FROM A LANGUAGE TO A THEORY OF RESISTANCE: CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, THE LIMITS OF FRAMING, AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Transcription

1 369 FROM A LANGUAGE TO A THEORY OF RESISTANCE: CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, THE LIMITS OF FRAMING, AND SOCIAL CHANGE Rebecca Tarlau Graduate School of Education University of California, Berkeley Abstract. In this article, Rebecca Tarlau attempts to build a more robust theory of the relationship between education and social change by drawing on the conceptual tools offered in the critical pedagogy and social movement literatures. Tarlau argues that while critical pedagogy has been largely disconnected from its roots in political organizing, social movement literature has shifted away from a theory of educational processes within movement building. Specifically, she suggests that the currently dominant framing perspective in the social movement literature is incredibly limited in its ability to analyze the pedagogical aspects of organizing. Conversely, while scholars of critical pedagogy are extremely convincing when critiquing U.S. schooling, the field is weaker when theorizing about how teachers using critical pedagogy can link to larger movements for social transformation. Critical pedagogues need more organizational thinking and social movement scholars need a more pedagogical focus. Tarlau suggests three conceptual frameworks for moving forward in this direction: the notion of social movements as pedagogical spaces, the role of informal educational projects in facilitating the emergence and strength of social movements, and the role of public schools as terrains of contestation that hold the possibility of linking to larger struggles for social justice. Introduction The goal of this article is to build a more robust theory of social change by drawing on the fields of critical pedagogy and social movement theory. Scholars of social movements and critical pedagogy are infrequently in conversation. Despite the focus in both of these fields on processes of societal transformation, social movement theory in the United States has been developed primarily by sociologists and political scientists while critical pedagogy is discussed almost entirely by educational scholars. Furthermore, over the past two decades many social movement theorists have moved away from analyzing the educational processes that are central to organizing and mobilizing. In addition, while the roots of critical pedagogy are in community struggles for social change, many scholars of critical pedagogy ignore the connection between educational practices and concrete examples of social mobilization. Thus, while social movement scholars disregard education, critical pedagogues often fail to go from a language of resistance 1 to a theory of how people can form movements of resistance with that language. The following article offers several conceptual frameworks for deepening our understanding of the relationship between education and social change. First, I briefly review the social movement and critical pedagogy scholarship, suggesting where each of these bodies of literature fails to adequately theorize these relationships. Then, drawing on these partial understandings, I put forward three key concepts: the role of social movement participation in building critical consciousness; the link between informal education and social change; and the potential 1. Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: Towards a Pedagogy for the Opposition (Westport, Connecticut: Bergin and Garvey, 2001). EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 64 Number Board of Trustees University of Illinois

2 370 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y Volume 64 Number of public schools to connect to larger movements for social justice. I argue that these three frameworks built from the tools that the critical pedagogy and social movement literatures provide can offer insight into (1) how organizing and mobilizing can become key components of radical educational projects, and (2) why grassroots educational processes are critical to the emergence and strength of social movements. Critical Pedagogy and the Absence of Social Movements It is widely agreed that the Brazilian theorist and educator Paulo Freire has had the biggest influence on the field of critical pedagogy. 2 Freire s work offers both a critique of the way schooling, in its current form, reinforces systems of oppression, as well as a theory of how education can become a means to help people collectively fight back against the inequalities they face. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Freire inspired what became known as popular education, or education for the masses; these informal educational initiatives take place outside of the public school sphere, for example, through church meetings, community organizations, and literacy programs. Freire s first literacy program was with sugar cane workers in the municipality of Angicos, Pernambuco, in the poor northeastern region of Brazil. Through this program 300 sugar cane workers learned to read and write in only forty-five days. 3 This success led to the expansion of Freirean literacy circles across Brazil to thousands of peasants and rural workers. The popularity of these programs was evident when, in 1963, Freire issued a call for 600 students to serve as literacy tutors and 6,000 volunteers showed up to be interviewed. 4 During this period, Freirean educational initiatives were directly connected to larger movements struggling for social change. As Freire himself said, It was a time of fantastic popular mobilization, and education was part of it. 5 In 1964, a military coup took place and cut short these educational initiatives. This led to Freire s exile for sixteen years, until 1980, illustrating the real threat that these educational ideas posed to the Brazilian rural and urban elite. It was during this period of exile that Freire wrote his most famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in addition to dozens of other texts. 6 He also directed several grassroots educational 2. Zeus Leonardo, Critical Social Theory and Transformative Knowledge: The Functions of Criticism in Quality Education, Educational Researcher 33, no. 6 (2004): Moacir Gadotti and Carlos Alberto Torres, Paulo Freire: Education for Development, Development and Change 40, no. 6 (2009): Daniel Schugurensky, Paulo Freire (New York: Continuum, 2011), Ibid., Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2002). For a more extensive review of Freire s life and work, see Moacir Gadotti, Reading Paulo Freire: His Life and Work (Albany: State REBECCA TARLAU is a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Center for Latin American Studies and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Societal Change at Soka University of America; <becktar@gmail.com>. Her research focuses on the educational practices of social movements, state society relations, participatory governance, and Freirean pedagogies.

