Writing from Social Education is writing from a situated place. We do not speak from a supposed technical neutrality or from an aseptic distance from reality. Social Pedagogy-Education (PES from now on) is born, works and breathes in concrete contexts, crossed by inequalities, power relations, conflicts, collective pains and also by powers of transformation. Therefore, those who educate socially do not occupy a neutral place: they exercise an ethical and political position, just like those who act as militants. Even when they do not declare themselves as such, they are already intervening in a social reality and contributing, in some way, to reproducing or transforming it.
I also write from another place: the academic and researcher. Pedagogy and PES are not only exercised, they are also thought about, analyzed, discussed and theoretically constructed. My professional practice, often unpaid but always deeply political, places me in a hybrid space: between intervention and research, between territory and theory, between vital commitment and intellectual exercise. Today I write from here, from where the analysis that follows is formulated: not only to describe what already exists, but to open questions, illuminate potentialities and think together about how PES can dialogue with dual militancy to strengthen emancipatory, communitarian and transformative processes.
Table of Contents: 1) A grounded definition of Pedagogy-Social Education 2) Paths found with dual militancy 3) Not everything that transforms is gold 4) Potentialities of this transdisciplinary work 5) As a projection
1) A grounded definition of Pedagogy-Social Education
Sometimes, even within the profession itself, we are unable to clearly define what PES is. Not because it is empty, but precisely because it is full: of diverse practices, multiple contexts, theoretical approaches and life experiences. Social pedagogy does not fit into a simple definition because it is not just an academic discipline or just a professional practice; it is, above all, a way of looking at and accompanying the social world.
A teacher once told me that social pedagogy is a fascination with the growth of others. We can hear that it is the education that happens outside of school, on corners, in social centers, in associations, in neighborhoods, in informal spaces, in bodies that do not fit and in lives that have never been considered central. It is the education of the margins, of non-normativity, of difference and otherness.
But it is not just a kind practice of light: it is an ethical and political practice. PES accompanies processes of emancipation, not to direct or supervise, but to facilitate that people and communities can exercise rights, build autonomy, organize themselves and transform the living conditions that they experience. It works from everyday life, not from closed pedagogical laboratories or from strictly institutional educational spaces.
Its epistemology starts from the bond. Educating, for PES, is fundamentally about building transformative relationships. There is no education without encounter, without trust, without mutual recognition, without shared creation of meaning. And, at the same time, PES is not limited to accompanying: it also interrogates. It can have a critical function that questions normalizations, denounces inequalities, points out oppressive logics and opens spaces to imagine other ways of living. In this framework, PES understands the community not only as an emotional space of belonging, but also as a space of rights, of shared responsibility, of politicization of the everyday. Here the link with political organization is direct: if the community is a space of rights, it is a space of power, of vindication and of collective action.
Paths found with dual militancy
Therefore, it should not be surprising that in our political organizations, especially those that are committed to dual models of militancy and transformation, there are social educators, free-time monitors, social integrators, socio-cultural animators, community mediators, teachers and other professionals in socio-community services who are politically involved (which I will include in this article under the umbrella of Social Pedagogy-Education). They not only provide technical tools (mediation, dynamization, strategic planning, participatory methodologies, etc.), but also ethics and a concrete proposal. They provide knowledge that cannot be improvised: knowing how to organize without commanding, caring without paternalizing, educating without domesticating, accompanying without replacing. PES, understood in this way, becomes a key that opens the possibility of thinking about militancy not only as a combative action, but also as a collective, sustained and conscious socio-educational process.
When we put PES into dialogue with militancy - and, in particular, with dual militancy - we discover that they are not two alien worlds, but deeply related practices, which share languages, horizons and ways of doing things. Both seek, in some way, to hegemonize ideas, not to impose them, but in a Gramscian sense of constructing shared meanings, frameworks of interpretation and ways of understanding the world that allow us to transform it. And for this, it is not enough to "inform": we must educate for these ideas, that is, create processes that make it possible for people to understand them, to critically internalize them and to put them into practice.
Here comes a central coincidence: both transformative militancy and PES work through dialogical and maieutic processes, in which knowledge is not transmitted as a closed truth, but is collectively constructed from experience, shared reflection and debate. This is a clearly Freirean heritage: awareness-raising does not consist of "opening the eyes" of those who do not see, but in creating conditions for the subjects themselves to explain, analyze and politicize their reality. They therefore share an ethic of dialogue, of shared speech and of mutual learning.
