by Jenna Queenan
How do we make our classroom content and pedagogies relevant to our students’ lives and the world we live in? A variety of terms have been used in an attempt to answer this question, ranging from applied and inquiry-based learning to culturally relevant/sustaining and place-based pedagogies. I’d like to add one more to this list: social movement pedagogies.
I began my career teaching high school in 2011 in New York City, at the height of Occupy Wall Street, and soon after the Black Lives Matter movement emerged. Teaching in Sunset Park, at a school with many immigrant and undocumented students, the immigrant rights movement had direct relevance to my students’ lives and wellbeing and so I got involved. While my first protest had been in high school, and I spent much of college organizing around issues of racial justice and in solidarity with Palestine, social movements and social movement pedagogy took on new meaning for me as someone responsible for the education of so many young people.
Social movements bring people together to fight for societal change (Jasper, 2014; Marshall & Anderson, 2009; Oakes & Rogers, 2006; Payne, 2007; Stark, 2019). According to “Everybody Changes in the Process of Building a Movement” (2022), leftist social movements “radicalize people. That is, people learn from the movement to go beyond the movement.” Social movements teach us to recognize systemic oppression and that our work within the movement is to help change social, cultural, and societal structures so that everyone can be free. As such, social movements are arguably pedagogical (Ayer et. al., 2021; Lowan-Trudeau, 206; Muraca, 2019); individuals learn to question societal structures through the collective conversations and experiences that take place within the movement. As educators, we can learn from social movements in the active and applied ways they teach individuals to interact with and question the world we live in and their place in it.
My experiences participating in social movements have influenced my pedagogy in a variety of ways. Social movement pedagogy within school and university spaces encompasses many things, including directly bringing the content and goals of social movements into classrooms through the curriculum. However, in this blog post I’m going to focus on four things I’ve learned about the how of teaching from social movements, detailed in the chart below.
| What I learned from social movements | What this has meant for my classroom pedagogy |
| Awareness of power dynamics: Leftist social movements, at the core, often confront and push back against an unequal distribution of power in society. Through my involvement in social movements, I have been taught to critically examine how I am participating, particularly given my positionality as a white, cisgendered queer woman. This includes asking myself questions like: How much am I speaking? What risks should I be taking and what privileges am I willing to give up? |
For more on these practices, check out the section on Ungrading and Contract-Based Grading in Chapter 5 of the TLC Handbook. |
| Commitment to democratic process: Social movements taught me about democratic decision making and consensus building. If we are going to practice the world we want to live in, that means taking the time (and it does take time) to ensure that all voices are heard. |
For more on creating community agreements at the start of class, see the section on Creating a Classroom Agreement in Chapter 6 of the TLC handbook.
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| Community-building and care matter: I’ve been in several social movement spaces that have fractured because the focus was solely on movement goals and strategies and then, when the pressure built and/or harm was caused, the group(s) organizing together broke apart. While the rupture can be caused by many things, in my experience the break happens in large part because we have not built strong enough relationships to collectively navigate disagreement and conflict and/or repair and address harm. Organizing spaces, often led by femmes of color, have taught me the importance of building community through storytelling. Through movements that incorporate mutual aid, I’ve also learned about the importance of meeting peoples’ basic needs and not assuming what those needs are. |
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| Clear Goals and Purpose: The movements I’ve been and stayed involved in were and are the ones where I believed in not only the goals of the movement but also that the strategies we were using could achieve some form of change. In order to stay engaged, we need to understand the larger purpose of the movement and our place in it. |
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Writing this blog post in our current political moment reminds me that so much of what we do, in social movements and our classrooms, is contextual. While there are many other things I’ve learned from social movements and the world around me, the four pedagogical lessons described here are the ones that are most integral to my teaching. At the same time, the specifics of what these pedagogical lessons mean for my teaching vary depending on the moment and the students in the room. Ultimately, I’m reminded that our teaching is never separate from the world we live in. With that in mind, I want to close with a few questions that inspired this blog post and are a source of continuous reflection for me:
- Who are you? Who are your students? How can you be in authentic relationship with one another?
- What have you learned from your interactions with the world that influence your own pedagogy?
- What are the broader goals you have for your teaching beyond specific course objectives? Social movement pedagogy reminds us that the purpose of education should be centered on freedom and liberation. What is the purpose of education for you?
Jenna Queenan is a PhD candidate in Urban Education and a Teaching and Learning Center Fellow
Works Cited
(2022, March 30). Everybody changes in the process of building a movement: Ruth Wilson Gilmore on abolition geography. [Audio podcast episode]. In Millennials Are Killing Capitalism.
Ayers, W., Ayers, R., & Westheimer, J. (2021, May 26). Curriculum of Social Movements. Oxford Research
Encyclopedia of Education. Retrieved 26 Mar. 2025, from https://oxfordre.com/education/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264093-e-1572.
Jasper, J. M. (2014). Protest: A cultural introduction to social movements. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity.
Lowan-Trudeau, G. (2016). Protest as pedagogy: Exploring teaching and learning in Indigenous environmental
movements. The Journal of Environmental Education, 48(2), 96–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.2016.1171197
Marshall, C. & Anderson, A., eds. (2009). Activist educators: Breaking past limits. New York, NY: Routledge.
Muraca, M. (2019). The legacy of Paulo Freire in struggles for social justice: Notes for a pedagogy of social movements. Educazione Aperta: Rivista di pedagogia critica, 103-113.
Oakes, J. & Rogers, J. (2006). Learning power: Organizing for education and justice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Payne, C. M. (2007). I’ve got the light of freedom: The organizing tradition and the Mississippi freedom struggle. 2nd ed. Berkeley; University of California Press.
Stark, L. W. (2019). “We’re trying to create a different world”: Educator organizing in social justice caucuses. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Curry School of Education University of Virginia.
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