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This blog, posted to Huffington Post, argues that organizing around democratic change in schools and colleges can generate "free spaces" where a plural, citizen-centered politics can take root, and create a hopeful alternative to growing violence and fragmentation.
Civic Studies AERA International Research Conference , 2021
In this draft essay for the 2021 international research conference supported by the American Education Research Association, “Civic Studies: The University as Civic Catalyst,” I argue that the “school wars” roiling American schools, school boards, and communities, for all their dangers, also represent an opportunity to launch a reversal of the centralizing processes of school consolidation and disempowerment of teachers, students, families and communities which have been at work for decades. Disempowerment is an “understory” deeper than debates about teaching about racism in the schools, mask mandates or other issues. There are building blocks for a new movement to promote “democratic deconsolidation” -- educational decentralization and local empowerment of communities, parents, students, and teachers. Here I make a case for such a movement, highlighting Civic Studies as a conceptual framework focused on agency and co-creation, describing the community schools movement and Braver Angels, the movement to depolarize America. I tell a story which suggests a democratic deconsolidation movement can gain political traction across today’s divisions. And I suggest new frontiers of citizen educators and pedagogies of empowerment, with objectives for a seminar on citizen professionalism which Marie Ström and I are planning for the spring.
This conversation between Harry Boyte and Deborah Meier, from Bridging Differences on Education Week, explores policy ideas, past and present, that might further "democracy schools," the concept of free spaces where students move from anger to agency, and politics.
Global Journal of Peace Research and Praxis, 2014
Liberal Education, 2024
2019
This second revision of the speech to the Civic Engagement Institute of Wisconsin Campus Compact, first delivered March 20, puts the nonviolent politics, public work and civic agency alternative at the center of the current debates on college campuses between proponents of academic freedom and safe spaces. It argues there is a third way, focused on equipping students to be agents of their lives and collaborators with others in making change.
1981
“Schools for Action,” an article in the journal democracy in 1981, was the first main theoretical statement of free spaces. It drew on experiences which Boyte and Evans both had in the American civil rights movement. It also built on a 1972 essay by Harry Boyte in Radical America ("The Textile Industry: Keel of Southern Industrialization") which argued that the absence of "autonomous social spaces" in Southern textile mill communities was the main reason for the failure of unionization. This essay prefigures the later book Free Spaces: The Democratic Sources of Change in America by Sara Evans and Harry Boyte (Harper & Row, 1986; University of Chicago Press, 1992). The concept of free spaces in both the essay and the book was advanced to challenge the assumption, widespread in social and political theory, that democratic, bold, transformative action emerges from "modern" settings which are uprooted and atomized. The education and learning themes in both the book and the essay also anticipated later elaboration of the theory and practice of free spaces as democratic learning spaces and also of their “action” dimension, elaborated in the concept of citizenship as public work, collaborative work across differences with a civic or “commonwealth” purpose. These ideas developed through partnerships of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship (especially the youth civic education initiative Public Achievement and the Jane Addams School for Democracy, with new immigrants in the Twin Cities) and through a long partnership with the education unit of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, Idasa, directed by Marie Ström. Today, free spaces and public work can be usefully contrasted with conventional education. Free spaces as learning spaces differ from teacher-controlled learning sites in our times. These include "safe" spaces, where young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are protected from discomfiting experiences. They include as well educational experiences where the teacher has a tacit or explicit view that “calling out” biases and micro-aggressions is the way to counter them. Such experiences are often called “bold” or “brave” spaces. In contrast, in free spaces, educators are citizen teachers who are co-creators of education, not external experts. Their work begins with a focus on building respectful relationships, not a focus on what is "wrong" with students’ beliefs. Citizen teachers co-create environments of publicness and pluralism with their students, where all voices and views are understood to grow from lived experience and merit respect. Citizen teachers understand that overcoming biases is a process of development and change, a largely self-directed process which educators can help to facilitate but do not dictate. Finally, citizen educators who co-create and sustain free spaces have an expansive and generative understanding of power developed through learning, power as civic agency, power "to," not power "over." In such power all involved -- including educators themselves - grow and develop through a learning process which is collaborative public work that builds a democratic commonwealth of knowledge, to use a phrase of the educational philosopher John Dewey.
This conversation between Deborah Meier and Harry Boyte, taken from Bridging Differences, an ongoing blog about democracy and education at "Education Week," involves an exchange of views about what educators can learn from organizers, what organizers can learn from educators, and what concepts like "democracy," "relationships," "public" and "politics" mean.
Il Saggiatore Musicale, xxx/1, pp. 115-117., 2023
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 2007
EPRA International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research (IJMR), 2019
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), 2023
Revista Latinoamericana de Psicopatologia Fundamental, 2013
Rocca Ricciarda, dai Guidi ai Ricasoli. Storia e archeologia di un castrum medievale nel Pratomagno aretino, a cura di G. Vannini, Firenze 2009, pp. 145-165.
Arkeoloji ve Sanat Yayınları, 2024
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arXiv (Cornell University), 2018
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IZVESTIYA VYSSHIKH UCHEBNYKH ZAVEDENIY KHIMIYA KHIMICHESKAYA TEKHNOLOGIYA, 2018