3 Tarlau From a Language to a Theory of Resistance 371 programs while living in Chile from 1965 to 1969, and through his work as the head of the World Council of Churches in Geneva from 1970 to These educational programs were almost always connected to organizations, political parties, and groups engaging in larger processes of social transformation, such as the movement for socialism in Chile in the late 1960s, 7 and the postrevolutionary government in Guinea-Bissau. 8 When Freire returned to Brazil, he helped to found a new political party to represent rural and urban working-class interests the Workers Party, or PT. 9 When this party took power at the municipal level in São Paulo in 1988, Freire experimented for the first time with implementing his educational ideas in the formal public school sphere. 10 Despite Freire s death in 1997, hundreds of organizations and grassroots movements continue to draw on his work and use popular education as a tool for organizing social, economic, and political change in Brazil, Latin America, and other regional contexts. 11 In summary, while Freire first implemented popular education in Brazil in the early 1960s, it was clearly connected to movements struggling for larger social transformations. Education was a tool that social movements used to internally strengthen and grow their movements, and the relationship between these educational processes and concrete actions was an assumption, not a question. Today, in most of Latin America, this relationship between popular education and organizing is still strong. However, in the U.S. context, critical pedagogy has largely been disconnected from its organizing roots. In other words, although critical pedagogy is a field of education dedicated to theorizing how education can be a progressive force for social change, social movements are rarely the center of discussion. In the Critical Pedagogy Reader, Antonia Darder and her colleagues write, Critical pedagogy loosely evolved out of a yearning to give some shape and coherence to the theoretical landscape of radical principles, beliefs, and practices that contributed to an emancipatory ideal of democratic schooling in the United States during the twentieth century. 12 Although Freire inspired the emergence University ofnew York Press, 1994); Schugurensky,Paulo Freire; and James D. Kirylo, Paulo Freire: The Man from Recife (New York: Peter Lang, 2011). 7. Schugurensky, Paulo Freire, Paulo Freire, Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bissau (New York: Seabury Press, 1978). 9. Margaret E. Keck, The Workers Party and Democratization in Brazil (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1992). 10. Pilar O Cadiz, Pia Wong, and Carlos Alberto Torres, Education and Democracy: Paulo Freire, Social Movements, and Educational Reform in São Paulo (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1998). 11. For some examples of popular education initiatives in Latin America, see Liam Kane, Popular Education and Social Change in Latin America (London: Latin American Bureau, 2001). For the use of Freire in other regional contexts, see Schugurensky, Paulo Freire, Antonia Darder, Marta Baltodano, and Rodolfo D. Torres, Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction, in The Critical Pedagogy Reader, ed. Antonia Darder, Marta Baltodano, and Rodolfo D. Torres (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003), 2.

