Social Movement and Activist Learning: Youth Activism in New York City and Buenos Aires

• In Event: Education Activism as Affirmative Resistance: Examples of Real Educational Utopias Through and Outside the State

Proposal

Based on research in NYC and Buenos Aires, Argentina (Anderson, et al., 2023), this paper will explore the notion of creating third spaces of learning in which learning is counterhegemonic and multisensory. Such learning can occur in sites of formal education or informal education or in what some call popular or public pedagogies. Informal sites of learning include worker cooperatives, museums and memory sites, artist collectives, and social movements, while formal sites can include public schools or sites of popular education on the margins of public schools (bachilleratos populares).
In this paper, we focus mainly on youth activism as it manifests within public schools (as both adult and youth-led) and outside public schools through youth-led organizations. More specifically, we discuss students in a Buenos Aires Secondary School who have taken over their schools and are making demands on the system while organizing their own learning from within the barricaded school. Then, we discuss a group called Teens Take Charge, a youth-led organization in New York City that seeks to use activism to seek policy changes within their schools and the district. Finally, we discuss youth in El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice, a public school that views student activism as central to the kind of counter-hegemonic learning they promote among students in a marginalized community in New York City.
Drawing on Choudry (2015) and Choudry & Vally (2017), we expand the notion of leaning to collective social activism as a pedagogical praxis that includes the learning of organizing skills as well as a philosophy of life and the practice of struggle, vital for the formation of active citizenship. For instance, Teens Take Charge participate in official public hearings, school board meetings, meetings with policymakers, and television broadcasts across major news outlets. In an interview with Teens Take Charge student leaders, they explained that students “study present-day educational inequity, its historical roots, develop policy proposals to address specific problems, and lead advocacy campaigns targeting the city and school officials with the ability to enact their solutions” (S. Francois, personal communication, September 30, 2019).
Similarly, Hillary’s (2023) research on school takeovers or occupations in Buenos Aires demonstrates that during the occupations students create productive educational spaces and organize forms of learning that differ significantly from the structures and objectives of their
current schooling. Her research reveals that not only do students learn to critique their education, dominant ideologies, and the political process, but they also learn to implement effective pedagogical strategies and advocate for their rights. And they gain hard skills in the process, including profound listening, caring communication skills, collaboration, public speaking, and debate. In addition, students in both Teens Take Charge and the school occupations learn the strong emotional feeling of solidarity, something rarely experienced in others realms of society.
The paper concludes with a discussion of how learning within counterhegemonic third spaces differs radically from Biesta’s notion of learnification, which is the product of mainstream school reform with standardized high stakes testing and a utilitarian approach to learning.

Authors

• Gary Anderson, NYU

• Carol Anne Spreen, New York Univesity