Reflections on Knowledge, Learning and Social Movements: History's Schools

Abstract

<p>While the study of social movement learning as a subfield of adult education has grown rapidly in the last three decades, this is the first book to make social movement histories the explicit site of learning. This is perhaps surprising, since adult educators have always taught that adults learn from their own experiences" and if this is true of individuals, why should it not also be true of collectivities? In the 1990s, Canada's preeminent adult education historian Mike Welton commented that most adult education scholars were not much interested in the history of their field. Moreover, the histories that had been written traced only the antecedents of the more mainstream forms of the discipline, ignoring the contested nature of this history and account of its more radical variants, such as the work of the Plebs Leagues and the independent workingclass education movement in the early 20th century. The rise of social movement learning is changing all that, since social movements that are also learning movements need to know and remember their own history, as much as those they oppose might need to ignore or suppress it. This collection by Choudry and Vally makes social movement histories—their collection, recording, and analysis—a core element of social movement learning curriculum and pedagogy.</p>