4 372 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y Volume 64 Number of critical pedagogy, the field has been primarily developed by academics in the United States over the past three decades. According to Darder and her colleagues, the first use of the term critical pedagogy was in Henry Giroux s book Theory and Resistance in Education, published in Since the 1980s, the use of this term has expanded rapidly. This makes it difficult to clearly delineate a body of literature that makes up critical pedagogy; it has become a sort of big tent for all people in education invested in social justice work. 14 Additional theoretical influences on the field of critical pedagogy range from the work of John Dewey and Myles Horton in the United States to that of the Frankfurt School in Europe. 15 Although many theoretical lineages are encompassed within critical pedagogy, it is possible to understand the field as twofold: First, critical pedagogy is focused on deepening social theory by analyzing public schooling as an ideological state apparatus 16 through critiques about knowledge production in schools, an analysis of school culture, and critical understandings of racialization and gender processes. Second, critical pedagogy offers educators tools they can use to help students reflect on these realities, through concepts such as the teacher-intellectual, banking versus problem-solving education, collective learning, and constructing a language of resistance. As Peter McLaren argues, Critical pedagogy is a way of thinking about, negotiating, and transforming the relationship among classroom teaching, the production of knowledge, the institutional structure of the school, and the social and material relations of the wider community, society, and nation-state. 17 In a similar vein, the postmodern educational theorist Gert Biesta writes, critical pedagogy is one of the central means in the struggle for justice and liberation. 18 Thus, according to scholars writing from both Marxist and postmodern perspectives, critical pedagogy is a method of analyzing the oppressive and emancipatory potential of education in all of its forms. Nonetheless, while the hope is that critical pedagogy will offer teachers tools to help build a more equal society, scholars of critical pedagogy often fail to make the connection between radical educational practices and concrete examples of social change. The majority of critical pedagogy scholarship focuses on why 13. Ibid. See also Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education. 14. Patti Lather, Critical Pedagogy and Its Complicities: A Praxis of Stuck Places, Educational Theory 48, no. 4 (1998): See especially John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Collier Books, 1938). For a discussion of Myles Horton s educational philosophy, see Jon M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996). 16. Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, in Essays on Ideology, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1984). 17. Peter McLaren, Revolutionary Pedagogy in Post-Revolutionary Times: Rethinking the Political Economy of Critical Education, Educational Theory 48, no. 4 (1998): Gert Biesta, Say You Want a Revolution Suggestions for the Impossible Future of Critical Pedagogy, Educational Theory 48, no. 4 (1998): 499.

5 Tarlau From a Language to a Theory of Resistance 373 public schools reproduce the same economic, social, and racial hierarchies. 19 Giroux is perhaps the best known for his theories of resistance and education; however, Giroux discusses resistance primarily through an analysis of critical theory. This approach often fails to go from a language of resistance to a concrete analysis of the ways in which people using alternative educational practices form larger movements for change. Michael Apple notes this disconnect in the critical pedagogy literature, calling for more substantive large-scale discussion of feasible alternatives to neoliberal and neoconservative visions, policies, and practices. 20 In this article, I offer several theoretical frameworks for understanding the connection between education and social change, in essence returning critical pedagogy back to its historical roots in movement building. However, before introducing these concepts, I briefly review the social movement literature and why the framing perspective overshadows the educational processes that are critical to organizing and mobilizing. Framing and the Erasure of Educational Processes in Social Movement Literature While critical pedagogy has shifted further away from its roots in organizing and social movement mobilizing, the literature on social movements has moved in the opposite direction, straying away from a robust theory of grassroots educational practices. The role of education and cognitive processes within social movement mobilizing was originally incorporated into a subfield of the literature that Steven Buechler calls social constructionism: the idea that every aspect of collective action must be understood as an interactive and negotiated process among participants, opponents, and bystanders. 21 For the past twenty-five years, the framing perspective has dominated the field of social constructionism. The pioneering article that introduced framing into the field, Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation, was first published in 1986 in the American Sociological Review. 22 Over the past twenty-five years, it has become one of that journal s most frequently cited articles. The concept of framing really took off in the mid-1990s, as evidenced by the article s citation trends: the 19. Donaldo Macedo, Literacies of Power: What Americans Are Not Allowed to Know (Boulder, Colorado:Westview Press,2006);Michael W.Apple,Ideology and Curriculum (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004); Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux, Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Peter McLaren, Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education, 4th ed. (Boston: Pearson Education, 2003); and Peter McLaren, Schooling as a Ritual Performance: Toward a Political Economy of Educational Symbols and Gestures, 3rd ed. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). 20. Michael W. Apple, Educating the Right Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality (New York: Routledge, 2006), Steven Buechler, Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism: The Political Economy and Cultural Construction of Social Activism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 22. David A. Snow et al., Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation, American Sociological Review 51, no. 4 (1986):

