought and practice thoroughly explicated in numerous books and articles (e.g. Wallerstein and Bernstein, 1988) and his own prolific writings (Freir, 1973, 1978, 1985, 1990, 2003) In relation to the current

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argument, two aspects of Freire's thought and work are particularl'y germane: his eclecticism and his international influence. While Freir was predisposed to a variety of thinkers there is general agreement that his most important influences were liberation theology and a particular brand of humanist, idealist Marxism which drew deeply on Hegel (Mayo, 1999) For Marxists like Youngman (1986), Freire's eclecticism - specifically, his combining of Christianity with Marxism - was his downfall, the thing that prevented him from constructing the sort of consistent socialist pedagogy to which Youngman aims. I would like to posit that, on the contrary, the eclecticism that was already part of popular education and which Freir strengthened is precisely the characteristic that can allow popular education to facilitate a rapprochement between critical pedagogy and some of its critics, and make it relevant and useful to people striving for social justice. The actual and potential international scope of popular education is the second of Freire's significant contributions to popular education. Both indirectly, by influencing a generation of young people growing up under colonialism (Macedo, 2003), and directly, through his work in places like Guinea-Bissau and his conversation' books with people like Myles Horton, (Freir, 1978; Horton and Freir, 1990), Paulo Freir took popular education beyond its home base in Latin America and made it a truly global philosophy/methodology. It is now common to see allusions to Freir in research emanating from places as far-flung as Canada (Travers, 1997), Norway (Aambo, 1997), Senegal (Aubel, Tour and Diagne, 2003), and Taiwan (Chang, L., Li, I., and Liu, C, 2004), along with more expected settings in Latin America (Wiggins, in press). During Freire's lifetime popular education became intimately connected to a variety of social and revolutionary movements; this association has continued since Freire's death in 1997. Following the triumph of the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979, the Sandinista government launched a massive adult literacy campaign based on popular education principles (Gmez and Puiggrs, 1986b) It has also been widely used in health promotion programmes like the ones in which I worked. Popular education programmes undertaken by El Salvador's Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN) recalled Augusto Sandino's efforts to teach his soldiers to read and write between battles (Hammond, 1998) More recently, Mexico's Zapatistas and Brazil's Landless Rural Workers' Movement have used popular education extensively in their efforts to raise consciousness and organise people to reclaim their rights (Kane, 2001). In the U.S., educator and organiser Myles Horton (2003) eventually adopted the name popular education' to describe the work he had begun in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee in the 1920s. Horton's Highlander Research and Education Center (formerly, the Highlander Folk School), founded in 1932, has helped to prepare generations of activists and organisers, among them, Dr Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. In the industrialised world generally, popular education has been used in the context of labour organising, ESL education, and movements for immigrants' rights (Wallerstein and Auerbach, 2004; Cho et al., 2004). Popular educators' engagement with the state is not new, although it has increased since the fall of repressive dictatorships and the installation of (more or less) representative democracies in Latin America (Kane, 2007) In collaboration with the government of President Joo Goulart, Paulo Freir was in the midst of the first large-scale implementation of his literacy methods when the military coup in Brazil forced him to flee (Gadotti, 1994) Later, he became Secretary of Education for the city of Sao Paulo. More recently, Brazil's MST has worked out agreements with public universities through

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which MST militants can enter the university together and study as cohorts, supporting one another ideologically and socially (Pinheiro, personal communication, 2007) Such cooperation between popular and state education is not unique to Brazil, but rather is occurring in other parts of Latin America (Kane, 2007) My own experience using popular education within a university setting as well as that of educators in the UK and elsewhere (Crowther, Galloway and Martin, 2005) suggest that this endeavour can be highly rewarding for students, teachers and communities outside the academy. There is no one definition of popular education, however, a working definition is necessary to speak meaningfully about the philosophy/methodology and differentiate it from other systems of thought and education. I conceptualise popular education as a philosophy and methodology that seeks to bring about more just and equitable social, political, and economic relations by creating settings in which people who have historically lacked power can discover and expand their knowledge and use it to eliminate societal inequities. Because of its emphasis on the capacity of members of oppressed groups to author their own destiny, popular education eschews political and pedagogical dogmatism (Gmez and Puiggrs 1986a), and maintains a shiftitig, sometimes uneasy relationship to hierarchical political parties and organisations. Values such as compassion, discipline, and love for the cause of the people are at the heart of popular education (Caldart, 2004) Methods such as dinmicas (social learning games), sociodramas (social skits), brainstorming, simulations, and problem-posing are important in popular education not only because they increase participation, but also because they embody the values of popular education and prefigure the type of society popular educators aim to create.

What is critical pedagogy?

My intention in this section is to briefly explain the origins of critical pedagogy and delineate it from popular education. In The Critical Pedagogy Reader, Darder et al. (2003) state that critical pedagogy evolved out of a yearning to give some shape and coherence to the theoretical landscape of radical principles, beliefs, and practices that contributed to an emancipatory ideal of democratic schooling in the LInited States during the twentieth century' (p. 2) Three aspects of that statement are especially key to my stated intent. First, unlike popular education, which developed and has remained largely in the arena of practice, critical pedagogy grew out of a desire to bring coherence to theory. Second, the focus of critical pedagogy is on democratic schooling, e.g. public education. While early definitions of popular education did refer to elementary education for all, the majority of popular education work still occurs outside of public education settings. Finally the authors link the origins of critical pedagogy to the US (and specifically to Henry Giroux, in a 1983 book) Clearly critical pedagogy has moved far beyond those origins; the term is now used in Latin America (Chiesa and FracoUi, 2007), Australia (Choules, 2007), and around the world, and radical educators from the US, such as Peter McLaren, have developed loyal followings in Latin America (http://www.fundacionmclaren.com/) Nonetheless, the origins of critical pedagogy still mark it as primarily a phenomenon of the industrialised world, and specifically, the Western academy' (Choules, 2007). Popular education and critical pedagogy occupy largely separate realms in the US. As proof I would offer the following: first, whereas academics in the UK have produced books such as Popular Education: Engaging the Academy (Crowther

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et al., 2005), there has been very little consideration of popular education as a discipline or topic of study within academia in the US, beyond a relatively small group of academics working in community colleges in and around New York City (Kramer, 2007; Shor, 1992) Second, standard texts and readers about critical pedagogy published in the US do not mention popular education as such (Darder et al., 2003; Kincheloe, 2005) Third, a search in EBSCOHost using the terms 'critical pedagogy' and 'popular education' revealed only one article coming out of the US that referenced both topics, and the article actually concerned work undertaken in Brazil (Barlett, 2005) Finally, if critical pedagogues in the US are aware of the insights offered by popular education, they are not accessing them. For example, in an excellent article that references critical pedagogy, Ochoa and Pineda (2008) describe problems they encountered in a class when they attempted to give voice to all students and de-privilege academic knowledge. While they eventually found solutions, I would submit that using popular education as the paradigm for the class could have helped to balance participation and reinforce the importance of experiential knowledge/rom the start. Thus, while I am not saying that critical pedagogues and popular educators never talk to one another, I am saying that more attention to popular education by critical pedagogues could produce multiple benefits. I will develop this thesis further in the next section.

What does popular education have to offer? The dilemmas of critical pedagogy
Since critical pedagogy was first recognised as a discipline in the 1980s (Darder et al., 2003), successive generations of critical educators and their detractors have raised a series of questions about how to achieve its aims. As someone coming to the critical educational discourses after a life spent in the practice of popular education, I would suggest that popular education holds some of the answers, if the questioners are willing to look outside academia. In the three sections that follow, I will show what popular education has to offer in terms of relevant language, concrete practices, and opportunities to experience changed social relations. Because I share Lather's (1998) resistance to totalising discourses and Ellsworth's (1997) suspicion of The One with the right' Story' (p. 137), I do not pretend that the solutions of popular education are the only solutions. They are, rather, possible solutions, worthy of consideration based on their demonstrated success in other contexts and situations.

Relevant language^
One of the most common criticisms of critical pedagogy from within radical educational circles is the inaccessibility of its language (Bowers, 1991; Darder el ai, 2003; Schrg, 1988) Critical educators have responded to these objections by accusing the critics of underestimating the ability of classroom teachers and other non-academics to read and understand complex language. Giroux (1992) states that the critics have set up a binary opposition between clarity and complexity that assumes a universal definition of clarity, oversimplifies the politics of representation, and erases people and constituencies by denying that there are different ways of communicating. Other critical educators have been more open to exploring the ways in which their location within the academy can seduce them into obscurity of language' and make their work inaccessible to those in, or near, the front line of struggle' (McLaren and Leonard, 1993, p. 6)

