Close, yet so far apart: Bridging social movement theory with popular education (original) (raw)

Thinking social movement learning, again: Choudry, Freire and the conversation between popular education and social movements

Globalisation, Societies and Education, 2023

Disciplinary pressures within academia often produce specialised and one-sided accounts of complex social processes. Convincing accounts of popular education regularly acknowledge the importance of social movements but without theorising them adequately – and vice versa. This one-sidedness is compounded by a widespread tendency to generalise from often highly specific institutional and political contexts, as though all movements learned in the same way across space and time and popular education’s role in fostering this learning is simple. Unchecked, this leads to the reification of ‘critical’ theory and the reduction and flattening of emancipatory practices to methods or even predefined goals. This paper constructs a dialogue between the work of Choudry, Freire and other authors in both fields, aimed at both celebrating and problematising their contribution to learning from our struggles. By developing a conversation between them, we want to explore how their insights might be usefully integrated for contemporary social movements.

Social Movements and Educational Research: Toward a United Field of Scholarship

Teachers College Record, 2018

Background/Context: Educational research addressing social movements appears to be growing rapidly, but, with a few exceptions, this body of literature has remained largely isolated in pockets stretched across myriad fields of educational scholarship. Awareness and dialogue across researchers is limited because social movement-focused educational research lacks the structure, identity, profile, and networks of a field of scholarship. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: The purpose of this article is to explore how educational researchers have addressed social movements in their scholarship. Through presenting the findings from a wide-ranging literature review, we aim to generate greater awareness of social movement-oriented educational scholarship and argue for a more united field of research on social movements and education. Research Design: We conducted an extensive review of educational scholarship with an explicit focus on social movements. Our sample included over 370 publications from myriad fields of educational research, including adult education, higher education, social foundations of education, and other fields addressing K–12 schooling. Findings/Results: We found that most of the educational literature addressing social movements can be grouped into one of two categories: the study of education and learning in social movements, and the study of the influence of movements on formal education. The first category of scholarship, produced primarily (though not entirely) in the field of adult education, has the appearance of a research program, with researchers engaged in scholarly conversation with shared theoretical touchstones. The second category of scholarship does not have the appearance of a research program, as it is produced across a number of fields that do not appear to be in dialogue. Although there is little sign of mutual awareness across these two large categories of literature, we found that researchers on both sides of the divide have much in common, including theoretical, methodological, and topical interests. Conclusions/Recommendations: We conclude the literature review by arguing for the establishment of a more united field of research on social movements and education. We posit that an interdisciplinary and multi-perspective field devoted to understanding the educational dimensions and implications of social movements would not only benefit researchers and their scholarship but also pose and answer new and important questions related to formal, non-formal, and informal education. A more united field of inquiry related to social movements and education would also raise the profile of this scholarship such that it could have greater influence on educational policy and practice, as well as on social movements themselves.

Popular Education and Youth: The Social Movement as an Educational Space

Cadernos de Pesquisa

This study aims to understand how individuals, in the course of their life histories, and mainly through experiential learning processes, build knowledge through the participation in a social movement. To this end, a qualitative research was conducted, using semi-structured interviews, to obtain life narratives from six participants of a Brazilian movement that brings together young people across the country: the Levante Popular da Juventude [Popular Youth Uprising]. The research allows us to understand how the educational experience lived in social movements favors the emancipation of individuals who experience it and lead to an awareness about participatory citizenship in face of local and global realities.

The confluence of popular education and social movement studies into social movement learning: A systematic literature review