6 374 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y Volume 64 Number number of citations per year increased from 10 in 1991, to 100 in 2000, to more than 300 in Why did this framing perspective resonate with so many social movement scholars? In order to understand the widespread acceptance and use of the framing perspective, it is necessary to review the paradigm shifts in the social movement literature during the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1970s, a group of scholars began critiquing classical social movement theory for (1) its focus on the individualistic as opposed to the political nature of social movements, (2) the assumption that individuals in social movements have an abnormal psychological profile, and (3) the way in which the larger political context was overshadowed. 24 These scholars felt that social movements were distinct enough from other forms of collective behavior that they needed their own method of analysis. For example, in his examination of protest and revolt in France during the seventeenth century, Charles Tilly argues that only certain forms of collective behavior should be considered a social movement. He defines a social movement as a sustained interaction in which mobilized people, acting in the name of a defined interest, make repeated demands on powerful others via means which go beyond the current prescriptions of the authorities. 25 Thus, the emphasis in social movement literature turned toward sustained forms of contestation, which require a united commitment to change and some minimal organizational structure. In this context, John McCarthy and Mayer Zald introduced the resource mobilization model for analyzing social movement action. 26 They argued that instead of focusing on social psychology, scholars of social movements should highlight sociological theories of politics and economics. McCarthy and Zald assume that there will always be enough discontent for a social movement to develop; therefore, rather than discontent, the key factor in movement emergence is whether people can effectively organize the resources at their disposal to take collective political action. The resource mobilization model emphasizes the interaction between resource availability, the preexisting organization of preference structures, and entrepreneurial attempts to meet preference demand. 27 In 23. David A. Snow et al., The Emergence, Development, and Future of the Framing Perspective: 25+ Years Since Frame Alignment, Mobilization: An International Journal 19, no. 1 (2013): John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory, American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 6 (1977): ; Anthony Oberschall, Theories of Social Conflict, Annual Review of Sociology 4 (1978): ; Charles Tilly, Social Movements and National Politics, in Statemaking and Social Movements: Essays in History and Theory, ed. Charles Bright and Susan Harding (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984); Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984); Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of the Black Insurgency, , 2nded. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Charles Tilly, Louise A. Tilly, and Richard Tilly, The Rebellious Century: (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1975). 25. Tilly, Social Movements and National Politics, McCarthy and Zald, Resource Mobilization and Social Movements. 27. Ibid., 1236.

7 Tarlau From a Language to a Theory of Resistance 375 a similar line of argument, Anthony Oberschall developed a conflict theory, wherein he emphasizes mobilization, organization, and collective action. 28 In 1982, Doug McAdam came out with a groundbreaking book, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, which builds on and critiques the resource mobilization approach, proposing a new theoretical framework: the political process model. McAdam claims that theories of resource mobilization do not adequately explain the emergence of social movements due to their focus on elite institutions that supposedly give movements the opportunity to mobilize. 29 Viewed through this lens, the masses are seen as helpless and unable to do anything without these resources. McAdam proposes studying social movements through three interacting forces: political opportunity structures, indigenous networks, and cognitive liberation. Two years later, Aldon Morris published a book on the civil rights movement that also critiques the prior focus on elite institutions. 30 Morris proposed an indigenous approach to studying social movements, which focuses on the internal resources already available in a community. The publication of these two books represents a clear shift in the literature toward analyzing resources within poor communities fighting for social change. 31 Another key concept that McAdam introduces in his 1982 study is cognitive liberation. Although it is rarely discussed in the current framing literature, Buechler suggests that some of the central concerns of social constructionism, such as framing, were foreshadowed by cognitive liberation. 32 McAdam writes, The crucial question is: what set of circumstances is most likely to facilitate the transformation from hopeless submission to oppressive conditions to an aroused readiness to challenge those conditions? 33 He argues that one of these conditions is a group process of cognitive liberation, in which people jointly begin to define their situation as unjust and subject to change through some type of collective action. 34 Cognitive liberation is essential for movement emergence, and 28. Oberschall, Theories of Social Conflict. 29. McAdam, Political Process and the Development of the Black Insurgency. 30. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement. 31. Morris and McAdam were doing the research for these books at the same time, and they include each other s dissertations in their bibliographies. However, the connection between the different theories these two authors develop is unclear. McAdam cites Morris twice, along with several other authors, in a general statement about the existence of indigenous organizations in the South; however, he does not credit Morris with helping to develop an approach that looks at indigenous organizations. In addition, while Morris includes McAdam s dissertation in his bibliography, he does not cite his work in connection with how groups mobilize. 32. Buechler, Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism, McAdam, Political Process and the Development of the Black Insurgency, Two decades later social movement scholars introduced another similar concept, oppositional consciousness. See Jane Mansbridge and Aldon Morris, eds., Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of Social Protest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

8 376 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y Volume 64 Number a reduction in this sense of efficacy might also contribute to movement decline. Although McAdam does not elaborate on the causes of cognitive liberation, it is implied that this process can occur through participation in successful actions, conversations with movement leaders, or involvement in educational programs that facilitate discussions about the structural reasons for inequality. Despite the potential for cognitive liberation to provide a framework for analyzing educational processes, this term soon disappeared from the social movement scholarship with the introduction of the framing literature in As Robert Benford, one of the authors of Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation, describes, we strategically framed the original 1986 article so it aligned with the resource mobilization and structuralist perspectives that dominated the field throughout the 1970s and 1980s. 35 These authors defined framing as a collective process of interpretation and social construction of particular ideas, 36 and frame alignment as the process whereby actors consciously create these forms of collective interpretation the frame in order to align with the interests, values, goals, and beliefs of other individuals and groups. 37 The capacity for these collective interpretations to align with the values and beliefs of other individuals is called resonance. The amount of resonance a frame has is the frame s ability to make sense, connect with, or be accepted by another individual. Frames become devices for constructing social meanings that resonate with particular actors or for contesting particular logics. 38 In 1999, McAdam published a second edition of his book on the political process theory with a new introduction wherein he outlines two of the same three conditions for social movement emergence: political opportunities and indigenous networks. However, his third condition previously called cognitive liberation is now referred to as framing or other interpretive processes. 39 This shift in language illustrates the new dominance of the framing perspective. I argue that while cognitive liberation could have provided critical pedagogy scholars a basis for understanding educational practices within social movements, this opportunity was lost when the framing literature was introduced. Benford argues that despite the fact that many viewed the frame alignment process as having a top-down and instrumentalist focus, the framing perspective became popular because it succeeded in bridging structural and cultural perspectives on social movements. 40 However, this shift to a top-down process of mobilization overshadows other educational processes that are also essential to capacity building 35. Snow et al., The Emergence, Development, and Future of the Framing Perspective, Doug McAdam and W. Richard Scott, Organizations and Movements, in Social Movements and Organizational Theory, ed. Gerald F. Davis et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 37. Snow et al., Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation. 38. Ibid. 39. McAdam, Political Process and the Development of the Black Insurgency, ix. 40. Snow et al., Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation,

9 Tarlau From a Language to a Theory of Resistance 377 among social movement actors. In the framing perspective, activist leaders assign meaning to movement activities in order to mobilize participation. 41 Therefore, framing makes the majority of movement actors the objects of the frame. While this is certainly part of the story, it should be understood as one tool in analyzing how movement participants are mobilized. Theories of framing do not offer a language for analyzing how individuals and communities develop the consciousness and capacity they need to act collectively. In other words, although the framing perspective redirected the study of social movements into this cultural and discursive realm, 42 the concept of cognitive liberation could have gone much further in bridging cultural and structural analyses of social change. It is important to note that I am not the first (nor certainly the last) to critique this framing perspective or to suggest the need to move beyond a top-down understanding of framing to a more dialogical approach. Marc Steinberg provides one of the most lucid analyses of this perspective, critiquing framing for not having a dialogical analysis of collective action. In other words, while meaning is made through interaction, the framing perspective treats frames and culture as a material resource people can control, like capital. The underlying epistemology, Steinberg notes, is that the transmission of meanings between actors is a largely uncomplicated process of sending and receiving messages. He argues that framing highlights a frozen moment in the course of action rather than the processes themselves. Furthermore, while activists can attempt to utilize and transform discourse, they are always partly captive to the truths these genres construct. 43 Other scholars have critiqued the framing perspective along similar lines. 44 Thus, 41. For some empirical applications of framing, see Daniel Cress and David Snow, The Outcomes of Homeless Mobilization: The Influence of Organization, Disruption, Political Mediation, and Framing, American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 4 (2000): ; Fiona Macaulay, Knowledge Production, Framing, and Criminal Justice Reform in Latin America, Journal of Latin American Studies 39, no. 3 (2007): ; Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, eds., Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Holly J. McCammon et al., Movement Framing and Discursive Opportunity Structures: The Political Successes of the U.S. Women s Jury Movements, American Sociological Review 72, no. 5 (2007): ; Rory McVeigh, Daniel J. Myers, and David Sikkink, Corn, Klansmen, and Coolidge: Structure and Framing in Social Movements, Social Forces 83, no. 2 (2004): ; John McCarthy, Activists, Authorities, and Media Framing of Drunk Driving, in New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity, ed. Enrique Laraña, Hank Johnston, and Joseph Gusfield (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); David A. Snow and Scott Byrd, Ideology, Framing Processes, and Islamic Terrorist Movements, Mobilization 12, no. 1 (2007): ; and Gerald F. Davies, From Moral Duty to Cultural Rights: A Case Study of Political Framing in Education, in Social Movements and Organizational Theory, ed. Davies et al. 42. Snow et al., The Emergence, Development, and Future of the Framing Perspective, Marc Steinberg, The Talk and Back Talk of Collective Action: A Dialogic Analysis of Repertoires of Discourse Among Nineteenth-Century English Cotton Spinners, American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 3 (1999): 739, 741, and James M. Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and William A. Gamson, The Social Psychology of Collective Action, in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, ed. Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClung Mueller (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1992),

