Politics in the Classroom

Right now, October 2020, the significance of voting in elections is an obvious political lesson to teach your class.

But in general, teaching politics in the classroom is not at all obvious.

I want to distinguish two kinds of radical political teaching, one of which most readers will easily recognize. The other kind of radical political teaching is less widely practiced and harder to see as political. We could call these the Saul Alinsky approach and the Ella Baker approach. Both are good; both are important.

The first kind is often brilliant “social justice” teaching, practiced in many classrooms. In math, for example, take a look at the outstanding, recently published High School Mathematics Lessons to Explore, Understand, and Respond to Social Injustice.[*]  Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, as two other examples, have been successful for almost 35 years in influencing curriculum and pedagogy, including how topics like Columbus’s explorations or the Civil Rights Movement are taught, and how the literary canon is constructed and represented in schools. Many wonderful teachers create their own units and lessons that provoke students into seeing the world politically, and many students have been changed because of this teaching.

I call this the Saul Alinsky approach because the core of the approach is the curriculum as brought to the students by the teacher. Alinksy’s powerful and influential organizing method is centered on a thoughtful, disciplined campaign-based practice. An organizing campaign is identified, local leadership developed, strategy and creative tactics planned (often by the trained, external lead organizer), and the targeted authorities then brought to task in public “accountability sessions” orchestrated by the leadership. The goal is political power.

But there is another, often overlapping, approach to teaching radical politics in classrooms that derives more from the organizing approach associated with Ella Baker. Baker’s approach relies on a less leader-centered group of “workers” who see themselves as determining the direction their group will take, the projects they will work on, the campaigns they will develop. There is still a crucial role for organizers in guiding, questioning, and attracting resources for the group. But the goal of the Baker-style organizer is not only power; the goal of the Baker-style organizer is better described as a change in how people understand their role in the world. It is a change from seeing ourselves as people who do as we are told, to seeing ourselves as people struggling with the problem of acting rightly in concert with our peers and communities.

In classrooms, this approach to teaching radical politics surfaces as democratic processes where young people learn two crucial skills: (1) to represent themselves, and not let anyone speak for them; (2) to make demands on themselves and on their peers because they see themselves and no one else as responsible for their group’s unity, equity, civility, security, welfare, freedom, and education.

The pedagogy of the Algebra Project and the Young People’s Project, for example, sees mathematics knowledge as emerging in communities of learners in exactly the way that the demand for voting rights emerged from sharecroppers and day laborers in 1960s Mississippi. Before the sharecroppers could effectively make a demand on the country, they had to first make a demand on themselves and on their peers--to study; to learn to talk and listen to each other about political questions; to risk life, limb, and livelihood by coalescing around consensus strategies for getting the vote.

Similarly, students in oppressed communities must learn how to make demands on themselves and on their peers--to study; to learn to talk and listen to each other about what they are studying, including, crucially, mathematics; to risk missing out on shorter term pleasures, by investing time and effort in longer term collective, self-determined goals. The content of the class might be apparently technical: quadratic functions, for example. But if students have learned to decide, individually and collectively, that they want to understand quadratic functions, to apply them, to use them, to talk about them, because they feel powerful, individually and collectively, when they do math, then they are also doing politics.

These practices embody “social justice” even when the topics being studied are not obviously political. Teachers are teaching for political change whenever they see their work as protecting space for young people to organize themselves in pursuit of their own consensual goals. It’s hard to protect that kind of space. Most institutions, starting with schools, try to prevent young people, workers, women, or any oppressed people from organizing for self-determination.  Supporting students in democratically determining their own shared purposes will likely get you into trouble, especially when the students become skilled in fighting for freedom and for resources to pursue those purposes. But this is an important form of political teaching, too: teaching the forms of freedom and collective self-determination, and teaching the risks that justice entails.

It turns out that Alinsky style social justice teaching often fits fairly well within the typical school structure. Lessons can be engaging, challenging, and rewarding, and are usually easy to “align” with standards and testing indicators. A good social justice curriculum also involves lots of student-to-student talk, and students can even learn to teach the lessons themselves to peers or near peers, or even to teach the lessons to teachers as professional development (for which, of course, the students should be paid). The system’s and the students’ interests may seem to coincide.

Baker style social justice teaching becomes more problematic for schools, but it can get off the ground as relatively innocuous when it is dealing with what seems to be “non-political” content, like traditional  math topics: solving equations, functions, and so on. The problem for schools and school systems (or for colleges and universities) develops as young people begin to get good at collective self-representation and self-organization. They can then take the methods of collective self-organization that they have been taught to use in learning math (or history, or science), and begin to apply the methods to areas where their own interests and the interests of the system diverge: resource allocation, class size, cultural studies curriculum, policing, and so on.

The contests that result at that point are what the Algebra Project calls an “earned insurgency.” “Insurgency” because the students’ interests diverge from the system’s interests. “Earned” because the students’ mastery of math, history, science, research, writing, and speaking is what the system and the larger society said it wanted all along.

