Learning in and for collective action

Collective action matters: out in the streets around us where people are reshaping the world through powerful protests. We see the significance and impact of collective action in uprisings around the world to contest racialized violence, to abolish police and prisons, to demand climate action, and to unequivocally assert that Black Lives Matter. Hong Kong student activists have innovated new technological and organizational tactics that protestors in other countries are using to develop their own anti-government actions. Chilean activists have mobilized massive protests against neoliberal policies and for significant political reform. In these cases, learning is taking place in contentious practice as people strive to transform power relations. Activists are organizing new forms of learning, new identity pathways, and transforming community values and ethics. They are doing this work through complex, volatile, and distributed collective action to shift the tactics, the framing, the recruitment, and the political imagination of social movements.

Social movements, defined simply, are “collectivities acting with some degree of organization and continuity, partly outside institutional or organizational channels” that offer a vibrant way of challenging … or resisting change in such systems” (Snow & Soule, 2010, pp. 6–7). Social movements have led social change for justice, have inspired actions across communities working in solidarity with each other, and have suffered dramatic losses in the face of oppressive and divisive politics (Baldwin, 1972/2007; Garza, 2020).

This special issue¹ is a call to Learning Sciences scholars to study social movements as productive sites where people work together to critique, re-imagine, strategize, design, and re-make how we can engage with one another now and in the future. Learning in these dynamic spaces is understood as possibility, as shaped by relational, spatial, and natural structures and as improvised in and around structures as resources for creative resistance and action (Erickson, 2004; Rogoff, 2003; Taylor, 2020). We hope this special issue encourages Learning Scientists to take the learning that happens through collective action seriously, to bring resources (financial, analytical, design-based, and feet in the street) into relationship with activists, and to commit to engaging alongside movements so that the potential consequentiality of our work can be mobilized for social change through collective action. The responsibility of Learning Scientists to contribute is not based on an ivory tower assumption that we know better, but that we can know, learn, and co-design something that “helps us get free” (brown, 2017). As Murri activists have taught many subsequent movements: “If you have come to help us, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together” (UCA, n.d). The kind of work we are advocating calls for a distinctive set of interventions, embedded in collective action that is anti-racist, anti-colonial, queer, feminist, anti-ableist, abolitionist, and that makes justice possible and inevitable. Invoking the words of Uttamchandani (2021, this issue), as learning scientists, it behooves us to “ … understand learning in the present as making some futures—future individual trajectories, collective lifeways, or shared social norms, for example—more possible while making others less likely.” This moment is an opportunity to imagine our futures differently.

In this introduction, we name continuities in how scholarship in the Learning Sciences has prepared the field for studying collective movements for justice. We then detail the contributions the articles in this special issue make. Our aim is to underscore the significance and complexity of learning in social movements and to position social movement learning in relation to an ongoing trajectory of scholarship and activism in our field.

Preparing the ground for studying movements for justice in the learning sciences

Although the Learning Sciences has not focused on social movements and collective action for justice centrally, the field’s attention to design for creating what is “not yet there” (Engeström, 2016, p. 9; Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016) and the power of collaborative, socially, and culturally situated learning offer a foundation from which to develop this line of inquiry. We name several developments that helped prepare the ground for a more focused analysis of social movements: centering the knowledge and power of marginalized communities, attending to the infrastructural relations that organize our collective lives, designing with communities to develop robust conceptions of justice and well-being, and centering the political in our analysis of learning and learning ecologies.

The move away from ahistorical and individualistic perspectives on learning was an effort to document more fully the nature of learning and a strategic move that enabled scholars working on problems of educational inequity to make their contributions to the study of learning legible within the dominant discourse. It expanded our understanding of communities and practices that existed at the periphery of our scholarly imagination and that were often defined through deficit lenses. The research that developed from these perspectives portrayed minoritized communities as multi-dimensional, ingenious, and agentive (e.g., Banks et al., 2007; Lee et al., 2003; McDermott & Raley, 2012). This shift toward recognizing the capacity of communities is fundamental for recognizing how people can and do lead social change.