10 378 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y Volume 64 Number the contribution of this article is not noting the limits of the framing perspective per se, but illustrating how the field of critical pedagogy can help social movement scholars move beyond the current understanding of social constructionism to a fuller analysis of the relationship between education and social change. Constructing a More Robust Theory of Education and Social Change As the previous two sections have illustrated, the field of critical pedagogy in the United States is disconnected from theories of organizing and mobilizing, and the currently dominant framing perspective has overshadowed a focus on educational processes within the social movement literature. Nonetheless, both of these fields offer scholars, activists, and educational practitioners a series of tools for building a more robust understanding of the relationship between education and social change. In the following sections, I discuss three frameworks that can begin to integrate critical pedagogy and social movement theory. The first section analyzes the pedagogical aspects of social movements and how one s involvement in movement organizing can become an educational experience of consciousness-raising and empowerment. The second section focuses on the connection between nonformal educational experiences outside of the formal public school sphere and social change. The third section examines the role of public schooling in struggles for social justice, recasting public education as a terrain of contestation. Social Movements as Pedagogical The process of critical consciousness-raising has always been and always will be crucial to mobilizing; however, it is necessary to analytically parse out this component of social movement work. Kim Voss and Michelle Williams distinguish between three levels of social movements: networking, mobilizing, and organizing. 45 For these scholars, networking is the attempt to create linkages among social movements at the global level in order to pressure institutions that act in national spaces. Networking literature includes the work on transnational advocacy, such as Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink s research on the boomerang strategy. 46 Mobilizing, on the other hand, is protest action at the national or regional level, which is an effort to get the state or other actors with power to respond to grievances. The political process model and the resource mobilization model in social movement theory, as well as the framing component of social constructionism, analyze social movements at this mobilizing level. In contrast to mobilizing, Voss and Williams define organizing as the effort to build individual capacity, civic engagement, and a level of group consciousness 45. Kim Voss and Michelle Williams, The Local in the Global: Rethinking Social Movements in the New Millennium, Democratization 19, no. 2 (2012): Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1998).

11 Tarlau From a Language to a Theory of Resistance 379 and sense of efficacy that will enable a collectivity to mobilize for action. This definition encompasses the major aspects of McAdam s original definition of cognitive liberation: a collective definition of a situation as unjust and subject to change. Although McAdam does not directly talk about education in his analysis of the civil rights movement, he defines cognitive liberation as a transformation of consciousness within a significant segment of the aggrieved population. Before collective protest can get under way, people must collectively define their situations as unjust and subject to change through group action. 47 This definition of cognitive liberation also aligns with Freire s educational theories because it proposes both the need to develop a critical consciousness and a theory of how this new consciousness can help people engage in collective struggles. Freirean educational theories can help deepen our understanding of this level of social movement work by bridging the connection between educational processes and social action. A prominent study focused on this level of social movement analysis is Charles Payne s social history of the civil rights movement. 48 In this detailed book, Payne illustrates how members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) went into black communities and worked with neighbors to create a sense of group consciousness of their efficacy. 49 Through community meetings, house visits, and group discussions, members of black communities began to analyze issues of oppression that had never been discussed openly, and through these conversations they began to believe that change was possible. A process of cognitive liberation was taking place. Payne calls this community organizing and writes that this tradition includes an emphasis on building relationships, respect for collective leadership, for bottom-up change, the expansive sense of how democracy ought to operate in everyday life, the emphasis on building for the long haul, the anti-bureaucratic ethos, the preference for addressing local issues. 50 Payne also asserts that organizing is synonymous with helping others develop their own potential to be agents of change. From an educational perspective, these organizing activities are pedagogical processes. Although SNCC leaders also used framing to mobilize people to protest, framing cannot explain the learning that took place among entire communities in the South as SNCC leaders convened people for political discussions, went on neighborhood visits, and developed the capacity for people to become leaders in their own communities. Cognitive liberation is also similar to what Jane Mansbridge and Aldon Morris have referred to as oppositional consciousness a mental state that develops when people begin identifying with a subordinate group, articulating injustices done to that group, opposing those injustices, and seeing the group as having a shared interest 47. McAdam, Political Process and the Development of the Black Insurgency, Charles Payne, I ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 49. SNCC was one of the main activist organizations during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. 50. Payne, I ve Got the Light of Freedom, 364.

12 380 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y Volume 64 Number in ending or diminishing those injustices. 51 As Morris and Naomi Braine write, One of the most important cultural forces working against a hegemonic culture is the oppositional consciousness of oppressed groups. 52 There is a clear parallel between the concepts of cognitive liberation and oppositional consciousness just described and Freire s notion of emancipatory education. Freire writes: One of the most important tasks of critical educational practice is to make possible the conditions in which the learners, in their interaction with one another and with their teachers, engage in the experience of assuming themselves as social, historical, thinking, communicating, transformative, creative persons; dreamers of possible utopias. 53 Freire s educational ideas are not only about constructing spaces for critical reflection but also emphasize providing students with opportunities to intervene in this reality through collective action. Therefore, Freire s theories have the potential to contribute to a theoretical framework that describes how marginalized groups go through a process of cognitive liberation, develop an oppositional consciousness, and learn that they have the ability to take action. Another concept that is useful for understanding this process of consciousness building is Freire s notion of the unfinishedness of human beings. Freire believes that the world is always changing and that the future is undetermined: In truth, it would be incomprehensible if the awareness that I have of my presence in the world were not, simultaneously, a sign of the impossibility of my absence from the construction of that presence. Insofar as I am a conscious presence in the world, I cannot hope to escape my ethical responsibility for my action in the world. 54 Although not all humans are aware of their ability to change the future, the realization of one s capacity to act in the world is an inherent possibility of our human condition. Throughout Freire s many essays, books, letters, and interviews, the unfinishedness of our human condition is referred to repeatedly as the necessary starting point for theorizing social transformation. Coming to an awareness of the unfinishedness of the human condition is similar to the concept of cognitive liberation identifying a situation as unjust and subject to change. Thus far, I have established the theoretical parallels between Freire s concept of emancipatory education and the notion of cognitive liberation. In addition, if we begin to conceptualize social movements as pedagogical spaces, critical pedagogy can offer several tools in regard to how this learning may take place. One tool is the notion of collective learning. As Zeus Leonardo argues, if critical pedagogy is supposed to help students develop a language of resistance, this must be a collective 51. Jane Mansbridge, The Making of Oppositional Consciousness, in Oppositional Consciousness,ed. Mansbridge and Morris, Aldon Morris and Naomi Braine, Social Movements and Oppositional Consciousness, in Oppositional Consciousness, ed. Mansbridge and Morris, Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), Ibid., 26.

13 Tarlau From a Language to a Theory of Resistance 381 language given the social nature of oppression. 55 While traditional education values individual progress and accountability, critical pedagogues emphasize collective learning as a process that students must go through together. 56 Thus, whether it was black communities during the civil rights movement or peasant groups in Latin America, there is a pedagogical justification for the collective approach to learning within those social movements. In addition, scholars of critical pedagogy push for a recasting of the teacher as intellectual or cultural worker, which can be helpful in conceptualizing the role of a community organizer. 57 This notion of the teacher-intellectual draws on Antonio Gramsci s notion of an organic intellectual : someone who helps elaborate an awareness of his or her social group s function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields. 58 Gramsci is careful to distinguish the role of an organic intellectual from that of a simple orator, or what he would refer to as a traditional intellectual who is disconnected from the actual practices of the people. For critical pedagogues, teachers and community organizers must also become intellectuals who are actively working to innovate and recreate a rigorous, reflexive, and emancipatory educational process for their students, or for the marginalized populations with which they are working. 59 In summary, critical pedagogy can help social movement scholars explore how a process of cognitive liberation occurs, or, conversely, why marginalized groups might be socialized to accept their unequal position in society. Although concepts in the social movement literature such as political opportunities, indigenous networks, and framing are important theoretical tools for analyzing collective action, there also needs to be a better framework for theorizing the local and generative processes of capacity building that often take place within informal movement spaces. Critical pedagogy literature can help us understand how political organizers build individual participation and civic engagement and institutional capacity at the local level. 60 Activists who engage in this level of social movement activity often utilize the practices that critical pedagogues discuss. A social movement framework that analyzes activist-leaders as teacher-intellectuals is a step toward building a theory of cognitive liberation. Furthermore, the notion of the 55. Leonardo, Critical Social Theory and Transformative Knowledge. 56. Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education. 57. Leonardo, Critical Social Theory and Transformative Knowledge, Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), For many postmodernist theorists, this focus on emancipation in critical pedagogy links the project of critical pedagogy to Enlightenment, and therefore authoritarian, ideals. See, for example, Ilan Gur-Ze ev, Toward a Nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy, Educational Theory 48, no. 4 (1998): Nonetheless, other postmodern scholars argue that if this search for justice is reframed as the impossibility of justice, which releases the possibility of transgression, critical pedagogy could again be linked to a real revolutionary project (Biesta, Say You Want a Revolution, 510). 60. Voss and Williams, The Local in the Global.

