Occupy Wall Street as Public Pedagogy: What Can Social Justice Educators Learn From Social Movements?

• In Event: 46.025 - Creative and Critical Justice: New Approaches to Methodological Border-Crossing

Abstract

Objectives
How and what can educational theorists and practitioners concerned with social justice education learn from the activist strategies, public pedagogies and educational interventions of global social movements such as Occupy Wall Street? In this paper, we focus specifically on the synergies of creativity, pedagogy, and activism evidenced by such collectives as the Occupy Wall Street’s People’s Puppets.

This paper also considers the socio-spatial aspects of creative activism (Jasper 2008), from in-the-street actions to web-based communication networks, examining the in/visible labor required to build unintentional communities and intentional connectivity (Boler et al 2014). We explore how these young activists embody modalities of public pedagogy, interrogating how and when these creative/artistic modalities appear to have pedagogical effects over traditional forms of protest. Our research into youth activism and connective labor augments contemporary scholarship in media education, which too often disregards the significant relations between formal and informal learning networks (van Zoonen 2005; Bennett & Segerberg 2012).

Theoretical framework
To rethink social justice education, we draw from performance studies (Phelan 1993, Harris 2014), social movement theory (Jaspar 2008; Welty 2013; Postill 2014, Boler et al 2014), and media education (Van Zoonen 2005; Jenkins 2006) to explore innovative methodological boundary-crossing, as well as nascent scholarship that explores new forms of “civic engagement” made possible through social media platforms and information technologies (Boler & Nitsou 2014; Bennett & Segerberg 2012). We outline how -- in keeping with the rise of pervasive contemporary creative economies and creative industries discourses (Harris 2014; Flew 2013) -- creative work is increasingly invisible if not commodified.

Methodology
Educational theorists help us re-examine young people’s relationships to “civic engagement” and “democracy.” We suggest that community-based research, grounded theory, and analyses of how activist collectives and practice are tied to both local and global contexts (Postill 2014, Welty 2013) are crucial to developing the kinds of robust theoretical accounts presently missing.

This work engages semi-structured interviews, interpreted using grounded theory and critical discourse analysis of both the interviews as well as the artistic practices used by the collective, to understand how young people’s engagements with creativity and activism suggest new ways of thinking about activism as spaces for informal learning.

Data sources
This paper is based on interviews conducted in 2014 with puppeteers from Occupy Wall Street, and builds on a three-year funded, mixed-methods research project that explored the motivations, strategies and experiences of both digitally- and locally-spatialized community-building and activism of Occupy Wall Street participants from seven sites across North America (Boler 2012; Boler et al, 2014). Additional sources used for triangulating data include close analysis of relevant Twitter hashtags/threads, Facebook pages, and media representation of creative activism of People’s Puppets.

Scholarly significance
Feminist and performance studies scholars (including Case 2009; Schechter 2003; Phelan 1993) have noted the productive links between creativity and activism, and the ways in which performance serves a public pedagogical function. Our analysis invites educators and scholars concerned with equity to explore the centrality of creativity and activism for developing innovative methodological approaches to justice education.

Authors

• Anne M Harris, Monash University

• Megan Boler, University of Toronto