Popular education: citizenship in action!
Because we support the notion of popular education, our actions are geared toward raising awareness and promoting social change.
- Community outreach (french only)
- Workshops on legal rights and recourse (french only)
- Mobilizing around social causes (french only)
Autonomous popular education puts citizens at the heart of social values and concerns. Simply put, citizenship establishes a relationship of belonging between the individual and the social body. It makes people central to the democratic ideal by giving them the power to act and the ability to participate. Lastly, it entails specific rights and obligations in the legal apparatus of the modern state.
“AUTONOMOUS POPULAR EDUCATION refers to the set of learning and critical thinking processes through which citizens jointly implement the actions that raise individual and group awareness of living or working conditions and are aimed at the short-, medium- or long-term social, economic, cultural and political transformation.”*
In other words, popular education lets us better understand the world we live in, determine how we can build a better future and act to create a fairer, more egalitarian society.
Principles
- To aim for social change by addressing social issues at their root causes.
- To adopt learning approaches that lead to collective action.
- To reach people who have little to no control over their living and working conditions.
- To encourage group responsibility for action and for the learning process.
*Free translation of the original French passage from the December 1990 policy convention of the Mouvement d’éducation populaire et d’action communautaire du Québec (MEPACQ).