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Regarding the language of critical pedagogy, my experience of community-based educators confronting academic discourses is not that we can't understand them; rather, it is that, unless we can see their value, we usually don't want to. By making the willingness to deal with complicated discourses the price of entering the critical pedagogical circle, many potential allies are excluded. That being said, I am sympathetic to Giroux's (1992) claim that in some cases, new language forms are needed to jar us out of the complacency of our exi.sting paradigms and allow us to think new thoughts. Community-based educators will struggle with complex language if it is relevant to our lives and our practice. Thus, I am not arguing against complexity per se, but rather against the needless complexity which exists only to gain credibility within the academy. Further, if we are going to evaluate an educational system based on its potential for mounting an effective counterhegemonic project,' (McLaren and Farahmandpur, 2005, p. 21), then we need to seriously question the value of a discourse which will be read and understood by only a tiny fraction of the population. What does popular education have to offer towards the resolution of this dilemma? Consistent with the value that it places on life experience and the knowledge that already exists in a community, popular education also values the multiplicity of ways in which people express that life experience, and does not hold them to particular standards of discourse. The idea of the importance of the language of a given community is at the heart of Freire's (2003) method of problem-posing, which seeks to discover the most evocative concepts and words in a community context and use those words as the basis for literacy instruction. True, Freir himself was not always consi.stent in his dedication to the language of the community or to linguistic relevance. When he wrote his letters to the revolutionary leaders of Guinea-Bissau in the mid 1970s, Freir (1978) endorsed the use of the language of the coloniser for literacy instruction. However, by the time of his conversations with Uruguayan educators in 1990, Freir was encouraging educators to show respect for popular syntax' as an essential aspect of showing respect for popular culture. While Freir (1990) agreed that children needed to learn the dominant syntax in order to better fight the dominators,' he also recognised that it is impossible to speak of the topic of language without bringing with it the question of power' (p. 88) One of popular education's attributes is its ability to make complicated topics and concepts understandable without oversimplifying or talking down to learners. For example, health educators throughout the developing world are familiar with the book. Where There is No Doctor (Werner with Thuman and Maxwell, 2003), a manual based on popular education principles that uses pictures and relevant language to support Community Health Workers (CHWs) to diagnose and treat common illnesses. Many North American health educators were introduced to popular education through comic-book style noveias that teach topics like HIV/AIDS. Using the metaphor of a river, my co-worker Teresa Rios-Campos has developed a variety of participatory and kinae.sthetic activities to explain to CHWs the physiological mechanisms underlying diabetes. Demonstrating very specifically how popular education can be used to raise awareness and foment action around some of the issues to which I alluded earlier in this paper, the team of university-trained economists and popular educators at El Salvador's Equipo Maz developed a series of engaging booklets on topics like privatisation, free trade, globalisation, and neoliberalism (e.g. Asociacin Equipo Maz, 2003) As well as teaching around the country using these materials. Equipo Maz staff also developed shortened versions which have been included in daily and weekly newspapers. These materials and approaches provide just a few examples of how both the

