In 2012, the remote Aboriginal community of Wilcannia in western NSW hosted the first Australian pilot of a Cuban mass adult literacy campaign model known as 'Yes I Can'. The aim was to investigate the appropriateness of this model in Aboriginal Australia. Building on an intensive community development process of 'socialisation and mobilisation', sixteen community members with very low literacy graduated from the basic literacy course, with the majority continuing on into post-literacy activities, further training and/or employment. The pilot was initiated by the National Aboriginal Adult Literacy Campaign Steering Committee (NAALCSC) consisting of Aboriginal leaders from the education and health sectors, and managed by the University of New England (UNE), working in partnership with the Wilcannia Local Aboriginal Land Council as the local lead agency. The pilot was supported by a Cuban academic who came to Australia for this purpose, and included a Participatory Action Research (PAR) evaluation led by the UNE Project Manager. In this paper, members of the project team and the NAALCSC describe the pilot and reflect on its outcomes.

This paper discusses the use of popular education in development work with Aboriginal communities in Australia. The three authors have been developing a popular education approach since the 1990s, when we began working together in a national organization representing Aboriginal community‐controlled adult colleges (FIAEP, 1997: Durnan & Boughton, 1999). The approach grows out of our experiences across a wide variety of education settings, formal and informal, accredited and non‐accredited, for community controlled agencies and under contract to governments, and with Aboriginal communities in every state and territory in Australia. Recently, we extended our work to Timor‐Leste, which deepened our understanding of the practice of popular education, especially its application in post‐conflict societies (Boughton, 2010; Durnan & Beetson, 2011).