Special Issue on Critical Pedagogy, Popular Education and Transformative Learning in Higher Education

From Dr Bruce Missingham, International WaterCentre (& on leave from Monash University)

On 27 and 28 November 2008, teachers, researchers, activists, adult and community educators, and other community members came together in a conference at Monash University to share experiences and debate issues in critical pedagogy, popular education and transformative learning in higher education. The conference began as a collaboration between the International Development and Environmental Analysis Program of Monash University, the oases Graduate School at Borderlands Community Cooperative in Melbourne and the Research Centre for Cosmopolitan Civil Societies at UTS. We wanted to bring critical teachers, popular educators, community educators and others together to share knowledge and experience of praxis, of putting transformative education and critical pedagogy into practice with students in the university and the community, and to learn from each other. We set out to achieve that in a range of ways. The conference was addressed by prominent keynote speakers such as Mike Newman, Daniel Schugurensky from the Transformative Learning Centre at the University of Toronto, and Peter Taylor from the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex. We also heard some short, but lively, papers from academic researchers and community workers.

The heart and soul of the conference consisted of a series of interactive workshops in which critical teachers, popular educators and community educators set out to engage participants through dialogue, learning by doing, and other participatory methods. These included a participatory art workshop facilitated by our ‘artist in residence’ for the conference, Eleni Rivers, and a session of Playback Theatre presented at our conference dinner, facilitated by Shani Quiddington, performer and community educator. These workshops and interactive activities reflected the dialogic and participatory principles of critical pedagogy and participatory learning and were our attempt to make the conference process congruent with our topic and content.

A special edition of New Community Quarterly (Vol 7, No 4, 2009) has now been published featuring a series of short articles about the interactive workshops from the Critical Pedagogy and Participatory Learning for Social Transformation conference. It also includes Mike Newman’s inspiring keynote address. New Community Quarterly is published by an editorial team lead by Jacques Boulet and Borderlands Cooperative, our partners in the Conference.

Very little has been written about how to plan and run ‘participatory’ workshops or conferences, and even less describing actual examples of participatory conferencing in practice. This special edition, therefore, aims to document and reflect upon our experience of facilitating a participatory conference in the hope of stimulating broader interest in participatory approaches to sharing and creating knowledge. We also believe that the practical strategies and methods employed in the workshops and described here will be useful for critical teachers, popular educators and community educators in their educational practice. But we aim to do more than simply offer an overview of methods. Combined, the papers give an insight into some current thinking and approaches to critical pedagogy and transformative education in the higher education sector in Australia, and also reveal their relevance and worth. I suspect they remain largely on the margins of educational practice in higher education, but seem to be enjoying something of a resurgence nonetheless.

The theme articles in NCQ are:

Bruce Missingham, Critical Pedagogy, Popular Education and Transformative Learning in Higher Education

Michael Newman, Polemics, propaganda and one-sided education: A defence

Jane Pearce, Barry Down, Nado Aveling and Anne Price, ‘Critically’ reinvigorating teacher education: Issues and dilemmas

Keiko Yasukawa, Mathematics and Power: Messing around with the politics of numbers

Tony Webb, PhotoVoice as a tool for community development

Susan Goff with Max Hardy, Pedagogies of participatory democracy: an experiential inquiry into the critical possibilities of Citizens Juries

Peter Willis, Gabriella’s Glory: Evocative portrayal for Transformative Learning

Eleni Rivers, In the Role of Visual Troubadour

Deborah Durnan, Antero Benedito da Silva, , Bob Boughton, Popular education for conflict transformation in Timor-Leste

Holly Hammond & Pru Gell, Exploring praxis: defining our educational philosophy and making it real

Jude Westrup, Participative and Transformative Postgraduate Learning and Teaching

Jude Cooke & Patricia Kenny, Embedding Participatory and Transformative Learning in curricula - from social exclusion to social inclusion

Some of the common themes of the workshops and papers are sharing stories and engaging with lived experience, group facilitation methods, dialog and problem posing and the collaborative construction of knowledge. You can find out how to order your copy at http://www.newcq.org/