Learning in Social Action: Knowledge production in social movements

Abstract

While most adult education research still tends to focus on institutionalized learning environments, this issue of the McGill Journal of Education focuses upon knowledge production and informal learning in social movement/community activist settings - in the global North and global South. Yet it is my contention that for all educators - whether in formal settings such as school classrooms and university seminars, or in non-formal (like Lysack's global warming teach-in discussed in this issue) or informal settings (as Daro describes in the contexts of "anti-globalization" protest actions), the dynamic body of knowledge and pedagogical tools arising from activist practice offer important practical insights which can inform teaching practice and our understandings of knowledge production and learning processes. Scholars who seek to understand social movement and non-government organization (NGO) networks, and the education, learning, and knowledge production associated with them, need to attend to questions coming out of social movements and activist research in regard to power dynamics and the valuing of certain forms of knowledge.These questions are often based on sophisticated macro- and micro- analyses of what, to an outsider, might seem a baffling network of relations, and shifting power dynamics.