Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Learning Community: Popular Education And Homeless Women, Lorna Rivera

Lorna Rivera

In this essay, I present the voices of homeless women to illustrate the empowering impact of popular education on their lives. Popular education is a methodology of teaching and learning through dialogue that directly links curriculum content to people's lived experience and that inspires political action (Beder, 1996; Freire, 1985, 1990; Williams, 1996). On the basis of 5 years of ethnographic research in a shelter-based popular-education program, I describe how popular education approaches inspired a sense of community among a group of 50 homeless women of color. I also examine some of the barriers to literacy faced by women who …