International Journal of Lifelong Education, 2020

The purpose of this paper is to systematically review and trace the lineage of theoretical debates around social movement learning in the field of adult education. We compiled articles, books and conference proceedings on adult education and social movements from Google Scholar using the software Publish or Perish and manually filtered the data to only include those that explicitly address the topic. Based on the data, we identified key literature that scholars cross-referenced, which extended the review to include the literature from the 1970s until today. We argue that the theoretical debates about social movements and education can be characterised by four phases: 1) popular education within and for social movements, 2) the Old/New Social Movement debate and its radical influence on adult education, 3) conflict and pushback between scholars, and 4) social movement learning as a confluence of literature. We argue that it is only when scholars writing about popular education interacted with scholars promoting the idea of 'new' social movements that the current proliferation of 'social movement learning' emerged. Thus, the knowledge production of social movement learning itself has been a result of a dynamic and historical movement in the field of adult education. KEYWORDS social movement learning; popular education; new and old social movements; adult education Introdution Despite varying approaches to the study of social movements, scholars share a broad definition of social movements as 'networks of informal interactions between a plurality of individuals, groups and/or [organisations], engaged in political or cultural conflicts, on the basis of shared collective identities' (Diani, 1992, p. 2). In this definition, it is in the human interaction and agency that we find connections between social movements and the field of education. Interactions that lead to shared agendas necessitate participants learning from one another through both informal (e.g., participating in rallies, reading leaflets) and nonformal processes (e.g., teach-ins, educational programmes). Education research has been fragmented in its approaches to social movements (Niesz et al., 2018). A notable exception is the field of adult education, which boasts a rich tradition in critical pedagogy as well as internal debates on the educational aspects of social movements. Yet, contrary to the abundance of literature on social movements in adult education, there have been few reviews on such lineages. Hall and Turray (2006) published a review that gives an overview of definitions and traditions of social movement learning within adult education while providing abundant resources. Another review is by Niesz et al. (2018), scholars based in Kent State University, who

Social Movement Knowledge and Anthropology of Education

Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 2019

Although social movements are frequently background and occasionally foreground in the studies of anthropologists of education, the knowledges produced by movements have seldom been a focus of our work. In this Reflection on the Field, I argue that investigating the production and circulation of social movement knowledges, as contextualized by educational processes and spaces, can enrich our understanding of the roles of education and movements in struggles for justice and social change

Learning and Education for a Better World: The Role of Social Movements

2013

The authors of this much-needed study of social movement learning offer a variety of examples of the pedagogical themes that emerge in social movement research. Their examples of social movements from around the world offer hope in the face of injustice. This hope is founded on the new knowledge and pathways constructed by social movements, which give access to spaces to imagine and create the future we want. The essays, when read together, exist as overlapping and intertwined perspectives on how social movement learning provides opportunities to gain understanding of radical, democratic, and transformative methods and processes.

Pedagogy from and for Social Movements: A Conversation Between Theory and Practice

Capitalism Nature Socialism , 2017

Much radical writing on academia expresses a disempowering despair grounded in a mystified view of knowledge in which an ecosocialist pedagogy appears as “theory from above.” Against this, the article argues for an understanding of knowledge as materially situated in social and ecological relationships; as oriented towards practice; as developmental; and as contested between top-down and bottom-up perspectives, demystifying third-level education from the perspective of radical traditions of movement-generated knowledge. Concretely, this means starting from participants’ existing praxis and “learning from each other’s struggles”—using “frozen” movement theory and activist experience—to move towards a wider, more radical understanding. In Ireland such pedagogy is rooted in the remarkable processes of working-class community self-organising, rural environmental justice alliances, women’s and GLTBQ activism, and the anti-capitalist “movement of movements,” encapsulating Audre Lorde’s dictum, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” Drawing on the literature on movement learning and knowledge production, the article focusses in particular on a “Masters for activists.” The course supports movement participants to deepen and develop their activist practice but also to situate it within these wider and more radical understandings and emancipatory alliances. Taking movement praxis—rather than “contemplative” knowledge—as a starting point raises very different questions about theory and practice, forms and distribution of knowledge and the purpose and shape of learning.

Social Movement Studies in Britain: No Longer the Poor Relation?

Tilly's famous claim that 'Britain created the social movement' (Tilly 1982) might lead readers to assume that scholarship on social movements would be firmly established as a central field of British social science. That is not the case. Or, rather, it is not the case in relation to the dominant approach to studying social movements as it has developed across North America and Europe in recent decades, anchored as it now is around the study of contentious politics, networks, framing and, latterly, emotions. Britain has, of course, produced some of this kind of social movement scholarship, as we will show, but British scholarship on social movements also has a distinctive texture and tradition, born out of the specific cultural, political and academic contexts in which the study of social movements emerged in Britain from the late 1950s, and of the subsequent development of relationships between British social movements and the study of social movements. Therefore in this chapter we survey the emergence of social movements and the varieties of scholarship that have developed since they became a focus of interest in the social and human sciences in the 1960s, and identify a ‘British tradition’ of movement analysis, which is pluri-disciplinary, overwhelmingly qualitative, and driven by concerns with context and movement agency. Finally, we discuss the challenges movement scholarship in Britain has faced and faces, and where future developments might lie.