Emancipatory pedagogies: fostering political engagement through action

ABSTRACT

Every electoral cycle, thousands of canvassers knock on doors to encourage strangers to vote. Many volunteers come from communities with low levels of participation. Scholars have yet to explore how community organizations recruit and sustain their canvassing teams. This article explores that process using an in-depth study of canvasser training and administration by two grassroots community organizations in California in November 2014. We argue that these trainings and collective interactions should be conceptualized as educational spaces utilizing pedagogies that are designed to enhance canvassers’ sense of political efficacy and empowerment. Consistent with the critical pedagogy literature, we find that an effective pedagogy within these contexts must be tailored to the canvasser population and need to help canvassers establish and maintain a sense of collective purpose over time and provide the scaffolding for both. We contend this direct action is a form of emancipatory learning that allows participating canvassers to relearn their position of power vis-à-vis the polity and gain a more profound sense of political purpose and empowerment. We highlight an area of civic engagement not often seen as a learning environment and offer two avenues for future research in this novel context.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical pedagogy
• community organizing
• civic engagement
• race
• voter education
• voter mobilization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We use the term “ethnoracial” to describe these groups in order to capture the intersection between race and ethnicity. Scholars have long debated which is the more appropriate term to describe group experiences. The word race presupposes a common biological or genealogical ancestry among people. Ethnicity places more of an emphasis on cultural practices than on common genetic traits. Many scholars use the terms race/ethnicity or ethnorace to describe the ways in which factors often attributed to culture, such as language, can be racialized. In other words, ascriptive attributions can be based on linguistic or cultural practices that are not “racial” (or biological), but still can have racialized consequences. Because we believe the lived experiences of the populations discussed in this paper include both racialized and ethnic/cultural traits, we describe them as ethnoracial groups.

2 Giroux (1997) expands on this, arguing that for people to create radical pedagogy acknowledging “the spaces, tensions, and possibilities for struggle,” they must see power as a set of practices that construct alternative sets of subjectivities focused on human dignity (121). Here again, a pedagogy that includes direct action in contradiction to the established organization of power can lead to transformation. Direct actions, like political organizing, could be this type of pedagogical practice if it has a clear underlying counter-narratives about the distribution of power in US politics.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the James Irvine Foundation’s Voter Outreach and Technology (VOTE) Initiative.