SPAN 226: Learning Together: Introduction to Community Engaged Learning

In the early 1970s, a group of Colombian intellectuals led by the pioneering sociologist Orlando Fals Borda created a research-activist collective called La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social (Circle of Research and Social Action). Combining sociological and historical research with a firm commitment to grassroots social movements, Fals Borda and his colleagues collaborated with indigenous and peasant organizations throughout Colombia. In Cowards Don't Make History Joanne Rappaport examines the development of participatory action research on the Caribbean coast, highlighting Fals Borda's rejection of traditional positivist research frameworks in favor of sharing his own authority as a researcher with peasant activists. Fals Borda and his colleagues inserted themselves as researcher-activists into the activities of the National Association of Peasant Users, coordinated research priorities with its leaders, studied the history of peasant struggles, and, in collaboration with peasant researchers, prepared accessible materials for an organizational readership, thereby transforming research into a political organizing tool. Rappaport shows how the fundamental concepts of participatory action research as they were framed by Fals Borda continue to be relevant to engaged social scientists and other researchers in Latin America and beyond.

A fully-updated and reworked version of the classic book by Stephen Kemmis and Robin McTaggart, now joined by Rhonda Nixon, The Action Research Planner is a detailed guide to developing and conducting a critical participatory action research project. The authors outline new views on 'participation' (based on Jürgen Habermas's notion of a 'public sphere'), 'practice' (as shaped by practice architectures), and 'research' (as research within practice traditions). They provide five extended examples of critical participatory action research studies. The book includes a range of resources for people planning a critical participatory research initiative, providing guidance on how to establish an action research group and identify a shared concern, research ethics, principles of procedure for action researchers, protocols for collaborative work, keeping a journal, gathering evidence, reporting, and choosing academic partners. Unlike earlier editions, The Action Research Planner focuses specifically on critical participatory action research, which occupies a particular (critical) niche in the action research 'family'. The Action Research Planner is an essential guide to planning and undertaking this type of research.

Participatory Action Research (PAR) privileges the involvement of participants as co-researchers to generate new knowledge and act on findings to effect social change. In PAR projects, academic researchers collaborate closely with co-researchers, working from the idea that these individuals, especially those who are usually marginalized from institutions, can be engaged in meaningful research activities to achieve social justice outcomes in addition to answering research questions. When deployed ethically in collaboration with co-researchers, PAR's participatory element facilitates a 'bottom-up' approach where knowledge is co-created through grassroots or community-based activities. This book goes beyond a PAR 'how to' manual on the methodology. Rather it synthesizes key learnings in contemporary research, with a distinct focus on the challenging aspects of undertaking PAR in practice and strategies to address these. It provides a clear and user-friendly collection of practical and contextual examples and presents key pointers on the implications of PAR methods, their strengths and weaknesses, and strategies for the field. These examples will be useful for critical class discussions, as well as to anticipate fieldwork pitfalls and pre-empt challenges through collaborative approaches.

First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. The methodology of the late Paulo Freire has helped to empower countless impoverished and illiterate people throughout the world. Freire's work has taken on especial urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is increasingly accepted as the norm. With a substantive new introduction on Freire's life and the remarkable impact of this book by writer and Freire confidant and authority Donaldo Macedo, this anniversary edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed will inspire a new generation of educators, students, and general readers for years to come.

For fifteen years, The Critical Pedagogy Reader has established itself as the leading collection of classic and contemporary essays by the major thinkers in the field of critical pedagogy. While retaining its comprehensive introduction, this thoroughly revised third edition includes updated section introductions, expanded bibliographies, and up-to-date classroom questions. The book is arranged topically around issues such as class, racism, gender/sexuality, critical literacies, and classroom issues, for ease of usage and navigation. New to this edition are substantive updates to the selections of contemporary readings, including pieces that reflect issues such as immigrant and refugee students, the role of social justice in teacher education, and an emphasis on practical elements of pedagogy, as well as it significance to forging democratic life. Carefully attentive to theory and practice, this much-anticipated third edition remains the definitive, foundational source for teaching and learning about critical pedagogy.

