The confluence of popular education and social movement studies into social movement learning: A systematic literature review

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to systematically review and trace the lineage of theoretical debates around social movement learning in the field of adult education. We compiled articles, books and conference proceedings on adult education and social movements from Google Scholar using the software Publish or Perish and manually filtered the data to only include those that explicitly address the topic. Based on the data, we identified key literature that scholars cross-referenced, which extended the review to include the literature from the 1970s until today. We argue that the theoretical debates about social movements and education can be characterised by four phases: 1) popular education within and for social movements, 2) the Old/New Social Movement debate and its radical influence on adult education, 3) conflict and pushback between scholars, and 4) social movement learning as a confluence of literature. We argue that it is only when scholars writing about popular education interacted with scholars promoting the idea of ‘new’ social movements that the current proliferation of ‘social movement learning’ emerged. Thus, the knowledge production of social movement learning itself has been a result of a dynamic and historical movement in the field of adult education.

KEYWORDS:

• social movement learning
• popular education
• new and old social movements
• adult education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Figure 2 is based on a search of the Google Scholar database using the keyword ‘social movement learning’ from 1990 to 2019. No literature was found in the search with the keywords of ‘social movement learning’ before 1996.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hye-Su Kuk

Hye-Su Kuk is a Ph.D. candidate in Lifelong Learning and Adult Education and a dual-degree candidate for Comparative and International Education at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include social movement learning, state-society relations in adult education and experiential learning theory.

Rebecca Tarlau is an Assistant Professor of Education and Labour and Employment Relations at the Pennsylvania State University. Her ethnographic research agenda focuses on theories of the state and state-society relations, social movements, labour education, and critical pedagogy, and Latin American education and development. She is the author of Occupying School, Occupying Land: How the Landless Workers Movement Transformed Brazilian Education (2019 Oxford University Press).