Popular education is a philosophy and methodology that creates settings in which people most affected by inequities can identify problems and underlying causes and develop solutions. The word “popular” in “popular education” comes from the Romance languages (Spanish, French, Portuguese, etc.) where it refers to something belonging to or arising from the vast majority of common people who have been denied political and economic power (Wiggins et al., 2014). In English, we can call it “people’s education.”
While PE was very strongly influenced by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1973, 2003), popular education (PE) existed before Freire and has continued to develop since his death in 1997. Popular education has been widely used for health promotion and has been associated with increased empowerment and improved health (Wallerstein, 2006; Wiggins, 2012). A few recent studies have compared PE to conventional education as methods for increasing knowledge and empowerment, with positive results for popular education (Wang et al., 2011; Wiggins et al., 2014).
Download An Introduction to Popular/People's Education Manual here: