We are pleased to present to an English speaking audience this collection of articles which reflect the expression of Latin American women's groups in developing a vision and practice of popular education by and for women. This collection brings to a wider audience perspective that have many important implications for the development of stronger popular movements throughout the world.

Increasingly, people's movements everywhere are finding that education is a crucial component of attempts to empower disenfranchised groups in the political, economic, social and cultural arenas. Such educational efforts may focus on subjects ranging from literacy to economics to workplace hazards. They may term themselves popular education, or adult education. What they have in common is an emphasis on starting from the lived experiences of their participants and using these known realities as a jumping-off point to arrive at a broader and deeper understanding of the subject at hand.

Another hallmark of popular education is its profound conviction that education is a tool in a larger project - the project of transforming the world into a community of justice, peace, and a true human security of freedom from poverty and oppression. In this relationship each half must be completed by the other: political struggle needs to be informed by an educational process, and education needs to be intimately linked to action in the world.

In this decade, feminists and women's groups in many places-- above all in Latin America-- have begun to carry the struggle for women's empowerment into the popular education movement. They have developed a critique of existing popular education efforts on both theoretical and practical grounds. Practically speaking, they have said, many popular education programs do not take sufficient account of women's double burden of household and family responsibilities on the one hand, and paid labor on the other-- so that programs may be organized in ways that make it all but impossible for women to participate. And on a theoretical level, popular education has often focused on the exploitation of the poor by the rich in ways that overlook or even obscure gender contradictions and their role in shaping the experiences of women at the grassroots.

Women's efforts have gone well beyond a critique of the shortcomings of popular education as it has existed. In many parts of the world, projects and groups have been launched to provide a positive alternative, offering programs that explore the hidden realities of women's lives while developing new visions of the concrete demands and organizational forms that best express women's needs. They are examining gender both as form of oppression in its own right and as a factor that interacts with class, race, and nationality-- so that poor women, women of color, and women in Third World nations live a social reality that is simultaneously the same as and different than the reality for men of their groups.

Such projects seek to combine the strengths of feminism and popular education. In general, their goal is not to create a separate women's movement, but to strengthen the overall popular movements—by maximizing women's participation and leadership and by extending the critique of injustice to fully embrace women's experiences. Use of the term, "feminism" is sometimes controversial, because established feminist movements have often neglected the perspectives of women from marginalized social groups. Nonetheless there is broad agreement that women must create a space for autonomous reflection and action, within their larger movements.

While these new type of women's groups exist in many places, it is in Latin America that their experience is the richest. Both movements, popular education and feminism, are strong in the region, and their intersection is much wider and broader- based than elsewhere- at least so far. Through the efforts of the Women's Network of CEAAL- the Latin American Council on Adult Education- co publisher of this volume, grassroots women's groups and educators from many Latin countries have created various opportunities to compare notes and reflect together on the meaning of their work and directions for the future. This book is the latest such forum for discussion and debate. The experiences documented here should thus be of particular interest to those who seek to benefit from this discourse and extend its effects beyond Latin America.

Rachael Kamel
July 1988