Radical Popular Education: Learning from the Berlin Lab

What happens when social movements turn their analytical lens inward? When we stop asking only "what are we fighting?" and start asking "how are we reproducing what we're fighting?"

What is radical popular education, and why do we need it today?

Popular education (PopEd) has a long lineage. Born in the liberation struggles of Latin America, developed through decades of feminist and anti-colonial organising, it starts from the premise that people are not empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge, but bearers of lived experience and collective wisdom. Real learning, in this framework, happens when we bring our whole selves — our bodies, minds, histories, and contradictions — into spaces where that knowledge is honoured and used to support struggles for collective liberation.
However, we know our movements are not immune to reproducing the patterns we’re trying to dismantle: extractive behaviours, hierarchical structures, burnout cultures. Especially, perhaps, in Europe where the roots of white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism can be traced.

Our Berlin Lab was designed to explore this question:

How can radical popular education disrupt systemic oppressive dynamics while also interrupting their reproduction within movements themselves? And what capacities, relationships and infrastructures are needed to sustain this?

Our case-study methodology

In the spirit of popular education, our lab started with lived experience — specific moments from real organising contexts — and worked inward and outward simultaneously.
Over the week we worked with three PopEd ‘experiences’:

Collective Care Berlin

Collective Care Berlin: Monthly gatherings exploring how embodied practices can nourish political struggle, strengthen solidarity, and help us imagine more interconnected, liberated futures. This month’s topic was Decolonial Futures, in which we explored questions such as: What might a liberated body feel like? What stories would it tell, and how would it move through the world? We used methods such as the me too circle, reading text, theatre of the oppressed, and intuitive movement.

Regenerative Activism Community of Practice

Regenerative Activism Community of Practice: Monthly peer-to-peer experiential learning focused on practicing together, reflecting on our collectives and struggles, and building a more interconnected resistance movement in Berlin. Each month is co-hosted by different participants who attended a recent training at Ulex Learning Center in Spain. This month was about Strategic Communications and Narrative Framing, which we learned about through two different games exploring narratives and the values underlying our work.

Beyond Patriarchy

Beyond Patriarchy: A taster session based on the collective learning journeys hosted by Beyond Patriarchy, exploring how patriarchal patterns show up not only ‘out there’ in systems and structures, but also in the ways we relate, facilitate and participate in movements for change. We explored this through a body scan meditation, reading text, connecting theory with lived experience, spectrum lines, and intention setting.

This "case study" methodology operated on a few core principles:

Work with live contexts: Rather than studying distant struggles, we worked with unique PopEd case studies happening in Berlin. This enabled us to reflect together as a group on shared experiences, keeping the conversations grounded and reducing the risks of drifting into abstraction.
Moving between experience and analysis: Each day followed a rhythm: we began with gentle check-ins, acknowledging what had stayed with us from the ‘experiences’ the evening before — the emotions, the tensions, the physical sensations that learning had stirred up. From there, we moved into small group exchanges, unpacking the case study through specific analytical lenses. Afternoon sessions then brought the insights back into our own contexts, asking questions like: How would this work in my context? What does this mean for how I/we show up?
Lenses for collective inquiry: Each participant entered each PopEd experience with a different ‘lens’, which we used to harvest the following day. The three lenses we chose for this lab were: pedagogical design, inner-outer transformation, and power and intersectionality. Each lens invited participants to think about different questions, which were derived from our core inquiry and objectives for the lab. We rotated these lenses for each PopEd experience, so each participant had the chance to ‘see’ through each of them.

What unfolded across the week

Each PopEd experience and the following day’s case study exploration saw us dive deeper into the questions we started with. By working inwards and outwards, as if in spirals, we could build on both each other’s reflections in that moment and on the reflections from the day before. This provided plenty of rich, contextual knowledge for us to work with.

With the understanding that all knowledge is partial and contextual, we’d like to share a few key insights and questions from the week, followed by some vignettes and reflections from participants. The following is a synthesis of some of the key points we harvested from across our three lenses: pedagogical design, inner-outer transformation, and power and intersectionality. Here are our top five:

On a pedagogical level, we kept returning to the importance of long-term, place-based, relationship-based learning. While there are many reasons for this — including the joy of learning together with people you care about in places you care about — a word we circled back to each day was commitment. To move from experience to transformation, we believe we need deep, long-term processes that enable the inner and outer transformation to happen — because the transformations we’re seeking don’t usually show up in our learning spaces; they take time to manifest, both the inner and outer transformations. While late-stage consumer capitalism has created all sorts of challenges to doing this well, we know we need to overcome them if we’re to create real radical alternatives. Centring relationships within local learning and organising allows for the strong interpersonal connections needed to stay committed when things get tough.
Related to this, but distinct enough to warrant its own point, is the critical need to tend to the material conditions that make sustained engagement in learning processes possible. While being place-based and relational are important conditions, without systems of support (e.g. mutual aid, childcare, shared meals, accessible meeting points), the commitments we need for really transformative work will likely fall short. This is where the lines between learning and organising begin to blur, and we’d encourage practitioners to dance in that in-between space.
In our lab we had many people who were practicing popular education, even in very radical ways, but don’t always see their work through this lens. We don’t consider this a fundamental issue, but it certainly poses challenges on a conceptual level when working across contexts, as well as on a personal level for people’s sense of belonging in a space. We believe these are things that conveners should be sensitive to when designing cross-context spaces, and make sure enough time is given for everyone to make sense of their position in the ecosystem, otherwise the deeper discussions will often be limited or simply difficult to navigate.
Talking of ecosystems, we circled back several times to questions such as ‘what is radical?’ and ‘radical for whom?’. Of course, beyond the literal sense of the word ‘radical’ meaning to get to the ‘root’, these are subjective and context-specific questions. However, they did give rise to an interesting insight for us — that we need spaces where different approaches can meet. Spaces where ‘more radical’ and ‘less radical’ approaches come together. Taking an ecosystem-based approach, we could say that all of these play an important role. They may even share similar values, principles and visions, but diverge on their methodology given their different position in the ecosystem. We see this as a strength, and something worth naming to challenge the rivalrous dynamics or zero-sum game mentalities that can emerge from these questions.
Finally, we talked about the importance of upholding the idea and practice of facilitators/educators also being learners. We talked about this not only in a principled sense for its inherent challenge to hierarchy and completion, but also in a subtler way for its challenge to cultures of perfectionism. This latter point felt particularly important to us due to the power that facilitators/educators usually have in a space and that — even with the best intentions — often reproduce these cultures if they’re perceived as outside of or above the group.

Quotes from the Berlin Pop Education Lab participants

Photo by Danilo Crispino — Participants Pop Edu Lab Berlin

Photo Danilo Crispino — Participants Pop Ed Lab Berlin

What this is building towards

This lab was one moment in a larger year-long European collaboration: CitizensLab and Beyond Patriarchy here in Berlin, Dance the Storm in France, and Magnet House in Serbia are together exploring the question, what does it look like to revitalise radical popular education in European social movements?
Part of that is methodological — figuring out how to hold case studies, how to move between analysis and embodiment, how to create conditions where real transformation becomes possible. But part of it is also relational and infrastructural. We’re building lasting connections between practitioners, researchers, and trainers across Europe who believe that movements need this kind of learning.
We’ll be sharing more as the labs in Serbia and France take place and we begin to identify patterns and surface insights, and then find ways to share these outwards in support of movement-wide learning.

Short video to capture the essence of our 5 days Lab in Berlin.

Video and editing by Danilo Crispino