Popular Research and Social Transformation: A Community-Based Approach to Critical Pedagogy

Abstract

* This report focuses on the application of critical pedagogy at El Barrio Popular Education Program, a community-based adult education program in New York City. It is a vignette of a more complex picture of what the participants and the staff of the program accomplished together between 1990 and 1996. During that period, I served as executive director of the organization and as the coordinator of its educational programs. The program, which was committed to the implementation of participatory education and the goals of bilingualism and biliteracy, integrated the teaching of Spanish-language literacy and basic education with ESL, computer and video technology, and popular research-that is, investigations designed, conducted, analyzed, and produced by the learners on topics significant to them. The concept of critical pedagogy as used in this report places language at the center of the curriculum. The students' native language was used not only as an aid to learning English but also as a terrain of knowledge and a field of possibilities that linked students' experiences to collective action. The use of Spanish gave the students the opportunity to use their own reality as the basis of the literacy program and enabled them to reconstruct their history and culture (Freire & Macedo, 1987). Through the use of their own vernacular, the students produced new forms of knowledge that they made accessible to the community. They produced this knowledge by engaging in investigations-called popular