Towards a Radical Theory of Learning

Prefiguration as Legitimate Peripheral Participation

Joe Curnow

When students enter my classroom in September, they rarely enter as radicals. They are young. They are curious. They have lived in this world for eighteen (or nineteen and sometimes more) years, and they have a nascent understanding that things are not fair, that everyone does not play by the same rules or have access to the same field. Often, by the time they finish university, their worldview is transformed. I wish I could say it is my teaching that rocks their world, but I know that is not where their politicization is rooted. For students who become activists, their political education is in the movement.

So how do people become politicized? How does their engagement in radical politics enable them to develop a critical systemic analysis? More often than not, people become politicized through engagement in communities where particular political analyses and actions are valued and performed collectively. This is certainly true in my own experience of student activism. Sure, course work bolstered my thinking, but the bulk of my learning came through work with fellow student activists as we experimented with new ways of working together to shape policy on our campus and internationally. But how, exactly, did that learning happen?

This chapter starts from the question of how political transformation occurs, both individually and collectively. More significantly, what does this tell us about what and how people learn through their participation in social movements? How does this inform how we, as activists and teachers, think about learning, praxis, and transformation?

In the essential book Anarchism and Education, Judith Suissa (2006) argues that anarchists have not done enough to attend to questions of pedagogy. I agree with her premise and extend it further — I believe anarchists have not done enough to attend to learning itself. Any discussion of pedagogy must begin with questions of learning. Schooling, education, and pedagogy are not the same as learning, and each of these has a unique history and connotation. Anarchist scholars have recently built on decades of critical scholars (Illich 1971; Bowles and Gintis 1976) who have established how schooling and education have been used in the interests of the state and capital rather than in the interests of student learning (DeLeon 2008; Haworth 2012; Armaline 2009). Pedagogy, too, has been implicated in exercises of building compliance in order to rank students for future exploitation. Certainly there are antiauthoritarian and democratic approaches to pedagogy that work to subvert this tendency, including democratic and critical pedagogies that seek to educate and empower generations of critical and engaged community members (White 2010; McLaren 1989; Giroux 1983). Recent scholarship on anarchist pedagogies has highlighted a variety of approaches to anarchist schooling and pedagogies, from the Ferrer school (Suissa 2006) and Paideia school (Fremeaux and Jordan 2012) to Free Skools (Motta 2012; Shantz 2012) and other deschooling experiments (Todd 2012; Noterman and Pusey 2012). These vivid examples of creative work on the ground illuminate possibilities for alternative approaches and start to open space to see that political transformations can emerge through engagement in radical processes. This work is necessary but not yet sufficient for explaining the process of how people learn and transform themselves and their communities.

However, in order to truly theorize an approach to enabling radical praxis, we have to start with an understanding of how people learn. We cannot build effective strategies for enabling critical analysis in action unless we understand how learning happens. Without this foundation, we tend to develop pedagogical strategies that are convenient, rather than effective. Our pedagogical tools tend to be instrumental to other goals. Or worse — we do not attend to any learning process among new participants. Many movements I've been part of expect new members to join up and take on an active role without supporting their integration into the movement or providing them with the information, skills, or community support they need in order to be successful. These are easy mistakes to make, but also easy to avoid by centring pedagogical approaches in a theory of learning that explains how people become able to participate well in the work of building radical alternatives.

In this chapter, I argue that situated learning theory effectively describes learning in social movements and I weave socio-cultural theories of learning together with the concepts of praxis and prefiguration to articulate a theory of learning, radicalization, and transformation that serves anarchist visions of the future. I bring situated learning theory together with theories of praxis and prefigurative action in order to understand how activists learn through legitimate peripheral participation. I argue that through their embodied engagement in prefiguration, understood as a process of enacting the values and political analysis of the group in the day-to-day and strategic processes of the community, movement participants come to understand the underpinning philosophies of their networks, which lead them to engage in increasingly critical forms of action. Prefiguration, then, becomes an active catalyst for shifting strategies to a focus on anti-capitalist and non-hierarchical approaches to justice. In this way prefigurative action can be seen as a type of praxis that occurs through legitimate peripheral participation. This extends academic discussions of praxis to include prefiguration and offers some of the strengths of learning theory to anarchist and other prefigurative social movements.

LEARNING IN ACTION: PRAXIS AND SITUATED LEARNING

In activist circles, when we talk about teaching and pedagogy, we tend to gravitate toward the work of Paulo Freire. Discussions of Freire's work and philosophies circulate widely, though unevenly. In activist and social movement work, people often draw on Freirean discussions of praxis, conscientização, and popular education. In the circles I have organized in and conducted research in, praxis is often reduced to the cyclical process of action and reflection. In other cases, it is understood as the popular education spiral (Arnold et al. 1991). These discussions often use praxis as a stand-in for what is understood as radical action. In other activist spaces, we may reduce praxis to a linear process of action and reflection, repeated but not fully integrated into our...