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Popular education seeks to fill the gaps left by more formal systems, by encouraging action, promoting social awareness and making complex issues accessible.

This is nothing controversial, just factual history; how this information is going to motivate you to do something is entirely up to you,” says independent filmmaker Fahmi Reza.

It is a sweltering August afternoon in a stuffy makeshift classroom, and Fahmi is addressing his assembled audience of 20-odd university students.

The talk was initially scheduled to take place within the nearby university campus in Shah Alam, but was cancelled at the last minute; leaving the event’s organisers to speculate that the lecture is “too controversial”.

Weaving his research into a compelling multimedia narrative, Fahmi continues with a forgotten bit of local history.

“In 1969, the Universiti Malaya Students’ Union decided to do a road show to educate the public on issues they felt should be addressed by election candidates.

“While many political campaigns at the time were focusing on race, these students wanted to get people thinking about broader issues such as public healthcare, agarian reforms and basic democratic rights.

“These multi-lingual rallies held by students of various races drew crowds of thousands, and made headlines every other day.

“Then May 13 happened, and everything was forgotten,” he says.

Fahmi may not be an accredited professor, but he boasts of what every teacher wants – passion and rapt attention from his listeners.

“I feel that many students these days are just not aware of current issues, and ‘politics’ is seen as a bad word.

“The point I’m trying to make is that being political is not about protests or joining (political) parties, but about taking an interest in what’s going on and working on improving the country.

“It’s an education on how average people can change things for the better if they just tried,” he says.

The heart of Fahmi’s work, reinforced by the history he puts forth, is a sort of learning that is for the people by the people – or what can be described as popular education.

Informal learning

There seems to be no hard and fast rule of what popular education is. Some say that its roots lie in Enlightenment-era thinkers and the French Revolution, while others argue that informal learning practices – such as that of tribal communities – have existed for thousands of years.

One notable figure who arguably provided the foundation for the concept’s evolution is Brazilian educator and theorist Paolo Freire.

Most famous for his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed published in 1970, Freire developed his ideas on education and its role in empowering the disenfranchised through his work with poor and illiterate farmers in Brazil.

Rejecting the idea of students as mere empty vessels to be filled up by teachers, he advocated a form of education that is a “practice of freedom”, where learners “deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of the world”.

Former Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) lecturer Assoc Prof Dr Chan Lean Heng is actively working on introducing popular education as a learning methodology in educational institutions.

She belives that the promotion of such pedagogy will help achieve sustainable human development.

“It’s crucial for us to promote learning that values action, so we can produce students and citizens who are socially responsible and motivated beyond their self-centred goals of individual wealth and success,” she says in an e-mail to StarEducation.

In her presentation at a Unesco-Asia-Pacific Programme of Educational Innovation for Development (APEID) International Conference last year, Dr Chan further explains that popular education uses creativity and participation to promote a rights-based agenda.

“The main aim of popular education is to engage people by relating their daily experiences to larger societal problems.

“It also empowers people to act and effect change on the issues that affect them,” she says.

Examples of how popular education has been used in social movements throughout the world are numerous and diverse.

For instance, the Highlander Folk School based in Tennessee, the United States (US) connected literacy to voter rights by using the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a starting point in their literacy classes for poor African-American communities during the civil rights movement there.

In Uganda, the Islamic Medical Association of Uganda works with village imams (Muslim religious leaders) to engage Muslim communities in open dialogue about HIV/AIDS prevention.

On the local front, the Fallen Leaves forum theatre project based in Batu Arang, Selangor, uses interactive theatre to highlight the plight of marginalised communities such as those living with HIV/AIDS.

Another recent example is “Chow Kit Kita”, a community mapping project by teenagers living in and around the Chow Kit area, Kuala Lumpur.

Fahmi, who is involved in the project, says that his team was inspired by the work of Arts-Ed Penang, a creative arts organisation that runs programmes to help young people understand the significance of cultural heritage.