The widely-shared assumption in the Learning Sciences that cognition is distributed across people, bodies, and culturally organized settings has also drawn critical awareness of how material and social infrastructure organizes what we know, how we act, and how we can participate in community practices (e.g., Goodwin, 1994; Hall et al., 2002; Nasir & Cooks, 2009; Rogoff et al., 2017). This is an invaluable insight for organizing more just futures. Examining the historical development of infrastructure and its relation to upholding systems of power and oppression illuminates how knowledge is produced, classification systems are established and who suffers as a result of how it is organized (Bowker & Star, 1999). Seeing infrastructure and treating it relationally, as stretched across physical materials and ideas as well as the social, relational, and emotional dimensions of our lives, enables the identification of inequitable practices and can facilitate their redesign (Bang, 2020; Hall & Jurow, 2015; Marin, 2020). This perspective helps us understand how learning and innovations extend across scales not because of the propagation of static designs, but because of local relationships and the adaptability of people in the face of political urgency and change.

Learning Sciences design interventions stemming from this perspective have strategically leveraged the historical and cultural practices of non-dominant groups (e.g., people who identify as Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian American, queer, disabled, etc) to broaden knowledge and transform institutional practices (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Pinkard et al., 2017; Rosebery et al., 2010). This expansive view of what learning is and how it can be organized to support new ways of being has provided conceptual language and methodological tools for studying and designing for equity, and broadened our political and ethical imaginations (e.g., Booker, 2016). As Philip and Sengupta (2020, p. 2) argue, “theories of learning are implicit theories of society” and we must be vigilant as to how what we value as learning advances particular forms of hierarchy and domination. Organizing the conditions necessary to produce dignity-conferring interactions as a consistent feature of our collective lives requires that we study and design for genuine belonging (Espinoza & Vossoughi, 2014).

Recently, there has been increased attention to engaging more directly with politicized contexts and consequences of learning and design. This scholarship has made space in the Learning Sciences for work that explicitly attends to power (e.g., Booker et al., 2014; Esmonde & Booker, 2017) and ethics (e.g., Philip et al., 2018; Vakil, 2018; Vea, 2019), contests claims of neutrality (e.g., McKinney de Royston & Sengupta-Irving, 2019) and recognizes the role that the Learning Sciences could play in supporting political struggles (Tabak & Radinsky, 2014; The Politics of Learning Writing Collective, 2017).

Learning sciences perspectives on organizing social change

Learning Sciences research on social movements draws attention to learning and design in organizing spaces (Jurow & Shea, 2015). Three themes that cut across this scholarship are the roles that researchers can play in social movements for justice, the nature of organizing consequential learning across scales, and what is entailed in learning toward alternative and counter-hegemonic futures.

Learning sciences research with social movements

Our views of learning and design have expanded through our commitments to working “side by side” (Erickson, 2012) with partners and stakeholders in relations of mutuality, respect, and reciprocity (Fishman & Penuel, 2020). This has serious implications for how we conceptualize our role as researchers and the capacity for action on the part of our research partners.

Engeström and colleagues have documented how in social movements, which they have analyzed as extending across dynamic networks comprising multiple and diverse institutions, times, and tools, people can construct new, more complex, and wider objects for activity (Engeström et al., 2015). In these collaborative spaces, a key role researchers can play is making visible how contradictions and unlivable situations have emerged and to support systematic reflection on how activities can be re-organized to support more desirable forms of life. This expansive learning is understood as a collective project that supports new forms of transformative agency and will. Gutiérrez and colleagues (e.g., Gutiérrez et al., 2019) use the term historical actor to specify the kind of transformative agency that can be cultivated in social movements. The notion of an “historical actor,” which Meléndez (2014, this issue) explores in his analysis of neighborhood organizing, underscores how new forms of agency do not spring out of nowhere and no-when; they emerge from our past, from our cultural traditions and tools, and are grounded in our dreams for the future. The concept of agency is theorized as powerfully inseparable from history, our intersectional identities, and ongoing struggles (Urrieta, 2007).

Organizing transformative consequential learning across scales

The organization of learning that can be consequential is not simply about working on issues that matter, but about how changing forms of participation allow us to become recognized as competent participants in dynamic networks of practice (Beach, 1999). This involves making valued ideas, cognitive and affective practices, and identities substantial and salient in our actions across temporal, spatial, and social scales (Curnow et al., 2020; Holland et al., 2008; Vea, 2020). Attending to organizing across scales requires analytic tools that can illuminate coordination across networks, contradictions that emerge from the use of diverse frameworks and tools as we extend practices across scales, local place-making practices that support the movement of people and ideas across contexts, and relational resources for cultivating trust and care among people.