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concepts and the messages of critical pedagogy could be made available to a broader audience through popular education methods. Concrete practices In discussing some of the materials that popular educators use to communicate complex ideas in relevant ways, I've started to address the way in which popular education can strengthen critical pedagogy through the addition of concrete practices designed to achieve the common aims of both pedagogies. Along with the inaccessibility of their language, perhaps the most common criticism of critical educators is that they tell teachers what they should or must do, but tell them almost nothing at all about how to do it (Ellsworth, 1989; Gore, 1993) Based on her definition of pedagogy as the process of knowledge production,' Gore (1993) states that those within the Giroux/ McLaren strand of critical pedagogy do not really v^cuce pedagogy but rather educational theory intended to help (or at least incite) teachers to develop their own pedagogies. (Gore makes a distinction between this strand and the Freire/Shor strand, which she says is more practice-oriented.) I am aware that an emphasis on concrete practice runs the risk of reinforcing a common criticism of popular education, namely, that it has too often been reduced to a methodology and denuded of its political content (Aronowitz, 1993; Kane, 2001) There are certainly multiple examples of the misuse of the methods of popular education. However, I disagree with Aronowitz (1993) that the idea of a liberating methodology' is necessarily paradoxical, and believe that a focus on practices does not necessarily preclude a focus on principles. Before proceeding, I would like to offer three additional caveats. First, the effects I attribute to the practices I describe below are anecdotal and need to be tested empirically. Second, I do not mean to suggest that a certain practice alone will always lead to a certain result, as many factors influence the impact of specific practices. Finally, genuinely practicing popular education requires continually rededicating oneself to its principles. Whether a specific practice will contribute to a specific outcome depends to a large degree on the intent of the practitioner. To show how a focus on practices can grow out of a focus on principles, and to begin to identify some of the specific practices that popular educators use to achieve our goals, I will describe a practice that my co-workers and I developed for our introductory workshops on popular education. We use this practice with a wide variety of groups and most find it useful; some participants comment that although they have read about popular education, they never really knew how to use it until exposed to this metaphor. We use the metaphor of 'The House of Popular Education' (see Figure 1) The House has been through a variety of iterations in both content and form; currently, it is a 6-foot by 5-foot (approximately 2-metre x 1.7-metre) outline of a house printed on a plastic material that can be rolled up for easy transport. The House is divided into foundation stones, which run horizontally, pillars, which run vertically, and the roof. Metaphorically, the foundation stones are the main ideas or principles of popular education, the pillars are the methods, and the roof is the goal. When participants initially see the House, it is an empty outline. During the course of the workshop, we introduce the main ideas, which are printed on horizontal strips, and attach them to the House. For the most part, we introduce one method along with one main idea, but we explain that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between principles and practices and many methods can be used to support or achieve many principles.

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Noeiie Wiggins

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Having introduced a principle and a practice, we then use that practice to enhance participants' knowledge of popular education. An example should serve to illuminate the process. One principle of popular education is that we all learn better when we feel comfortable and at ease with our fellow-learners. Popular educators use a variety of practices to develop trust and begin to establish equality among participants. Probably the most common are dinmicas. These are sometimes conflated in English with icebreakers but the comparison is not apt and is usually unhelpful. Dinmicas are social learning experiences. They can be short or long, simple or complex, and can involve lots of movement or none at all. A climimica well known throughout Latin America is called. Pina y Naranja (Pineapple and Orange) where participants sit in a circle. The facilitator stands in the centre of the circle, points to a participant, and says either yjm or naranja. If s/he says pina, the participant must say the name of the person on her/his right. If the facilitator says naranja, the participant must say the name of the person on her/ his left. If a participant says the wrong name, s/he comes to the centre and becomes the facilitator. When the facilitator is satisfied that everyone knows their neighbours' names (or alternately, gets tired of facilitating), s/he says, canasta revuelta ('mixed-up

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basket') and everyone must move to another chair and learn the names of those on her/his right and left. After conducting the dinmica, we always ask participants whether they feel differently now than they did before the activity. Almost invariably, the answer is a resoutiding yes'. When we ask participants how they feel differently, common answers include I feel more relaxed,' I know people's names,' and 'I feel more awake.' The key point is that when we probe further, participants frequently comment on how laughing and acting childlike' serves to equalise differential levels of power between participants. Popular educators use a variety of other practices to accomplish particular objectives. Practices designed to draw out what people know, think or feel include a variety of forms of brainstorming and storytelling. Practices designed to share new information range from radio plays to the aforementioned comic books. Practices such as sociodramas (unscripted skits planned and enacted by facilitators), photos and pictures are used to represent or problematise reality. These practices are closely tied to and often used along with practices designed to identify problems and their causes such as problemposing. Methods such as simulations give participants the opportunity to experience a situation as reality so that they can identify and reflect on the physical and emotional reactions that go along with the experience. Pursuant to Freir and other popular educators' dictum that we must constantly reflect and improve on our own practice, popular educators use methods such as group evaluations. Around all these practices there is xhc praxis of moving from action (current practice) to reflection (theory building) to action (new practice informed by theory) (For a much fuller description see Wallerstein and Auerbach, 2004.) By adopting these methods, critical educators could respond meaningfully to their critics and strengthen their own practice. Changed social relations Popular education can also assist critical pedagogy to achieve the need for people to experience changed social relations. According to Youngman (1986), If hegemony is the result of lived social relationships and not simply the dominance of ideas, then the experience inherent in educational situations (i.e. the totality of knowledge, attitudes, values and relationships) is as significant as the purely intellectual content' (p. 105) For Youngman, the social relations of the educational situation should prefigure the new society we are attempting to build, since to change their consciousness, people need both different ideas and different experiences' (p. 71 emphasis in the original) Giroux (1992) echoes this sentiment when he writes that critical pedagogy needs to be informed by a public philosophy defined, in part, by the attempt to create the lived experience of empowerment for the vast majority' (p. 73), and that educators need to understand more fully how people learn through concrete social relations' (p. 77). Through the practices mentioned above, and others like them, popular education allows participants to experience changed social relations and thus come to a different understanding and expectation of reality. The emphasis on changed social relations is grounded in the idea, explicated by Freir (2003), that in order for oppressed and marginalised people to truly take control over their/our lives (rather than simply exchanging one master for another), they/we must evict the oppressor who lives within them/us and come to see themselves/ourselves as wise and capable subjects."* Freir explains at length why this cannot occur if revolutionary leaders (read: educators) adopt the same methods of indoctrination formerly used by the oppressors and simply change the message.