We believe that the political-pedagogical and theoretical-conceptual construction that is synthesized in the notion of "critical emancipatory praxis" is tremendously productive for emancipatory education and Latin American critical pedagogies, because it opposes technical, neoliberal and hegemonic conceptions of the educational field and pedagogical; because it recovers the transforming activity of the human being, vindicating the articulation between the understanding and the transformation of reality; because it vindicates the importance of the construction of alternatives for the prefiguration of the society of the future, and therefore, it feeds utopia and hope; because it demands to be affected by the pain and suffering of the other or the other, to be indignant and activate the political exercise of resistance; because it demands the development of political action from below, hand in hand with oppressed peoples, communities and subjects , exploited and excluded.

By utilizing the testimonial narrative of Rigoberta Menchú--a Mayan-Quiché of Guatemala and winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize--teachers in this volume engage students in vital and relevant cross-cultural learning in a variety of locations, disciplines, and levels. Teaching and Testimony tells teachers' stories of using Menchu's testimonial in their classrooms, and invites reflection on the transformative possibility of integrating previously marginalized voices. Energized by the teaching of Menchu's testimonial narrative, I, Rigoberta Menchú, these teachers let their guard down, wrestle with the immediate difficulties and possibilities of multicultural teaching, and speak with passion about the importance of what they and their students are learning.

Crítica teórica, crítica histórica : tensiones epistémicas e histórico políticas / Estela Quintar -- Disciplinar indómitos y acallar inútiles : la Educación Popular y las Pedagogías Críticas interpeladas / Inés Cappellacci, Anahí Guelman, Claudia Loyola, María Mercedes Palumbo, Shirly Said, Laura Tarrio -- Bolivia ; la lucha por la educación como lucha por la identidad / Silvya De Alarcón -- Eduación Popular y Pedagogías Críticas : corrientes emancipadoras de la educación chilena / Beatríz Areyuna, Fabián Cabaluz, Felipe Zurita -- Pedagogía critica y educación popular : polifonía de voces desde la periferia colombiana / Jonathan Piedrahita, Yicel Giraldo, Cindy Guzmán, Yolanda Pino, Andrés Castaño, Mónica Salazar, Héctor Fabio Ospina -- La Educación Popular y su Re-Significación en la Pedagogía Crítica / Piedad Ortega Valencia -- Vinculación entre Pedagogías Críticas y Educación Popular en El Salvador / María Teresa Cruz Bustamante, Juan Carlos Hernández, Cándida Chévez, Ariana Celeste Aquino, Suyapa Pérez -- Descolonizar a participação : pautas para uma pedagogia crítica latino-americana / Danilo R. Streck -- ¿Dónde está lo crítico de la Educación Popular? / Alfonso Torres Carrillo -- Conversaciones : entre el legado de los que me preceden, y mi quehacer educativo / Alfredo Manuel Ghiso -- Aportes de los procesos de Educación Popular a los procesos de cambio social / Oscar Jara Holliday.

In August 2011, ethnographers Carolina Alonso Bejarano and Daniel M. Goldstein began a research project on undocumented immigration in the United States by volunteering at a center for migrant workers in New Jersey. Two years later, Lucia López Juárez and Mirian A. Mijangos García--two local immigrant workers from Latin America--joined Alonso Bejarano and Goldstein as research assistants and quickly became equal partners for whom ethnographic practice was inseparable from activism. In Decolonizing Ethnography the four coauthors offer a methodological and theoretical reassessment of social science research, showing how it can function as a vehicle for activism and as a tool for marginalized people to theorize their lives. Tacking between personal narratives, ethnographic field notes, an original bilingual play about workers' rights, and examinations of anthropology as a discipline, the coauthors show how the participation of Mijangos García and López Juárez transformed the project's activist and academic dimensions. In so doing, they offer a guide for those wishing to expand the potential of ethnography to serve as a means for social transformation and decolonization.