Re-Imagining Alternative Academies: Lessons from Educational Activists Throughout the 20th Century

Activists and workers have often transformed the politics of schooling in North America from a position outside of the public school system. Throughout the twentieth century, alternative academies emerged across North America. Immigrant workers, feminists, artists, anti-racists, and anarchists created non-traditional educational spaces to resist increasingly standardized educational regimes. They imagined and implemented transformative learning communities that had significant impact on the many students that they served as well as on pedagogical thought in North America.

While the political investments of educational activists were varied and no alternative academy the same, each community’s distinctive philosophy coalesced around the central belief that student-centered learning, political literacy and curricular innovation in the classroom—wherever that may be—could lead to social action elsewhere.

The Big Berks is a critical opportunity for scholars and activists to reckon with our work in the historical present and recommit to a scholarship in service of multiple communities within and without the academic context. My work makes visible innovative pedagogies and alternative academies and centers a range of women who were core to this history. To think about these practices together and across time allows us to mine this history for the many ways it can help us to address the most significant issues facing education today. By placing contemporary debates concerning education within a large arc of history, my presentation will introduce methods, ideologies, and practices from visionary communities with the hope that a social movement history of school can aid us in collectively imagining a way forward.