Learning toward counter-hegemonic ends

Learning in radical movements for justice is oriented toward alternative possibilities for organizing our social and political lives. To conceptualize justice in these sites, activists engage in counter-hegemonic and non-disciplinary practices that support them becoming politicized (Curnow et al., 2019). In organizing spaces, disciplinary knowledge has been both used and critiqued as a tool for advancing narratives that served the goals of campaigns (e.g., Davis & Schaeffer, 2019; Scipio, 2014). These critical disciplinary practices are not limited to collective action in campaigns, but have also been successfully cultivated in formal educational spaces designed to support consciousness-raising and democratic participation (e.g., Kirshner, 2015; Smirnov et al., 2018).

Developing transformative agency through challenging the status quo has also been shown to support minoritized youth in seeing themselves as powerful political actors (Mirra & Garcia, 2017). The development of youth power has drawn serious attention to how young people and newcomers to activism develop through their engagement in political organizing and what forms of social organization best support their learning (Booker, 2010; Kirshner, 2008). Learning to engage in the mundane—and often gendered and racialized—labor of coordinating group work, building solidarity among diverse members, speaking to policymakers and community members, connecting diverse stakeholders, systematically analyzing data, and practicing affect as a way of knowing and feeling are central tasks of participating in grassroots movements (Curnow, 2013; Kirshner et al., 2011).

Across this body of work, scholars of learning in social movements articulate the social, interactional, and scale-making processes that shape the political engagement of participants. Through their commitment to equity, ethics, culture, history, and expansive forms of learning, they make space for the work that follows. Their work resonates with the words of activist Yuri Kochiyama who argued, “Our ultimate objective in learning about anything is to try to create and develop a more just society” (Tajiri, 1993).

Contributions from special issue articles

In Shifting education reform toward anti-racist and intersectional visions of justice, Pham and Philip draw us into the everyday practices of the LA Teachers’ Strike, a story of mass mobilization built on the work of grassroots activists. Their case focuses on one rank and file union organizer and traces his work to make others’ learning possible. The authors introduce the notion of “pedagogies of organizing” to name the “methods and practices used by activists to seed and nurture diverse groups’ learning about social issues impacting their communities and themselves, and to emerge as local social movement actors, with common causes and identities, who have the resources and power needed to make the change they want.” Pham and Philip connect local organizing and the specificity of race and place to the national context and broader shifts in teacher strikes and trade unionism. This approach attends to the small and large practices that a particular organizer, Makario, embodies and identifies their consequentiality at different scales. The analysis draws our attention to the individual, but always in relation to place, to history, and to systems change. Racialization, gender, and culture are at the forefront of the analysis and in the context. This allows readers to see how intersectionality mattered for the construction of a powerful social movement that continues to inspire and create possibilities for public education internationally.

In Educational intimacy, Uttamchandani partnered with Chroma, an LGBTQ+ youth group, working to shift how schools, teachers, and other institutions understood and engaged with LGBTQ+ young people. Uttamchandani draws attention to the interactional dynamics established within Chroma, examining how educational intimacy is co-constructed, and how it supported the organizing new possible futures. This research stresses how relationships grounded in care, trust, and commitment to the goals of the movement were enacted and deepened through humor, teasing, and sarcasm. The relationships developed in the group prefigured relations of inclusion, making their dreams for the future concrete in their present-moment interactions. Uttamchandani argues that “educational intimacy brings a distinctly queer sensibility that links the organization of present relationships with the kinds of futures that we hope are catalyzed by the learning process.” Of note, queer contexts have never been featured substantively before in the pages of the Journal of the Learning Sciences (Uttamchandani & Shrodes, 2020). Publishing this piece in the journal is thus a significant moment of claiming space for queer youths’ activism, bringing queerness into focus, and challenging heteronormativity and cisnormativity in our field and our theories.

In Latino immigrants in civil society, Meléndez worked with Chicago’s 49^th Ward’s Participatory Budgeting (PB) Process, using tools from cultural historical activity theory to analyze the process of community-led democracy at the grassroots. He situated the local experience of participatory budgeting within the larger histories and movements that have advanced participatory budgeting as a democratizing process. Meléndez’s research highlights the tensions that arose when Latinx community members were brought into the PB process in what participants felt were tokenizing and superficial ways, and how they worked to organize for more meaningful and consequential engagement in city planning. The participants innovated new activity systems, new practices, and new forms of claims-making as they actively shaped the outcomes of the PB process. Meléndez’s work brings Latinx activism into focus, considering how language, culture, and class shape peoples’ abilities to be engaged in practices that aim to be genuinely democratic. His focus on the shift toward more equitable structures of engagement draws our attention to how resilience and resistance are enacted and how these strategies shape the terrain for decision-making in our cities. Designing with communities who are struggling and envisioning change helps us appreciate how the past is present in current infrastructure, lived in our bodies and subjectivities, and reinscribed in how we make knowledge claims.

