Movements Teach Us: Ethnic Studies as Social Movement Pedagogy

• In Event: Liberation as Political Imperative: Toward the Conceptualization of Ethnic Studies Education

Abstract

In this paper I attempt to illuminate the pedagogical relationships between social movements and Ethnic Studies pedagogies in P–20 schools. To detail this dialectical relationship, I share my own pedagogical memories as a child, social studies teacher, and now pre-service teacher educator, to explicate the ways that my participation in, and study of, social movements influenced my pedagogical and curricular praxes as a justice-centered social studies teacher with liberatory aspirations. Given the experience(s) shared, I hope that Ethnic Studies teachers in contemporary P–20 spaces can be more explicit in the ways they, and their students, both learn from and (re)create social movements. After detailing the available scholarship on social movement learning and where this study is situated, I share my experiences learning from social movements during three time periods of my life.
There is a bourgeoning body of literature, emergent over the past 50 years, that has analyzed and conceptualized informal and formal learning in social movements. Neisz (2022) reminds us that “this body of scholarship provides evidence that movements are endlessly generative when it comes to change in individuals, groups, and culture” (p. 78). What still remains unclear in the literature is how teachers learn from social movements and more importantly, how those learnings transform into pedagogical and curricular experiences for students in P-20 educational settings (Neisz et al., 2018; Neisz, 2022; Atta & Holst, 2023). This study seeks to add to that empirical void, illuminating the pedagogical and curricular transformations that can occur by refining the phenomenological focus on learning in social movements to educators. I do so by returning to my own memories of social movement learning.
Given that there is little scholarship documenting teachers learning from social movements and more importantly, how those experiences shape their pedagogical and curricular practices, I conclude by attempting to synthesize what I’d like to term social movement pedagogy. Social movement pedagogy is:
● connected to the moments that are impacting students’ lives. Social movement pedagogy is also connected to the movements, related to students’ experiences, that are resisting and refusing oppression. In this sense learning is situated in communities outside of the confines of the classroom or textbook.
● consciousness, an analysis of harm in the world and a remembrance of the resistance/refusal of people moving against these enclosures.
● collaborative. It exists through non-hierarchical connections between students and teachers, between teachers and community, and between students and community.

I hope that this paper, and other scholars that are taking up this phenomenon, can lead to deeper conceptualizations of social movement pedagogies and their relationship to ethnic studies praxes. More importantly, I hope that this work, and what might come of it from others, can support more transformative learning conditions in P–20 schools for students and their teachers to critically read, reimagine, and actualize more just worlds.

Author

• Asif Wilson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign