“From the Streets to the Academy, and Back:” Education and Social Change
Models, Practices and Analyses for Radical Learning

New Left social movements of the1960’s in the U.S. helped us understand the necessary but strained relationship between education and social change. In just one powerful example, street-based movements such as Black Power, Chicanismo, Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation created African American Studies, Chicano/a and Latino/a Studies, Women’s Studies and Gender(Queer) Studies departments—and fought for implementation of these programs in universities nationwide. Deeply affected by social movements of the ‘60’s through the ‘80’s, colleges and universities have provided spaces of learning and academic production where many activists (students and teachers) have suffered and thrived. In this workshop you will hear voices from activists who are students and teachers. We understand that valuable work is done in the academy and in our communities and movements, and we are committed to bridging the two.

We will begin with a brief presentation of a critique of mainstream education in the U.S. As a part of our workshop, we will discuss some of the problems of institutionalized education, including the alienation, exploitation, and complicity with imperialist projects associated with State-sponsored schools, and on the other hand, the “Tyranny of Structurelessness” that suffocates many private, non-profit, “left” or “alternative” institutions. The alternatives we will present are contemporary attempts at praxis, the process in which we as groups and individuals travel from what we learn, to what we act upon, and back to learning, in a never-ending cycle. This is the kind of education that has the potential for world transformation.

We will present two radical education models as they are used in the Activism and Social Change Masters Program at New College of California in San Francisco. First, we’ll get off our seats and on our feet with exercises that explode the expected in “education,” by using movement as a tool for communication and reflection. Led by Helene Vosters, and based on Augusto Boal’s “Theater of the Oppressed” work, these exercises utilize movement to facilitate an embodied exploration of social problems, current events and strategies for social change. When we get back to our seats, we will discuss the ways in which activists can use ethnographic method to promote social reform and social justice with Dr. Rachael Stryker. This presentation will first briefly locate the history, politics, methodologies and ethics of Public Interest Ethnography (PIE), a new subfield of anthropology informed by human rights discourse and dedicated to the collection, analysis and accessible distribution of materials for the purpose of highlighting and minimizing economic and cultural inequities. It then outlines the process and results yielded by one class at the New College of California that utilized the tenets of PIE and Paolo Freire’s praxis-models as outlined in Pedagogy of the Oppressed as part of a collaboration with Bay Area immigrants and their families to produce ethnographic materials for the non-profit, Immigrant Legal Resource Center’s education and media campaigns to inform and reform deportation laws in the U.S.

The second half of our workshop turns specifically to lessons learned from recent U.S. social movements, and the opportunities these lessons present us with today. We will discuss the practice of historical social movement study, and the opportunity for intergenerational communication and connection. Student Christine Negri will present her research interviewing veterans of the Civil Rights movement with special attention to the problems and opportunities presented by outsider participation in movement campaigns.

We will then turn to today’s organizing and social movement work, and begin to explore some tools that radical academic theory has to offer to our movements today. In particular, we will talk about the politics of difference in our own communities and organizing work. We will present the theory of intersectional oppressions, a development of women of color feminist activists. This mode of strategizing and thinking contributed to ideas in postmodernism, and has had a fruitful life in the academy. In this conversation, we will look at some of the challenges of applying academic theories like this one to our work for social change. Together, the workshop participants will explore several ways of understanding the systems and structures that oppress us, creative tactics for organizing, and opportunities and obstacles for building coalitions within and across identities.