In Learning to assemble the hidden bodies, Takeuchi and Aquino Ishihara, a migrant activist leader, partnered to analyze the mathematical and activist practices the Filipino Migrants Center mobilized to intervene against violence and human trafficking experienced by migrant women. Takeuchi and Aquino Ishihara refuse to accept narrow ideas of mathematics and who it is for—and the result is rich with lessons about how space, place, and collective action rely on and make mathematization possible. Their work brings forth “the intersectional histories of race, gender and sexuality, and the geo-economic politics” and considers mathematical practices as a way of working against systems of power so as to bring subjugated knowledge to light. Takeuchi and Aquino Ishihara bring hidden bodies into focus, showing us how migrant women who are survivors of abuse and/or trafficking are agentic and expand spaces for their resistance. The authors’ analysis of activism in solidarity with minoritized and oppressed migrant women reinvigorates studies of mathematics as a tool for social transformation and offers new conceptual tools for doing this work.

In Learning to claim power in a contentious public sphere, Tivaringe and Kirshner bring our attention to youth activism in South Africa mobilizing for educational equity. Working with Equal Education, a movement organization committed to expanding access to quality education, they examine how histories of previous movements shape the emergence of new generations of activism. Through systematic ethnographic research, Tivaringe and Kirshner show how youth organizing “offers an illustrative case of how student leaders drew on apprenticeships in activism in Equal Education to gain relevant skills for nonviolent action … [and] look at specific power-building strategies that young people learned to utilize in order to counter threats to their legitimacy.” Their research underscores Social Movement Studies’ relevance for Learning Scientists, bringing attention to networks as a way of moving beyond analyzing learning within bounded learning environments to thinking about learning across movements. They stress how youths’ antagonistic relationships with power brokers can create opportunities for learning, for solidarity building, and for intergenerational power sharing in robust ways. Their research demonstrates how moving toward analysis and theories anchored in the global South challenges Eurocentric views of learning and processes of social change.

Taken together, these papers model deep relations with social movement actors, and point to new ways of thinking about learning, future organizing, and consequentiality. The papers shift mainstream notions of whose learning is ratified as meaningful and whose insights about learning are considered worthy. They invite the Learning Sciences to (re)commit to understanding and theorizing of learning as political action and for political action.

Commentary from our discussants

We have invited activists and scholars to provide commentary on the articles in this issue. Frederick Erickson’s research and writing have uncovered the ways in which people actively and creatively organize their lives within highly structured systems (e.g., Erickson, 2004). His attention to the empirical world, to how people use words, timing, their bodies, and their coordination with others in spatio-temporal contexts, has illuminated human agency and resistance and helped us develop human-centered social theories. His words help us contextualize the arguments that are being put forward and to help us think through the consequentiality of the special issue.

One lesson that has come out of antiracist feminist organizing like the international Wages for Housework campaign (Federici, 2020) is the significance of recognizing the often radicalized and gendered reproductive labor that goes on behind the scenes to make “work” possible. In this vein, we want to recognize the care work that has made writing and revising during this time of social upheaval and pandemic possible—from childcare work that enables our authors, reviewers, and editors space, to the housecleaning, cooking, emotional support, and other care work that our community members, partners, and families have made possible. We also must thank the reviewers, editors, typesetters, and coders, and the people at our institutions who support our work, clean our offices, and balance our accounts, whose reproductive labor could easily go unremarked, but which, in a very literal sense, made this issue possible.

Creating new futures, together

Youth climate activists often chant, “Why aren’t you/Out here, too?” This issue poses the same question and invitation to join activists and learning scientists doing work that advances justice. We hope future scholarship will continue to answer the questions activists are asking, bring activists into conversation with learning researchers to advance activists’ self-defined goals, and move us closer to a world where justice prevails. As the social movement activists and musicians Sweet Honey in the Rock sing out, “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes”.

Acknowledgments

Writing this introduction and serving as midwives on this special issue in the midst of uprisings was both a challenge and a gift, proving the consequentiality of our work, while also distracting from it. We thank the people who helped us to write and manage this while also organizing large-scale campaigns, international society statements, and institutional battles. Friends and colleagues read, re-read, critiqued, and pushed us to write this piece in a way that was responsive to this moment and to the history of our field. We extend enormous gratitude to this large group of generous scholars. Thank you.

Notes

¹ This special issue was commissioned and accepted by the previous editors, Susan Yoon and Jan van Aalst.