Activist accompaniment as pedagogy

• In Event: Part 2: Advancing peace, justice and human rights through community-engaged praxis in education

Proposal

Educational philosopher George Counts(1932) urged teachers in the early 1900s that they needed to be present in the community, and that there was a social responsibility for the students and families to see that presence. Years later, educator Miles Horton, founder of the Highlander School would make a similar call in deep dialogue with philosopher Paulo Freire (1990). More recently, the fields of social justice education, ethnic studies, human rights and peace education have continued this call for teachers and educators to be relevant in their lives of their students, whether that be through developing culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995), culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris and Alim, 2017), humanizing our schools (Bajaj et. al, 2023), making our schools more caring (Hantzopoulos, 2016), and as Bree Picower (2012) calls “practicing what we teach”.
These demands within the field of education are also coupled with the recent and growing trends in placing more importance on community engaged research (as this entire edited volume is centered on) which we see in increased funding calls, re-evaluations of tenure and promotion files (UCSC guidelines) and critiques of more traditional research methods as extractive and furthering power inequities (Fine, 2018, Paris and Winn, 2014 and Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). While this new push for more community centric practices is extremely necessary, what we do not hear much about is the impact of these types of research agendas on the classroom and teaching. In this presentation, I expand on previous work naming activist accompaniment as research (Hernandez- Arriaga & Argenal, 2022) to explore the impact of this scholarship on my teaching, in particular, what I name as activist accompaniment as pedagogy.
Through a reflection of teaching practices, I name activist accompaniment as pedagogy as a necessary pedagogical praxis to be relevant in students’ lives and communities, hold justice and movements for justice in our work and our teaching, and constantly interrogate power, even in our own classrooms. The presentation will pull from two community engaged research projects that have been incorporated into the teaching of two courses, Tools for Human Rights Advocacy and Community Engaged Research, Learning and Internships. Pulling from activist accompaniment, the presentation seeks to answer what are the impacts of activist accompaniment as pedagogy within the classroom and on the students in terms of their own praxis with justice work inside and outside the academy.

Author

• Amy M Argenal, University of California, Santa Cruz