Another key similarity is in horizontality. The social educator does not place herself above the community, just as the activist should not place herself above the collective. Both practices are placed alongside other people: they accompany, propose, facilitate processes, but do not replace or unilaterally direct. PES works intensively on community care, conflict resolution, the sustainability of bonds, social cohesion and mutual support. Activism, when it thinks of itself in collective and non-heroic terms, also speaks of coexistence, companionship, mutual support and emotional management. Both share the same commitment: it is not just about caring for individuals, but about caring for collective coexistence, making possible organizations that last, that do not break, that learn to manage their own wounds. Thus, there is also a profound coincidence in respect for collective agreements and personal trajectories: recognizing that processes are slow, that people come from different places, that changes require time and care.
Both community PES and dual organizations share a commitment to participation, shared responsibility and collective action. They share a key idea: empowerment cannot be reduced to the individual level. Many social projects fail because they remain in a personal, intimate, almost therapeutic change. Dual militancy, as the most critical PES, breaks this limitation: it connects educational processes with structural change, with organized action, with the material transformation of reality.
Both fight against social isolation and are committed to building community as an alternative to neoliberal fragmentation. They are committed to long-term projects that think about the future and work to sustain processes, not just to respond to emergencies. They insist on training, shared reflection, debate, mutual learning and social transformation: this is exactly what community PES understands as educating for and by participation.
Both also share a methodology: continuous evaluation, the ability to review, to self-criticize, to learn from mistakes and to improve collectively. What in PES we call participatory evaluation and continuous learning, in our spaces usually appears as criticism and self-criticism: they are different names for the same need, which has much to learn from both realities.
Finally, and one of the main points, they also share an epistemology and a temporality. They understand that knowledge is born from practice, from lived experience, from collective dialogue. And they share a slow, patient and strategic logic of time: they work in the long term, knowing that profound transformations are not measured in weeks or in one-off campaigns, but in processes that mature, change and consolidate over time.
Not all that turns into gold is gold.
If the similarities show an obvious affinity, the differences help to shed light on the tensions and risks that run through both the PES and the militancy. It is not a question of opposing them, but of understanding where they can fail, where they can be co-opted and where they need to be revised.
A first crucial point is the social and political misunderstanding of the PES and, in general, of the so-called "third sector". As Julio Rubio and other critical authors have pointed out, much of contemporary social action has been co-opted by capitalism and neoliberal states as a mechanism for managing poverty, containing conflict and dampening social unrest. The ES, when trapped in this framework, runs the risk (a current reality) of becoming a device of welfare, verticality and social control, more concerned with making things "work" than with asking who decides how they should work.
Related to this is the institutionalization of the PES. When it becomes a bureaucratic instrument, a service more embedded in administrative logistics, part of the welfare state, it can slide towards depoliticizing, individualizing and technocratic practices. Instead of accompanying processes of collective emancipation, it can limit itself to "intervening in cases", adapting people to reality instead of questioning the reality that produces exclusion. And that is a real risk, of our day-to-day, not theoretical.
Another delicate point is the process of professionalization and privatization of socio-educational knowledge. Tools such as group facilitation, community mediation, socio-community strategies or planning for community development have, little by little, become professionalized skills, sometimes elitist, sometimes linked to the training market. What should be collective and intangible heritage is transformed into services, consultancies or pedagogical goods.
It is also necessary to name a recurring deficiency: the lack of a class perspective. PES talks a lot about community, context, inclusion, but often avoids mentioning class, conflict, material interest, political struggle. From a more critical perspective, we could say it this way: with a class perspective, PES ceases to be simply a discipline of intervention and becomes a deeply political tool, close to (if not heir to) libertarian methodologies. Where PES speaks of community as the axis of its praxis, militancy reminds us that this community is crossed by class, by structural inequality, by domination.
But militancy also has its own risks. Militancy can fall into a paralyzing moralism, into a dogmatism that absolutizes theory and forgets concrete people. It can privilege ideological purity over real life, or reproduce dynamics of harshness, competitiveness, exhaustion and guilt. It can, at times, forget the emotional, affective and relational dimension of political processes, and this is where PES is not only useful, but necessary: to remember that without care for the common there is no sustainable collective process, that without bonds there is no living organization and that without attending to bodies and emotions there is no lasting transformation.