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Most fundamentally, popular educators attempt to contradict the negative messages oppressed people receive about their level of knowledge by consistently and genuinely valuing the knowledge participants bring and establishing an atmosphere of absolute equality in the educational setting. (This is not inimical to helping participants discover how their knowledge may be influenced by hegemonic forces. Ciood popular educators will do this as well.) Reflecting on her own experience a Community Health Worker interviewed for a recent study crystallised the sense of equality at the core of popular education, saying, in popular education nobody is talking...down [at you]; we're speaking to you, we're all on the same level pretty much' (Wiggins et al., 2009). While a variety of popular education practices contribute to the experience of changed social relations, many are dependent on the behaviour of the teacher. The appropriate role of the teacher in popular education is controversial, with some people stressing the need to break completely with traditional models of the teacher as sources of knowledge (Gmez and Puiggrs, 1986a) while others encourage popular educators to accept that, while they will necessarily transmit cultural values, they have a choice about which values they will select (Brauch, 1994). This controversy notwithstanding, many popular educators observe certain deceptively simple practices that reinforce the equality of the educational setting. (I will remind the reader again that whether the practices actually reinforce that equality will depend on whether the educator is truly willing to share power.) These include accepting all ideas without judgment, arranging chairs in a circle, not privileging some remarks or participants over others, and writing down what participants say in language that is as close to their own as possible. I unconsciously adopted the practice of squatting or kneeling down from time to time when I am facilitating and I have since seen other popular educators do the same thing. Participants made me conscious of the effect of this practice when they commented that it helped to reinforce the principle that I did not have greater authority simply because I was facilitating. Another facilitator behaviour that can strengthen the group's ability to act collectively is the practice of resisting making decisions for the group, even apparently simple ones such as when to break for lunch. Similarly, when asked a question, popular educators will often turn the question back to the group, only sharing their opinions or thoughts after the group has had an opportunity to speak. In sum, popular education offers valuable examples of how to make language relevant without being reductionist, how to embody theoretical principles through concrete practices, and how to create egalitarian social relations in educational settings.

Recommendations for joint action

Part of the unity of theory and practice which I am calling for will be achieved in individual classrooms, as more university-based radical educators adopt the methods and attitudes of popular education into their practice. Another significant opportunity for achieving a unity of theory and practice, and thus furthering a social justice agenda, lies in research projects conducted jointly by community-based educators, community members, and radical educators located in universities. We already have excellent models of collaborative practice in the field of public health, where community-based participatory research (CBPR) is gaining increasing attention and credibility. Growing out of many of the same roots as popular education (Minkler, 2005), CBPR is based on a poststructuralist epistemology which views the knowledge of any particular group (academics, community members, service providers) as partial, and thus seeks

