S1.E7: Popular Education: Organizing Knowledge & Learning to be Political Artwork

Listen, Organize, Act! Organizing & Democratic Politics

The Listen, Organize, Act podcast focuses on the history and contemporary practice of community organizing and democratic politics. Alongside this specific focus are two others: the first is to explore how organizing connects democracy and religion, particularly at a local level; the second is to explore the visions and practices that shape small 'd,' participatory democratic politics. The name of the podcast reflects these concerns. Through a series of conversations with folk who live and breathe the work of organizing, each series looks at democracy as not first and foremost about a system of government, or set of laws, or an ideology but as rooted in three things. The first is a commitment to listen to others different to oneself because their experience, their story, who they are as a person matters. Listening honors fundamental premises of democracy, as it marks a way of respecting the dignity of each individual, the importance of dialogue as against killing and coercion as means of resolving conflicts, and that people should have a say in decisions that affect them. The second is that democracy does not just happen, it needs organizing. And if it is to be democratic, it needs people organizing between themselves to determine their living and working conditions. If ordinary people don’t get organized then they are subject to others acting on them and their living and working conditions being determined by systems and structures controlled by others who either won’t listen to them, don’t have their interests at heart, or are actively hostile, wanting them silenced or disenfranchised. And finally, democracy lives or dies by shared action. Listening and organizing generate the means of coming together, but at a certain point people must act together to move the world as it is towards becoming a more just and generous one in which all may flourish. Each episode is a stand alone discussion, but when listened to together, the episodes build on each other to form an integrated series. Season 1 is a foundational course in the meaning, purpose and mechanics of how to do community organizing and build a more just and generous common life through democratic means. Season 2 is a foundational course in the meaning, purpose, and character of democracy.

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Listen, Organize, Act! Organizing & Democratic Politics

S1.E7: Popular Education: Organizing Knowledge & Learning to be Political

March 30, 2021 • Ernesto Cortes • Season 1 • Episode 7

This episode focuses on popular education, discussing what it is and why it’s key to good democratic organizing with Ernesto Cortes, Jr. Alongside organized money, organized people, and organized action, building power to effect change requires organized knowledge. Organized knowledge generates the frameworks of analysis and understanding through which to re-narrate and reimagine the world, destabilizing the dominant scripts and ideas that legitimate oppression. But rather than be driven by ideological concerns, popular education as an approach to organizing knowledge begins with addressing and seeking to solve real problems people face where they live and work. This entails informal, self-organized forms of learning. Another way to frame popular education is as a grounded approach to addressing the epistemic or knowledge-based dimensions of injustice and creating policies that put people before top-down programs of social engineering (whether of the left or the right).

Guest

Ernesto Cortes, Jr. is currently National Co-Director of the Industrial Areas Foundation and executive director of its West / Southwest regional network. Beginning in the United Farmworker Movement, he has been organizing in one form or another for nearly half a century, helping to organize or initiate innumerable organizing efforts and campaigns. The organizing work he did in San Antonia in the 1970s in many ways set the template for community organizing coalitions in the IAF thereafter. The fruits of his work have been much studied and he has been recognized with numerous awards and academic fellowships, including a MacArther Fellowship in 1984, a Heinz Award in public policy in 1999, and an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Princeton University in 2009.

Resources for Going Deeper

Saul Alinsky, “Popular Education,” Reveille for Radicals (various editions), Ch. 9;

Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: the Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle(University of California Press, 1995), Ch. 3. Details the organizing and popular educational work of Septima Clark, Ella Baker, and Myles Horton in the formation of the civil rights movement;

Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change (Temple University Press, 1990);

Stephen Brookfield and Stephen Presskill, Learning as a Way of Leading: Lessons from the Struggle for Social Justice (Jossey-Bass, 2008), see especially Chapters 4 & 5;

Michael Oakshott, “Political Education,” The Voice of Liberal Learning (Yale University Press, 1989), 159-188.

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