Our session began as our sessions have been recently: I gave a short description of what Radical Sunday School is to newcomers, and then we went around with introductions and a check-in to see how everyone was feeling as they arrived at our session. After our check-in, we had a bit of physical movement in the form of light stretching and such (though of course some members chose to abstain, which is always fine). Ever since our last session two weeks ago, I’ve been trying out some of the guidelines of Horizontal Pedagogy (HP), a style of radical learning organizing first developed during the Nomadic University/Occupy U from 2011-2012. There were a few giggles of course at the idea of moving around during “class time”, but as one member pointed out later in our discussions, trying new things can often be a bit uncomfortable. It will be interesting to see whether the group will continue to put up with my requests for physical education before sessions haha.
I started the more verbal portion of the session by asking for two things from everyone: first, I wanted people to try, as we went on with the session, to pay attention to their memories of both classrooms and less formal intellectual spaces (like theoretical discussions), and to speak up if any of the dynamics we would discuss sounded familiar. Because, as one member mentioned, schools are always embedded within and continuous with our broader society, it shouldn’t be surprising that social dynamics at play in classrooms also affect us in the “outside world”. The second thing I asked everyone to keep in mind was that this place should be one that encourages us to speak our “half thoughts”, and not just the fully formed ones. It’s more than likely that if you tell the group one of the “half thoughts” you’re having, someone else might have the other half in their head, and we can all learn from their coming together!
The first topic I brought up was the idea of “power”. Obviously this is a loaded word, and people will have all sorts of perspectives on what it means, but I focused on the idea of power as “having the permission to speak” (or, put slightly differently, the right to have your opinions heard). In classrooms we can clearly see this concept of power at play: the teacher, traditionally, has priority in talking, and students are expected to share their opinions/worldviews only when the teacher allows them to. We’re all unfortunately very aware of how much of our society is based on muffling or ignoring the perspectives of women, queer folks, racialized groups, people with disabilities; the list goes on. What’s interesting is how even in radical spaces which are (as much as possible) free from these kinds of hierarchies, otherwise well-intentioned people can have a hard time resisting the urge to use the kind of “speaking power” that expertise can give us. I recounted the story of Sandra Jeppesen and Joanna Adamiak, two anarcha-feminists who organized a workshop on challenging the notion of expertise. Ironically, they found that,
During the go-around, we spoke to the fact that we resisted the need to reinsert ourselves as experts, to sum things up, or to interpret the go-around through academic frames. Despite the intention to unsettle this performance of academic expertise, we felt conflicting pressures because of the feeling that as anarchist, feminist, female presenters, there was already a structural assumption that we were not experts, and because of this, we would need to assert our knowledge all the more explicitly to be deemed legitimate by participants
As we’ve talked about before, this coming autumn, Radical Sunday School is going to be moving beyond the kind of weekly discussions we’ve been having and towards organizing learning spaces on all sorts of topics (a former email listed some, and the discord server has channels devoted to a few already, but the list is very much open, so please feel free to contact us if you’d like to talk about a topic you’d like to learn!). I chose the topic for this week’s session because as a collective, we should start keeping our eyes peeled for these kinds of power dynamics in the “classes” we hope to facilitate. After telling the story of Sandra and Joanna, I encouraged members to reflect on their own experiences with grandstanding, “intellectual combat”, and other gross kinds of power dynamics that they’d seen in their lives. A number of feelings and memories came up:
- A member recalled classes where a few students would go on and on about what they knew, which only made everyone else in the room feel stupid, and not really in the mood to volunteer their own ideas.
- One member recalled the fear they used to feel sitting in class, worried about what would happen if they raised their hand and said something “stupid”
- Another member could only motivate themselves to speak up in class (and risk confrontation with an authoritarian teacher) by being so angry at the nonsense they were being told that they simply couldn’t stay silent.
- A few members discussed the gender dynamics at play both in classrooms and among people who’d gone through the educational system: both remembered their mothers being too worried about being called stupid to speak up on intellectual matters, especially if these women had to do so in front of their husbands.
After spending some time reflecting on what it is like to live through these dynamics of power and expertise, we began to talk about different approaches to organizing classes that seemed like they could make the experience less competitive and combative. The first suggestion was something called Problem-Based Learning (PBL), where class is centered around a problem that needs to be solved, and students are encouraged to do independent research outside of class in order to look for solutions. In PBL, as it was described, the teacher would sit in the back of class, rather than standing at the front. Instead of delivering information to their students, they would be keeping an eye out for oppressive dynamics and bringing the classroom discussion back on topic if it drifted out of focus. There was some approval expressed for this approach, and it’s likely aspects of it could become a part of classes at Radical Sunday School.