With over 25 years of experience as a community organiser, Malaysian Community Communications Centre (Komas) founder Tan Jo Hann is well-versed in popular education techniques.

Aside from carrying out social work with the local urban poor through the Community Residents Association of Selangor and Federal Territory (Permas) and serving as the councillor for the Subang Jaya Municipal Council, he is also involved in training grassroots communities across South-East Asia and is the co-founder of the South-East Asia Popular Communications Programme (SEAPCP).

Continuous process

While he mostly deals with marginalised communities, Tan believes that the concept is relevant to all levels of society.

“Critical pedagogy is crucial in getting messages across effectively – from highlighting gender discrimination in the office, to educating factory workers on safety precautions, and instilling leadership qualities in our youth.

“The interative nature of popular education makes it a powerful tool to help people internalise,” he says.

Tan adds that educating for social change is a continuous process rather than a one-off lesson.

“It’s a constant cycle of analysing the root causes of a larger problem, brainstorming solutions, planning a concrete action plan, and reflecting upon the strengths and weaknesses of the plan after it is carried out.

“This approach is directly opposed to the traditional top-down education — so people can have ownership of what they are learning, rather than just being talked at,” he says.

He cites his work with the urban poor as an example of this process.

“When we conduct community education sessions in slum and squatter areas on their land rights, we don’t just sweep in and bore them with legal statutes.

“Our sessions involve role play, group exercises, and mapping techniques so they can understand complex law on their own terms and contribute their own ideas,” he says.

As participatory learning is a key component to this method of learning, creativity is central to the concept.

“Art is an especially effective medium as the mind retains visual information more easily,” says Tan.

“This makes it cut across language barriers and educational backgrounds.

“For example, when working with villagers in Preah Vihear, Cambodia on land rights, I encouraged them to draw out how deforestation is affecting their income and what practical solutions they can come up with to solve the issue.

“Instead of lecturing them on environmental protection, this simple method proved to be more effective. The villagers that I trained are now conducting their own workshops and organising themselves to combat forest degredation.”

The issue of rights

Furiously drawing a picture of a large spaceship on a piece of paper, lawyer Edmund Bon is on a mission to get university students thinking about the fabric of society.

“Imagine that earth has been destroyed,” he starts.

“You need to choose six people from a list of 25 to board this spaceship to repopulate a new ‘earth’.

“Your group’s decisions must be unanimous; my advice is start your discussions from a point of collective understanding before taking a personal stand.”

The session is part of “Reconstituting Earth Version 2.0”, a workshop series held in conjunction with the Malaysia Bar Council’s rights-education campaign titled “MyConstitution”.

The two-year nationwide campaign aims to educate the public on their rights and responsibilities as citizens as set out by the Federal Constitution.

As the groups deliberate over their choices, Bon explains the purpose behind the exercise.

“It’s a warm-up before getting participants to dissect the sort of values their new society needs to function.

“Then when they draft their own constitutions for these imaginary societies, they will be better prepared to tackle the issues of the Federal Constitution,” he says.

After a few more exercises, the students express their opinions on how the law affects their daily lives, sparking debate on issues such as privacy, the Internal Security Act and cultural freedom.

“Some say that this is subversive content because we openly discuss ‘explosive’ issues,” says Bon.

“But why is it a bad thing to encourage people to think about ways of making the country progress?”

According to Tan, popular education serves to fill in the gaps left by the more traditional system in place in schools and universities.

“Not everyone has an interest in the academic learning provided in schools, and not everyone has the good fortune of going on to university.

“The least motivated in schools are the ones who are the least engaged because they don’t see anything meaningful in pure classroom learning,” he says.

Thus, the role of popular educators is to make sure these people are equipped with skills to get them through life, and that includes having values and the ability to build relationships with other people.

He adds: “Education should be more than just reading, writing, and counting — it should be about being human.”

> See
StarMag for a more in-depth look at Fahmi Reza’s Student Power! lecture series and the student movement of the 1960s.