In 1989, the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre initiated a model of budget participation known internationally as "participatory budgeting." In this process of diagnosis, deliberation and decision-making, city residents directly decide how to allocate part of a public budget, typically at the level of municipal government. During the past two decades, hundreds of cities in Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa have adapted this model of participatory democracy to their own contexts. In this article, we explore one of the first Canadian experiments of participatory budgeting. In Guelph, Ontario, a civil society organization called the Neighbourhood Support Coalition uses participatory budgeting to allocate of public and private funds. We discuss the Canadian context for this experiment, as well as the history and evolution of participatory budgeting in Guelph. Based on four years of interviews, ethnographic observation, and primary and secondary literature, we identify several lessons learned through the Guelph process, as well as the conditions that have enabled its development and posed challenges for its success.

Informal learning has always been part of humankind, but only in recent decades has it attracted the attention of educational researchers. This chapter examines four challenges (conceptual, methodological, institutional, and pedagogical) related to informal learning. The section on the conceptual challenge addresses the distinctions between informal learning, informal teaching, and informal education, and identifies three forms of informal learning: self-directed, incidental, and tacit. The section on the methodological challenge discusses the difficulties of researching informal learning (particularly incidental and tacit forms), describes an approach to elicit informal learning, and presents a critical analysis of its strengths and limitations. The section on the institutional challenge discusses issues related to the assessment and recognition of informal learning. Finally, the section on the pedagogical challenge highlights the potential of informal education to nurture informal learning.

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With over 150 years of history, social pedagogy is both an interdisciplinary scholarly field of inquiry and a field of practice that is situated in the intersection of three areas of human activity: education, social work and community development. Although social pedagogy has different emphases and approaches depending on particular historical and geographical contexts, a common theme is that it deals with the connections between educational and social dynamics, or put in a different way, it is concerned with the educational dimension of social issues and the social dimensions of educational issues. The first part of this paper analyzes the history of the field of social pedagogy since its origins until today, with a focus on transnational flows between Europe and the Americas. The second part of the paper discusses the main issues raised in this special issue of EPAA, and extracts the main threads and connections among the different papers included in the volume.

Descripteurs (TEE) : apprentissage fortuit, apprentissage par la pratique, auto-enseignement, stratégie d'apprentissage, théorie de l'apprentissage.