Popular Education as Organizational Practice: Regenerating Grassroots Education in the South Korean Labor Movement

Based on a year-long ethnographic study of the South Korean labor movement, this research examines how a labor union effectively implemented popular education to regenerate workers’ education at the grassroots level. The specific case is the Grassroots Learning Program (GLP), a popular education initiative launched by the Korean Public & Social Services and Transport Workers’ Union (KPTU) in 2020. By analyzing the GLP, where both learners and educators at the grassroots level experienced deep engagement in educational activities and union activism, I argue that popular education in social movements is a set of organizational practices that extend beyond classroom pedagogy. Specifically, the GLP translated the ontological, epistemological, methodological, and ethico-political principles of popular education into concrete organizational practices: training rank-and-file workers as educators; organizing praxis for and through education; coordinating dialogical activity grounded in camaraderie; and developing a deliberative curriculum for the emancipatory process.