From action.RAN.org

• Popular Education: The RAN education program is grounded in popular education in which power is shared, participatory dialogue is key, learning leads to action, and learning starts from and responds to the learner’s lived experiences. Also integral to popular education is the fundamental idea that anyone can be an educator. Our program seeks to support activists in our network in becoming educators in addition to providing resources to classroom teachers.

• Post-Issue activism: Issues of social and economic justice, democracy and ecologal integrity intersect and are interdependent. Ultimately none of them are possible without all of them intact. Educators can choose whichever issue their learners are most personally connected with as an “entry point” then move towards an integrated understanding of the others.

• Planetary Citizenship: Our lived reality is becoming globalized, we should globalize our sense of community, responsibilities and our commitments as well.

• Art Education: Thoughtful activism requires that people develop the capacity to feel, intuit, imagine, create, relate, and express themselves. In this way we move from object to subject, able to participate in articulating and creating the world we want. This implies that the multiple languages/ intelligences of theatre, music, visual art, photography, dance etc. are fundamental to engage with as tools of expression and creation in both education and activism.

• Praxis: Action as experiential learning: Education is incomplete if the learners take no action or do not apply what they have learned. Instead of learning about the climate crisis for example, we provide structure and resources to develop and follow through with an action plan inspired from the information learned in order to do something effective to help solve the climate crisis.

• Conscientization: RAN provides education that supports activists in their ongoing process to become aware of environmental, social, political, and economic contradictions and then work to change them. This process involves naming and critically reflecting on issues in the world to see that oppressive conditions are not simply fate, but have been constructed by humans and therefore can be changed. It is a process of transforming oneself from a passive object or spectator to an active subject who has agency, ownership of self, and who acts to change the world.