[*] By Robert O. Berry III, Basil M. Conway IV, Brian R. Lawler, and John W. Stacey (Corwin Press, 2020).

Food Insecurity, the Pandemic, and Young People's Economic Need

We vastly underestimate the underlying need for cash that students in poverty face every day.

Young people themselves are clear on this need. They are always looking for a way to pick up some money, a job, a hustle, a friend with money, a relative with a little extra.

But young people think of this as a private problem that is their own business. They generally don’t think of it as a public problem that they can organize around.

Policy makers and most adults tend to bury our heads in the sand on the question of young people’s need for cash. For middle class families, youth jobs are mainly a question of character building. A summer job is good for a teenager to learn responsibility, to learn the “value of money”, to get a sense of independence and autonomy. The cash in the teen’s pocket relieves parents of the necessity to constantly fork out for allowances and phone bills, but it doesn’t make or break the family budget.

But in families with little or no wealth to fall back on and with generally insufficient income, the income teenagers bring in—not only in the summer, but year-round—is absolutely crucial to well-being.

In fact, young people can’t concentrate on education if their family is economically distressed, and the older they get, the more they understand that the level of the family’s economic stress depends partly on them. Are they contributors, or just drains?

The pandemic has revealed this reality in rather a stark way. Of course, everyone agrees students need to eat if they are going to be able to put effort into school. And everyone agrees that if families aren’t able to provide enough food for all their children, the children need to be fed some other way.

So schools slowly took on more and more of the responsibility for feeding children, and generally, the citizenry thinks this is a good thing.

But the pandemic made feeding children at school problematic, and suddenly it became clear just how desperate the food insecurity problem really is. Does anyone really think that just because a student can get some kind of very basic meal at school in a normal, non-pandemic year, that their anxiety about having enough to eat disappears?

No. The same panic that is obvious in the pandemic is actually present in the lives of the young people and their families in every “normal” year, too. Food insecurity, and housing insecurity, and health care insecurity, are constant, grinding, and overwhelming always.

Learning does not depend on a few handouts to children in poverty. Learning requires actual security.

And security depends concretely on having enough family income to actually meet all of the family’s needs.

This is one of the reasons that paying young people for sharing their knowledge with their peers is so important. They need cash, lots of it, year-round in order to be able to concentrate on their education.

Peer-to-peer teaching during the pandemic

One strength of peer- and near-peer teaching is that young people use communication networks that are often unavailable to teachers and school districts.

Of course, many students are connected through social media networks, and they are also connected through family and community networks, as well.

Schools should ask young people to help them mitigate the “distance” problem in “distance-learning” by paying them to activate their social networks on behalf of the schools’ engagement goals.

Students naturally reach out to each other for various kinds of school related information. But they could structure their intra-group communication much more effectively if we added some intentionality through cash payments and thoughtful organizing.

For example, a high school teacher could invite four or five of their students to become co-teachers in this year’s course. Those few students and the teacher might meet virtually once or twice a week to learn the week’s material. (We’re going to set aside the important question of “What material?” for later posts.)

The co-teachers can invite their various network contacts within the teacher’s class to participate in small “affinity groups.” The co-teaching students can help their affinity group get access to the teacher’s materials, can help clarify assignments, and troubleshoot questions or confusions. Student co-teachers can also make friendly attempts to contact students who aren’t engaged and find out what’s going on--completely in confidence.

Co-teachers would need to be paid serious money, and there would have to be a way to decide expectations and responsibilities for compensation. Teams of students could certainly develop these parameters in a way that was fair, and they could also check in with each other through peer accountability structures, to ensure work was being performed.

The benefits of even a few such co-teaching teams in a single school would be great. Of course, the students involved as co-teachers will learn more in the subject area. But also, all the students in the class—co-teachers and the other students—would begin to understand themselves as contributing to and helping to determine the learning environment. This change in perception—from consumer of education services to co-producer of real learning—is a crucial element missing from many reformist projects.

Teachers can still review work products, comment and interact—either directly with each student, or indirectly through the co-teachers. The point is, everyone is involved in positive interactions around the content of the course, rather than in negative interactions around what the young people are failing to accomplish.

People can come up with many objections to this idea: Where will the money come from? What about confidentiality? What if the co-teaching students give wrong information to their peers? What does a co-teaching student do if they learn about a situation that a teacher would have to report to authorities by law?, etc.

All good questions, and all questions that groups of human beings in their local circumstances are capable of wrestling with, learning from, and gradually solving to a greater or lesser extent. Open dialogue builds trust, knowledge, and competence, and slowly raises the quality of social interactions. Rough spots and conflict are to be expected, but there’s no way to avoid the rough spots and conflict. Either you deal with them in the open, or you sweep them under the rug.

I’m delighted to help anyone who wants to try to get structures like this started. Feel free to reach out:  Twitter:  @jaymgillen  email: gillen.jay@gmail.com or contact me on the website: Educate4Insurgency.org