Popular Education, Outsiders and Social Change

This work aims to develop an approach on social deviance and Popular Education. In this sense, it assumes a basic analytical statement of the sociology of deviance: social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders. Labelling occurs in all spheres of society. Those groups whose social position gives them weapons and power are best able to enforce their rules. On the other hand, Popular Education has been referring, for instance, to a general practice that covers a variety of social actors - from peasants to workers, women to groups of indigenous peoples and so on - and a variety of topics, whichever generate interest in promoting change. Taking into account such definitions, the work describes Popular Education as an important alternative for the pedagogical work with outsiders. That is to say, a pedagogy that expands beyond societal and institutional boundaries by engaging directly with questions of bias that perpetuate systems of domination, and also finds new ways to teach diverse groups of students. Such a process is related to the construction of meaning at the subjective level and to the dynamic interactions between that level and other decisive processes in the configuration of knowledge, as well as in the construction of social life.