Balancing Individual and Institutional Biographies of Activist Educators and Alternative Schools

• In Event: The Educative Life

Abstract

This paper presents the individual biographies of activist educators along with institutional biographies of alternative schools in 1970s Wisconsin. Alternative schools were founded by parents, teachers and activists who resisted the fixed curricula and authoritarian discipline of public schools, to create educational settings conducive to freedom and creativity. The narrative is based on existing documents, retrospective and current interviews of founders, teachers, former students. Their stories reveal the interconnections between people and institutions, explain how these schools were directly influenced by the personalities, values and motivations of the founders and teachers; making the intertwining and balancing of individual biography with institutional biography important in getting at the complexity of the stories.

Author

• Raji Swaminathan, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee