The workshop as a methodology for popular education

Abstract

Popular education, through their different backgrounds and experiences, has created, redefined and recreated a wealthy methodological framework for the educational and organizational work with communities, organizations and collective subjects. Methodologies and techniques from different disciplinary origins, which make an important instrumental framework for educational processes, participatory planning, systematization of experiences, assessment and monitoring, among others. When the methodologies are subordinated to the direction of theoretical and political perspectives, they have a fundamental importance to the possibility of a transformative praxis. But, however, when they are dissociated from the theoretical and strategic guidance, methodologies are confused with the techniques and they become an end in itself, in a sort of tacticism without transforming potential. The term "workshop" is sometimes used in so many different ways, in different contexts,
and to nominate very different things. Also, within popular education, often the term "workshop" is used to call different kinds of meetings and activities. This paper deals with the definition, components, embodiments and moments of the workshop as a methodology of the popular education, starting from placing the subject in the context of a general methodological reflection