Using Popular Education in Development Work: Some Experiences from Aboriginal Australia

Abstract

This paper discusses the use of popular education in development work with Aboriginal communities in Australia. The three authors have been developing a popular education approach since the 1990s, when we began working together in a national organization representing Aboriginal community‐controlled adult colleges (FIAEP, 1997: Durnan & Boughton, 1999). The approach grows out of our experiences across a wide variety of education settings, formal and informal, accredited and non‐accredited, for community controlled agencies and under contract to governments, and with Aboriginal communities in every state and territory in Australia. Recently, we extended our work to Timor‐Leste, which deepened our understanding of the practice of popular education, especially its application in post‐conflict societies (Boughton, 2010; Durnan & Beetson, 2011).