Another suggestion was made that perhaps courses should pay much more individualized attention to each student. Instead of waiting until the first student seems to understand the lesson, and they assuming all the other students do too, maybe we should elevate the goal of making sure that every student in the room is really clear on material being taught.
Conversation then drifted back to problems with PBL. Firstly, such a goal-directed environment can still be very competitive, because students have the opportunity to publicly show off in class how they did the “best” independent research and found out the “best” solution to the problem. A second problem with PBL was quickly raised, however, that even though this scheme seems more practical than simply learning concepts from a textbook or a teacher, the reality is that PBL still isolates students from the real world. This was called the “passivity” of the classroom. Rather than actually going out and doing something about the problems discussed, the format of PBL was just like traditional education in that at the end of class, students would still be able to go home completely unaffected by the experience. It’s as if the classroom is a bubble, a place where problems can be argued about fiercely… but once the bell rings, we’re left only with the impression that the world hasn’t changed at all.
One of my favorite (paraphrased) quotes from this session was “the world doesn’t seem changeable when you look at it from inside a classroom”. As complicated and thorny and important as the issues are, schools can make us feel like the best we could do is write a paper about it, and hope someone reads it. I certainly have felt this “passivity” in my traditional education, and sadly I wasn’t the only one. One member pointed out that though they had taken many classes on feminism, the history of feminist activism, and the intricacies of feminist theory, they still had to go out and find feminist groups in their area, without any help from their university.
This discussion brought up the issue of “learned helplessness”. As many anarchists have pointed out over the years, a life lived under the State teaches one to rely on others to solve problems for them. Is your sink clogged? Call a plumber. Argument with your neighbor? Call the police. Are you being oppressed? Vote hard and get a politician to fix the government for you. As we move forward in the fall facilitating classes at Radical Sunday School, we should try to keep in mind that learning should literally empower students: that is, it should give them tools they can use to make their lives and the lives of their community better.
Of course, all of us have grown up in this kind of world that encourages passivity, so, as one member asked, how can we help each other learn a new ways of learning that aren’t so passive? For instance, this member brought up the question of embodied learning. We’ve all grown up in a society which believes in a clean split between body and mind, and even when we try our best, we often find ourselves behaving in learning spaces as though we’re all just brains in jars, discussing ideas while sitting still and pondering the unponderable. As we saw at the beginning of the session, stepped outside our comfort zones by involving our bodies in learning can make us a little uncomfortable. So how could we make sure the spaces we create at Radical Sunday School are safe enough to let us try new approaches to learning?
The same member then brought up the idea of Action-Based Learning (ABL), in which we learn by taking part in more traditional activist actions. While this certainly removes the passivity of traditional education, some concerns were raised as to whether this would put too much focus on “getting results”. A problem observed in many activist spaces is the almost capitalistic focus on achieving specific goals, almost as though we have production quotas for activism. If we want to live our lives in opposition to that kind of mindset, then we would need to make space for useless learning as well. If I just want to learn about the history of watercolor painting, am I a traitor to the revolution? And if everything is focused on actions begetting more actions, isn’t there a risk that those who have more experience in activism could end up taking on the role of the enlightened teacher who everyone else needs to listen to, no questions asked?
The final point that was brought up this session was a different perspective on power in learning spaces. Rather than thinking of power as the right to speak, what if we thought about the transformative power of listening? A member brought up the book Quantum Listening, which apparently discusses the ways in which a reluctance to listen to other people, to our communities, and to the world at large is one of the main drivers of the injustices we see all around us. First I tied this to some ideas that David Graeber had written about regarding the connection between violence and needing to understand other people (if I need to convince you to do something, I’ll probably have to learn something about your motivations and worldview – but if I can just beat you bloody until you figure out what I want, I’ll never have to understand anything about you). In this way, the kinds of power dynamics we see in classrooms are more explicitly connected to non-metaphorical actual violence. As we’ve seen in the response of police to student protests, clearly the question of who gets to speak is related to armed force, even in our “civilized” “advanced” “developed” country!
Another member described a system called Theory U, which distinguished a number of different “levels of listening”, with basic language comprehension at the top, and profound understanding of the other person at the deepest level. They had found this framework useful in their own life, but worried that bringing up such an “official” perspective might be its own expression of power in our discussion. As we were running out of time, we didn’t get a chance to dive deeper into this idea, but just like all the other ones brought up this session, I hope we can reflect on them soon enough!
Overall, I was really really excited to see just how much everyone contributed to the discussion during this session! I had plans for what to talk about, and I’m really happy that the conversation took on a life of its own and we got to speak about new perspectives I didn’t have when I walked in at the start! I hope all of the points we talked about today can help us build up a set of tools for when we begin classes in the fall, and that we can use those tools to make the kind of learning space that can work as a good alternative to the broken system we all live in today.