Potential of this transdisciplinary work
These differences are not a wall; they are a place of fertile tension. They are the space in which PES and militancy can look at each other critically and help each other not to fall into their own abysses. And if we assume that there is a fertile intersection between PES and dual militancy, the logical question is: what can we do with it? What possibilities does it open up? What paths can we explore to strengthen collective processes, make them more conscious, more caring, more transformative?
A first axis is the transmission of socio-educational knowledge within political organizations, not from a position of technical superiority, but as a shared basis from which to think and act better. It is not about knowing more, but about putting at the common service tools that already exist, accumulated experiences and proven methodologies that can greatly enrich militant practices.
Along with this, it is key to value other forms of knowledge and other methodologies for disseminating political ideas. Not everything can be a talk, a rally or a masterful lecture. PES has been working for decades with participatory dynamics, games, socio-emotional and experiential methodologies that allow for deeper, more lasting and more meaningful learning. The ability to speak in an understandable way, to adapt the message to the public, to create accessible and welcoming spaces, is a first-rate political tool.
Another great potential lies in the use of educational sciences as lenses to better understand reality. Psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology, philosophy, social history or participatory research methods are not neutral knowledge: they are powerful tools for analyzing collective dynamics, understanding conflicts, identifying oppressions and designing transformative strategies. PES, by working at these intersections, can provide a holistic perspective that complements more traditional political analysis.
One of the most powerful proposals could be formulated as follows: politicize education and educabilize politics. That is, those who work in education assume that their work is necessarily political and those who do politics assume that all political action is also educational. If education is politicized and politics becomes pedagogical, both are strengthened.
We can also learn from their warnings. There are problems that we must consciously avoid: falling into welfareism that replaces organization; into bureaucratization that suffocates internal life; into militant attrition that breaks processes; into moralism and political purism that destroy before building. Here, PES, with its tools of evaluation, collective self-care and critical analysis, is once again an ally.
Participatory action research methodologies offer another fertile field of encounter: researching while transforming, learning while acting, producing collective knowledge from and for practice. And we should not forget the cultural and symbolic dimension. PES knows how to work with collective imaginaries, symbols, narratives and emotions. And that is deeply political: no social movement advances with reason alone; it also needs shared emotion, a sense of belonging, a common story.
These potentialities do not define a mechanical alliance, but rather an invitation: to think of militancy as a collective educational process and to think of education as an emancipatory political practice. In that encounter, perhaps, one of the keys to our time emerges.
As a projection
In an organization committed to social transformation, we cannot allow knowledge to remain locked up within ourselves. Each social educator, each activist, each companion, carries a wealth of professional, technical and theoretical knowledge that must be made available to the collective. It is not about individual displays or the accumulation of authority: it is about giving them collective form, building with them strategies, practices and processes that strengthen common action.
PES brings to militancy something that is not always recognized: its capacity to care for human processes, emotional support, conscious and reflective accompaniment, to preserve the continuity of the collective, to protect the bonds that allow an organization not to break under pressure or conflict. Militancy, for its part, returns to PES a clear perspective of class, of structural struggle, a constant reminder that care or mediation is not enough, but that it is necessary to intervene in the deep causes of inequalities and oppression.
To work from this awareness is to understand that our work is not heroic or individual, but collective and invisible in its deepest effects: we create capacities, autonomy and organization that will survive our absence, strengthening community, struggle and mutual education. It is an ethical and political practice of the utmost responsibility, because it looks beyond ourselves, beyond the immediate, towards a horizon of emancipation in which, we hope, our presence will no longer be necessary.
And in this dialogue a profound reflection is born: the best social educator is the one who does not fail. The best anarchist, social and organized militant, is the one whose collective work generates structures, habits and capacities in such a way that, if we disappear, social movements would continue without our interventions. We both work, paradoxically, not to exist, because our existence is the product of an unjust and inhumane system; our existence and action are necessary, but ideally they would not be because the reality that justifies our resistance no longer exists.
Inés Kropo, activist of Xesta
https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2026/02/18/entre-a-praxe-educativa-e-a-accion-politica-a-educacion-social-na-militancia-dual/
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Link: (en) Spaine, Regeneration: Between educational practice and political action: Social Education in dual militancy By XESTA ORGANIZACIÓN ANARQUISTA GALEGA (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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