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

How do educators and activists in today’s struggles for change use historical materials from earlier periods of organizing for political education? How do they create and engage with independent and often informal archives and debates? How do they ultimately connect this historical knowledge with contemporary struggles?Reflections on Knowledge, Learning and Social Movements aims to advance the understanding of relationships between learning, knowledge production, history and social change. In four sections, this unique collection explores: • Engagement with activist/movement archives• Learning and teaching militant histories• Lessons from liberatory and anti-imperialist struggles• Learning from student, youth and education struggles Six chapters foreground insights from the breadth and diversity of South Africa’s rich progressive social movements; while others explore connections between ideas and practices of historical and contemporary struggles in other parts of the world including Argentina, Iran, Britain, Palestine, and the US. Besides its great relevance to scholars and students of Education, Sociology, and History, this innovative title will be of particular interest to adult educators, labour educators, archivists, community workers and others concerned with education for social change.

Part 1. Engaging with activist/movement archivesChapter 1: Working with the past: Making history of struggle part of the struggleAndrew Flinn (University College London, UK)Chapter 2: Learning from the Alexander Defence Committee ArchivesArchie L. Dick (University of Pretoria, South Africa)Chapter 3: A lost tale of the student movement in IranMahdi Ganjavi and Shahrzad Mojab (University of Toronto/Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Canada)Part 2. Learning and teaching militant historiesChapter 4: Immediate history as personal history: The militant as a historianPablo Pozzi (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina) Chapter 5: Anti-apartheid people’s histories and post-apartheid nationalist biographiesDavid Johnson (Open University, UK)Chapter 6: African history in context: Toward a praxis of radical educationAsher Gamedze, Koni Benson and Akosua Koranteng (University of Cape Town, South Africa) Part 3. Lessons from liberatory and anti-imperialist strugglesChapter 7: Tracking the states and the UN: From an Indigenous centreSharon H. Venne (Treaty Six/Cree) and Irene Watson (Tanganekald/Meintangk, University of South Australia)Chapter 8: The legacy of the Palestinian Revolution: Reviving organising for the next generationAkram Salhab (Independent scholar, UK/Palestine) Chapter 9: ‘An act of struggle in the present’: History, education and political campaigning by South Asian anti-imperialist activists in the UKAnandi Ramamurthy (Sheffield Hallam University, UK) and Kalpana Wilson (London School of Economics, UK)Chapter 10: Learning in struggle: An activist’s view of the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa

Aziz Choudry is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Social Movement Learning and Knowledge Production in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University, Canada. He is a visiting professor at the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation, Faculty of Education, University of Johannesburg, South Africa.Salim Vally is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education and Director of the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He is also a visiting professor at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa.