Student Activism: Building an Alternative Logic in Opposition to Corporatized Learning

• In Event: 29.071 - Communist Study: Theorizing and Enacting the Pedagogy of Critical Pedagogy

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to contribute to the discussion about the connections between pedagogical, cultural and political dimensions of student activism. This work is theoretically grounded on the idea that collective action is understood primarily as a site of political tension (Crossley, 2008; Gill & DeFronzo, 2009;). However, from a broader understanding of pedagogy and pedagogical engagement (A. P. DeLeon, 2010; Fanelli & Ross, 2014; Ford, forthcoming, 2016; Hall, B. L., Clover, D. E., Crowther, J. & Scandrett, 2012; Lewis, 2013; Malott & Ford, 2015; McLaren & Giroux, 1989) student collective action can also be conceived as a pedagogical space of study that triggers curiosity and provokes deeper and meaningful explorations towards building alternative futures and alternative ways to engage with each other (Sotiris, 2012).
This paper examines how through political performances, narratives, and repertoires of contention contemporary student movements are not only opposing and disrupting entrenched, oppressive and dehumanizing practices in academia, but also they attempting to displace them by imagining, debating and experimenting alternative possibilities to their material reality. Methodologically, this paper uses artistic, intellectual and manual work produced and performed collectively by student movements in Europe, Latin America and the US to analyze the interactions between political, pedagogical and cultural dimensions of activism. Creative work can be understood as the means and the conditions of production of the symbolic values shared by the movement activists (Durham & Kellner, 2005; Jasper, 1999; Polletta, 2006). Through the analysis of the performances, narratives and discourses that the students are employing, this paper contend that student activism presents important insight for thinking about how the concept of pedagogy can be interpreted as a practice more than a technique and poses some provoking questions for how to understood critical pedagogy, study and learning in the context of social action.
Students have an important role as a political and social force (Altbach, 1966, 1989; Boren, 2001; Burg, 1998; DeGroot, 1998; Esler, 1973; Feuer, 1969; Lipset & Altbach, 1966, 1969; Lipset, 1968). Based on the current discussions on student social action and in the analysis made on this paper, the main augment contended in the document is that student movements can be understood as spaces of counter hegemony because they are constantly opening new possibilities to displace and resist hegemonic practices in academia. This paper reinforces the argument made by Sotiris (2014) and others that advances the idea that university movements and student movements not only have the potential to subvert educational reforms, but also have the capacity to establish themselves as places of encounter for the transformation of political, social and cultural processes and practices (Sotiris, 2014, p. 1). The current processes of sociopolitical transformations are echoed in the dynamics of student collective mobilization. Likewise, although many contemporary forms of student activism do not necessarily describe themselves as part of bigger social and political movements, this paper argues that students’ movements need to be located and connected in the context of major revolutionary solidarities and political alliances and struggles happening today.

Author

• Sandra Ximena Delgado Betancourth, University of British Columbia