“We are Poor, not Stupid”: Learning from Autonomous Grassroots Social Movements in South Africa

https://www.sensepublishers.com/media/1468-learning-and-education-for-a-better-world.pdf

“We are Poor, not Stupid”: Learning from Autonomous Grassroots Social Movements in South Africa

by Anne Harley

During the course of 2008, six militants from two South African social movements met every month to reflect on what they were learning through the struggle they were engaged in as social movement actors, and what they were learning as participants in a Certificate-level course at the local university. They called these sessions ‘Living learning’. Their reflections were written up after each session, and published in late 2009 as Living Learning (Figlan et al., 2009). ‘Living learning’ was intended partly as a space to reflect on what and how to take back the things that the militants, mandated by their movements to attend the course, had learned in the classrooms of the academy:

For a living learning, the critical question was always how best to take back to our communities whatever we might gain?; how best can our communities benefit from the few of us who are lucky to have access to the course?; how will we utilise the academic skills we can gain?; how do we take this information back? It has always been the task of a synthesis and a breaking down of the University theory so that we can work out properly what we can learn from it – and so we can understand for ourselves in what way it is different from the daily learning of struggle and life emijondolo [in the shacks] or eplasini [on the farms] (Figlan et al., 2009, p. 7).

But, significantly, ‘Living learning’ was also about how to combine the university of struggle and the academic university, and indeed ‘disrupt’ the academic university.