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Research links social movement and education, but almost no related studies address classroom practices. Oaxacan teachers in this ethnography are political and pedagogical pioneers who move between the streets and schools. This book materializes from the practices of politics in classrooms and the manifestations and rural primaria communities in a major migration-sending region of Southeastern Mexico. Movements on the Streets and in Schools theorizes teaching and activism in creative tension, with what Anna Tsing called "friction of global connection." Using friction, three contentious concepts emerge: quality, patrimony, and governability. Through the engaged universals of quality, patrimony, and governability, this book describes and analyzes how activism and teaching intertwine on the city streets and in the rural schools. Here, teaching, between uprisings, police raids, and austerity reforms, reveals how operating critically transcends a centered critical project. For instance, quality, to state and corporate philanthropists, leads to standardization, but parents and pupils rally around quality education to demand learning-centered schools. Likewise, patrimony may drive heritage for the tourist market, but patrimony also permits teachers to claim labor rights on historical grounds. Lastly, governability, an NGO imperative for Global Southern countries like Mexico, becomes pedagogical when the misrule of state authorities leads to police raids against teachers and cuts to public education. Movements on the Streets and in Schools is timely, as the activism-schooling nexus has just begun to generate interest with high-profile events on and around campuses worldwide. Both pre- and in-service teachers, education activists, administrators, and professors alike will find this book essential in bringing activism into their classroom practices in a clear and cohesive manner.
List of contents
Figures - Foreword - Movements of Diverse Inquiries - Quality Rendered Pedagogical - Quality Education through Self-managed Pedagogies - Marching for Patrimony - Benito Juarez as Pedagogical Package - Blocking the Road - Laughing in Protest - Counter-pedagogies, Quality, Patrimony, and Governability: Closing Thoughts - Index.
About the author
With a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts, Stephen T. Sadlier has published Chile- and Mexico-based research in the Journal of Latinos and Education and the International Journal of Qualitative Education and edits a special issue of the British Journal of Sociology of Education on social movements.
Report
"Stephen T. Sadlier's book puts forth a refreshing and innovative piece of narrative-inquiry research that brings up to date Oaxacan (and Mexican) teachers' political struggles to defend public education and democratize union practices (after thirty years of neoliberal reforms), while theoretically interrupting common understandings based on entrenched categories regarding subaltern resistance and hegemonic dominance. Teacher-researcher collaboration contributes to the power of the stories told here; contingencies and contexts of the research process itself are woven into an ethnographic, relational account of how some rural-based teachers' everyday activities in and out of schools and during union protests reconfigure counter-pedagogical topographies, opening them up for social and cultural interrogation." Susan Street, Professor and Researcher of Education at CIESAS-Occidente, Mexico
