Life Attracts Life: Learning in Movement Within the Grassroots and the Global

• In Event: Learning in and for Collective Action: An Intervention Into the Learning Sciences

Abstract

Objectives
We examine the origins and development of a pedagogical movement called Tutoría that spread to thousands of schools across Mexico and in the past 7 years, to the Global South (Thailand, Chile, Argentina). Over 20 years, Tutoría has re-mediated teaching and learning at school into relationships of dialogue, mutual care and solidarity (Cámara et al., 2018). We study how movement participants learn a counter-hegemonic practice, what heuristic processes they develop over time taking into account this central question: What is the place of learning across the grassroots and the global? Through sociocultural understandings of learning, we examine how the ethical qualities of subject-subject relations mediate and sustain grassroots movements that repair, humanize, and reconfigure school spaces towards self-determination in locally consequential ways (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016).

Theoretical Framework and Methods
Social movement studies illustrate how everyday people are sometimes able to create and grow social, cultural, institutional, and political change from the margins (Grossman, 2010; Author). We draw from 76 interviews and focus groups with movement participants (families, NGOs, institutions), documents (internal communications, media releases), ethnographic observation of classrooms and regional/global gatherings. We examine how movement actors learned, spread, sustained and adapted the politic and ethic of Tutoría within and across political contexts of schooling. We examine transnational iterations in an Indigenous school in Thailand to see how learning in movements can be “openings for reciprocity, accountability, and the de-settling of normative hierarchies of power” (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016, p. 174).

Findings
Tutoría is based on profound trust of people’s creative power and ethical intelligence, where reciprocally humanizing relationships ignites movement actors (students, administrators, families and movement organizers) and spreads influence through wider local and multi-national networks. We find that first, learning in social movements is necessarily fractal and prefigurative - how we ethically and politically engaged with each other, mattered for the broader change we desired to see within schools and communities – it was the transformation itself. Life attracts life. Second, we show how community-based iterations of the Tutoría movement contributed to building a collective learning ecology through local differentiations that respond to the historicity and hopes of people and place.

Significance
Few studies have illustrated how the ways that we organize teaching and learning in schools could be a vehicle for widespread cultural change in schools and the flourishing of community lifeways. This paper adds to emerging scholarship on learning and social movements in school-community settings through global collaborations across sociopolitical contexts. This study examines tensions between grassroots movements and how ‘universal’ education reforms that flirt with colonial desires and neoliberal narratives can yet fuel south-south collaborations and movements grounded on humanistic principles of dialogue and solidarity that refuse such impositions.

Authors

• Meixi *, University of Minnesota

• Santiago Rincon-Gallardo, Michael Fullan Enterprises