Discussing Popular Education and Social Movement Work (w/ Ultra-Red)
Added 2025-10-05 13:00:13 +0000 UTCIn this episode, Alyson joins members of the Ultra-Red collective to discuss their recent trip to Central America where they learned first hand about popular education movements of the past and present. The discussion gets into the history of popular education, existing social movements in Central America today, and what we can learn from these movements in our organizing work.
The journal of Ultra-Red can be found here:
https://www.rabrab.net/titles/urvol1?utm_campaign=as-npc105112516
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Comments
Great episode, lots of helpful stuff in here. But definitely odd for me to hear Alyson without Breht 😅
BammEs
2025-10-08 06:44:38 +0000 UTCPOTO is on my list! I can see some parallels between popular education and the alternative education I'm most familiar with, Montessori. They both had issues of people coopting their methods in very shallow ways and had various periods of introspection of how the methods could be expanded to meet political realities they may have not been originally designed for. With Montessori in particular, I recall the protests around BLM being a wakeup call for many in the movement to reevaluate how social justice could be addressed and how the method could even reproduce injustice with its focus on "peace education." The parallel I find most interesting is their focus on the fluidity of teacher and student. Teacher's in Montessori classrooms learn much from their students to improve the method and themselves, while students can be teachers of the teacher and other students. Unfortunately, due to economic realities in the West and the aforementioned cooptation, Montessori is more known nowadays as a method for better-off suburban families despite the original schools being in slums and later schools being set up in rural villages, refugee camps, and other overexploited or under- resourced areas.
Lefty In Training
2025-10-06 16:14:07 +0000 UTC
