Adult and Popular Education in Timor Leste

This paper introduces the adult and popular education stream at the 2011 Timor-Leste Studies conference. This is the second conference of the Timor-Leste Studies Association held in Dili, following on from the one held in July 2009, and the second time that a group of popular educators from Australia, Timor-Leste and other parts of the world are using the opportunity presented by the Conference to analyse and reflect on the role of adult and popular education in Timor-Leste. In 2009, we reflected on and systematised the experiences of people who had been working on popular education projects in Timor-Leste, including members of the Dai Popular network, Timor-Leste's own popular education network; two OPMT women who were veterans of the first popular education campaign in Timor-Leste, the 1975 literacy campaign led by the student union UNETIM; the Cuban educators who were working with the Ministry of Education on the current national literacy campaign; and several Australian adult educators who were part of the international Popular Education Network. To assist us in systematising our work at that Conference, we invited an Argentinian popular educator, Daniel Schugurensky, who at that time was Director of the Transformative Learning Centre at the University of Toronto in Canada. In 2011, we are asking how adult education builds community leadership, and enables people to become active participants in the democratic process. My aim in this paper is to introduce the stream. I begin with a brief discussion of what is meant by adult education in general, and popular education in particular, with reference to some of the history of popular education which is relevant to Timor-Leste today. I then outline what we did at the last Conference, before providing a brief overview of the papers to be presented in the stream this year. I finish by explaining the concept of systematisation, drawing on Daniel Schugurensky's 2009 paper, which is included in the Proceedings of this stream of the Conference.