FEMINIST POPULAR EDUCATION
“I have always thought that what is needed is the development of people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership in others.”
Ella J. Baker, activist community educator (quoted in Hatzenbeler)
“[Ella] Baker‘s view of teaching for liberation was based on the need to empower ordinary people to dig within themselves and their collective experiences for the answers to social and political questions. She did not want her students to see her as the repository of all knowledge but to discover their own insights and knowledge base. Her pedagogy was democratic and reciprocal and she relied on the collective wisdom that resided in poor and oppressed communities. Baker‘s commitment to democratic education and empowering her students to believe in and connect with their own knowledge and wisdom illustrates the values of popular education.”
Sam Hatzenbeler (thesis): Radical Education and Social Change: An Experiment in Student-Driven Democratic Feminist Education
“We have found powerful possibilities for dialogue among feminist collectives in different grassroots organizations, seeking new ways to engage in politics, and confronting male and machista ways of exercising power, that go beyond the fragmentation among organizations. Being active in different movements we discover that the incidences of men taking over an organization’s voice and political life repeat themselves in very similar ways, which is why we facilitate workshops to challenge machismo in our own collectives. A feminist perspective grounded in the body-territory and in a critique of daily life enriches the perspectives of those movements.”
Read more in this AWID interview with Claudia Korol, member of Pañuelos en Rebeldía.
“A primary critical question is what can help create hope, since people organize out of hope, not despair. People taking action creates hope, people winning victories creates hope, people developing stronger relationships with one another creates hope, people coming to new understandings and developing new skills and confidence creates hope.”
Susan Williams, popular educator at the Highlander Center
“I think if you are building a movement, it can only be sustained when it is led by collective power.”
Nani Zulminarni, JASS Southeast Asia