14 382 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y Volume 64 Number public sphere as both a lens for analyzing the de-politicization of the masses and their possible self-transformation toward a conscious and active citizenry is another conceptual tool. 61 These broad ideas can assist scholars in analyzing how social movement participants interpret their own efficacy and their ability to create change. Critical Pedagogy as Integral to Social Movement Building As the previous section describes, there is clearly a pedagogical dimension of social movements, and scholars of critical pedagogy can help analyze this level of movement building. However, popular educators and critical pedagogues also need organizational thinking in order to build a framework for understanding how dispersed educational projects might lead to social change. Therefore, a second concept I introduce is informal educational initiatives as key to social movement building. I construct this framework by drawing on both the social movement and the critical pedagogy literatures. On the one hand, critical pedagogy offers important lessons about how educational practices can produce resistance and agency while, on the other hand, social movement scholars offer a framework for theorizing how and if these initiatives lead to the formation of a social movement. The idea that nonformal education beyond the day-to-day participation in social movements themselves is an important component of social change is not a universally accepted proposition. In fact, during the first half of the twentieth century, this was a central topic of debate between two famous U.S. community organizers: Saul Alinsky and Myles Horton. Alinsky was the head of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), and he wrote the famous book Rules for Radicals, which continues to be used by community organizers across the United States. 62 Horton, as the director of the Highlander Center in Tennessee, wrote about the connection between education and social justice for decades before Freire published Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The Highlander Center was critical in strengthening the southern labor movement in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, through residential and extension workers education programs. While both Freire and Horton have acknowledged the similarities in their educational ideas, Freire remains better known internationally and has had a larger influence on critical pedagogy. In the book We Make the Road by Walking, which is a dialogue between Horton and Freire, Horton discusses the debates he had about education and organizing with Alinsky: One of the unsolved problems, even I think here at Highlander, is the difference between education and organizing, and that s an old question, it goes way back. Saul Alinsky and I went on a circuit. We had the Alinsky/Horton show that went out on the circuit debating and discussing the difference between organizing and education. Saul says that organizing 61. Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education, Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971; repr. New York: Vintage Books, 1989).

15 Tarlau From a Language to a Theory of Resistance 383 educates. I said that education makes possible organization, but there s a different interest, different emphasis. 63 In this statement, Horton is summarizing two positions about the connection between education and social change. The first position is that organizing is the most important educational process that a person can be part of; therefore, organizing should be the primary form of education for marginalized groups. The second position is that education intentional spaces of learning outside of organizing is also a critical component of building a strong social movement. Horton falls on the latter side of this debate, critiquing the anti-intellectual focus in activist campaigns and suggesting that it is actually education that makes possible organization. Although both Horton and Alinsky have passed away, this debate continues to divide community and labor organizations in the United States. In the labor movement, many unionists openly identify as following either the Freirean or Alinsky tradition supporting workers education or investing primarily in organizing. 64 In the community-organizing sphere, Alinsky s position is still a dominant narrative. For example, Edward Chambers, who has headed the IAF since Alinsky passed away in 1972, recently wrote: Theoria, or theory [is] the knowledge that comes from the reasoning and research of academics. You get it by pulling away from the realities of everyday life into a university or laboratory, a specialized place of research, ideas, and academic jargon. But there is another Greek word for knowledge, phronesis, which means practical wisdom. That s the kind of know-how based on the hard lessons of life experience that guide a good parent, boss, or leader. It s what I call social knowledge. It comes from actual experiences of raising children, running businesses, and dealing with conflicts. All social knowledge is experiential: You don t get it in school; you get it at work, on the streets and at home. 65 In this statement, Chambers is making a clear distinction between education that occurs through everyday experience and theoretical knowledge that comes from schools which he claims is completely disconnected from reality and not necessary for social action. This debate parallels the divide between the social movement and critical pedagogy literatures, wherein the former emphasizes organizing and the latter focuses on education. However, I argue that this dichotomy is not necessary. Not only is social movement participation undeniably a pedagogical experience, as the previous section describes, intentional spaces for learning based in radical educational models are also critical for building stronger social movements. There is abundant historical evidence about the role that informal educational initiatives 63. Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change, ed. Brenda Bell, John Gaventa, and John Peters (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), Rebecca Tarlau, Education and Labor in Tension: Contemporary Debates About Education in the U.S. Labor Movement, Labor Studies Journal 36, no. 3 (2011): Edward Chambers, Roots for Radicals: Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 16.