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to involve all interested stakeholders as equal partners in conducting research (Israel et al., 1998). Addressing the underlying causes of problems and working for social justice are overt goals of CBPR. While it bears some relation to the action research models prevalent in the field of education, CBPR differs from action research in significant ways. Whereas action research is primarily a model for researchers (including classroom teachers) to engage in research to solve specific, localised problems of practice (Wallerstein and Duran, 2003), CBPR has become recognised as a credible research paradigm that can be applied on a large scale to problems of national significance. Within recent years, both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health have issued major requests for proposals' that require a demonstrated commitment to the principles of CBPR. In addition, major foundations including WK. Kellogg and the California Endowment are increasingly funding major CBPR initiatives and programmes. CBPR has been applied to health issues as diverse as breast cancer, arthritis management, and tobacco cessation, and used in concert with popular education (Farquhar, Michael and Wiggins, 2005; Wiggins et ai., 2009). In 2001, the Community-Based Public Health Caucus of the American Public Health Association was formed to promote community involvement in research and further development of the CBPR model. Organisations such as Community-Campus Partnerships for Health present conferences and bring together advocates of the model to strategise about its future development. Radical educators based in universities working with community-based popular educators could apply models like CBPR to achieve a common agenda. Just as it is being applied to the problem of racial/ethnic inequities in health, CBPR could be applied to analogous problems in the field of education, most notably the equity gap' (also referred to as the achievement gap) that exists between Anglo-European students and students of colour. Part of the reason that popular education is relatively unknown in mainstream educational circles in the industrialised world is the relative paucity of academically credible research and peer-reviewed publications concerning the methodology, although that body of research is growing (Wiggins, in press). Universitybased radical educators could help to increase the visibilit)' of popular education by working with community-based educators to identify pertinent research questions and appropriate methodologies for exploring these questions, and then jointly implementing projects, analyzing data, and reporting results. At the same time, radical educators could respond to the criticism that 'there have been no sustained research attempts to explore whether or how the practices [critical pedagogy] prescribes actually alter specific power relations outside or inside schools' (Ellsworth, 1989, p. 301) Again, useful lessons could be learned from academics in the field of public health, who have already created new theoretical constructions of empowerment and applied and evaluated these constructions in concrete situations (Eng and Parker, 1994; Wallerstein, 2002; Wallerstein and Bernstein, 1988, 1994; Wiggins, 2010).

Conclusion
I have attempted to show how a synthesis with popular education could strengthen critical pedagogy and bridge some of the divisions that separate radical educators. There are a number of difficulties inherent in the project of harmonising critical pedagogy and popular education. The main ones concern the epistemology and sites of practice of the two philosophies/practices. Popular education is grounded in the idea that the wisdom gained through life experience is in no way inferior (and in

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some cases is superior) to the knowledge gained through formal study. One of Freire's (2003) insights, echoed later by feminist epistemologists (Alcoff and Potter, 1993), was that the powerful had so dominated epistemology that they had actually been able to define knowledge and ignorance to their own benefit. This insight is profoundly at odds with the will to knowledge' that, according to Gore (2003), is at the heart of much academic discourse, regardless of its political bent. A second, closely related difficulty is that critical pedagogy takes place primarily within universities, whereas a fundamental principle of popular education is the de-privileging of knowledge gained in these settings. Harmonising popular education and critical pedagogy also requires a softening of the anti-intellectualism that I have noted amongst some popular educators. It will require popular educators to give up the view of academics as necessarily out of touch with the realities of lives in communities. Popular educators have to develop an appreciation of how theoretical frameworks can advance our own practice and also increase our ability to promote our methodology (and thus our ideological goals) to a broader audience. The project will also require that critical educators within academia commit the truly revolutionary epistemological act of admitting and accepting that no knowledge is necessarily superior to any other, that the knowledge gained through formal study is no better than the knowledge gained through caring for children or harvesting corn or building houses, and that all types of knowledge are equally needed in the construction of a better world.

Acknowledgement
I would like to express my sincere thanks to Heather Burns, Francisco (Pancho) Arguelles Paz y Puente, and Eunice Cho for carefully reading the entire text and offering important insights, comments and suggestions. Stephanie Farquhar provided useful input on the section which deals with participatory research. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of two anonymous reviewers, who offered valuable comments and suggestions. Finally, deep appreciation goes to Ramin Farahmandpur, who generously provided the contacts, consultation (and tutorial credit!) without which this article could not have been written, and to Teresa RiosCampos, my long-time collaborator, compaera de trabajo, and hermana. While expressing my appreciation to my colleagues, I, of course, take full responsibility for any flaws in the text.

Notes
1 Community Health Workers are carefully chosen community members who promote health and social justice in their own communities. Their professionalism is based on their life experience rather than on formal training (Giblin, 1989) 2 Translations from the Spanish are by the author. 3 I am indebted to Francisco Arguelles Paz y Puente for pointing out that the issue is not "accessible " language but rather 'relevant " language. 4 I've adopted this rather cumbersome pronoun usage because, while I am sympathetic to Martin's (2001) point that we all need to reflect on how we are affected by hegemony, I also do not want to understate my privilege as a white, formally educated, middle class, able-bodied. North American person.

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