A Pedagogy of the Strike: Education and the Commons

• In Event: Politics, Protest and Educators

Proposal

In his analysis of the 1981 University of Puerto Rico strike, Puerto Rican historian Fernando Picó (1982) observed that the student movement’s most enduring outcome was the political formation and alternative pedagogical experience of students immersed in praxis. The pedagogy of the strike refers to the political learning that takes place in the process of contention. This form of pedagogy challenges the material and epistemological enclosure of an emancipatory educational project. Specifically, the strike challenges the neoliberal and colonial erosion of public higher education through direct action, critical thought, and the practice of self-governance. In doing so, it becomes a commoning act, a set of practices that aspire to alter the social relations that govern the use of spaces and resources. In the contemporary educational setting, commoning acts aim to curtail neoliberalism’s redirection and commodification of the mission, structure, and pedagogical orientation of public education. Striking is a form of resistance that transcends the act of articulating demands as it engages in reorganizing social relations. It becomes a commoning act when it produces new practices of sharing, knowledge generation, and the development of solidarities that capitalism must constrain in order to reproduce itself. At the University of Puerto Rico, this pedagogy contends against the interpellative power of neoliberal reasoning that Wendy Brown (2015) details in Undoing the Demos. Striking supports processes that Paulo Freire termed conscientização. Conscientização can challenge neoliberal interpelation and question the coexistence of democracy and inequality. Striking as a commoning act imparts lessons on the value and urgency of defending common spaces and resources, and particularly the university as a site for building alternative and emancipatory futures. This pedagogy prepares movement adherents to build and maintain popular forms of democracy. It does so by compelling activists to enact inclusive and democratic processes and structures within their own movement spaces, which I refer to in this paper as commoning the movement. Through movement commoning, activists reflect on who belongs and who is excluded from the movement, the university, and the polity. In light of these reflections, activists engage in negotiations that transform the norms of political membership of the commons. Striking to common education seeks to diffuse and expand the realm of political education beyond the confines of institutionalized higher education.
In Puerto Rico, various sectors of the Left adopted the scripts that students developed during strikes and sought to redeploy them in parallel and subsequent struggles. Those who watched the news every morning and read the reports coming out of the shutdown university also had to ponder the struggle for public education. The friends and family of people associated with the university had to entertain the debates that gained national prominence during the student strike. Strikers are not the only beneficiaries of this pedagogy. Disruptions compel broader publics to reflect on the state of social relations and engage in efforts to disrupt unequal orders.
The student movement in Puerto Rico is engaged in a constant struggle to reproduce and defend a social justice orientation of higher education. This commitment to social justice entails making the university a place that is accessible to marginalized groups, that harbors and promotes critical thought, and that is at the service of the communities that surround it. This struggle for the enactment of a social justice mission within education is part of a tradition that has a rich history in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Throughout this history, those who have joined these social justice struggles have faced off with numerous forces that are at odds with a social justice mission within education. These forces are aided by structures that empower them to undermine social justice efforts in the educational setting. Namely, colonialism, patriarchy, and racism provide the frameworks that enable the continued hegemony of neoliberal forces and ideologies. Student activism and its alliances with groups in the Puerto Rican Left have allowed students to temporarily disrupt this neoliberal hegemony and build counter hegemonic practices, policies, and discourse. Yet, until the structures of colonialism, patriarchy, and racism are subverted, this constant struggle will characterize social relations in the Puerto Rican educational context and no movement victory will be left unchallenged.
What the student movement in Puerto Rico demonstrates, however, is that activists need not wait for systems of oppression to come down to enact counter hegemonic practices, norms, and develop shared spaces. Student mobilization in Puerto Rico builds counter hegemonic projects that aim to reappropriate spaces and institutions of higher education. Student movement struggles enact alternative norms for sharing space and seek alternative forms of learning. Historian Fernando Picó (1982) once called this alternative form of learning-in-praxis the “pedagogy of the strike.” Picó observed that the political formation and alternative pedagogical experience of students immersed in praxis was the student movement’s most enduring outcome. I build on Pico’s (2001) notion of the pedagogy of the strike and argue that striking in the context of the University of Puerto Rico consists of a commoning act, a practice of building new social relations, new forms of sharing, popularizing struggle, and developing alternative approaches to knowledge creation and critical thought.
This study begins by placing the Puerto Rican student movement in historical, legal, social, and economic context. I detail the contemporary history of contention within the public higher education system in Puerto Rico, the battles over its control and pedagogical orientation, and the outcomes of these struggles. Further, I discuss the notion of the pedagogy of the strike as a commoning act and the political impacts of these practices. I conclude this study with an analysis of the implications of colonial rule for the aperture of the University of Puerto Rico to marginalized sectors of Puerto Rican society.

Author

• Fernando Tormos-Aponte, University of Pittsburgh