All About Mentoring Spring 2011 - SUNY Empire State College

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imagination and a sociological imagination.
In Freire’s later work the picture gets
somewhat more complicated, but there
remains a strong utopian streak to his
thinking. Indeed, it is one thing to liberate
a classroom, but quite another to liberate
a society.
The difficulties posed by Freire’s utopianism,
which Brookfield’s introductory essay in
some ways recreated, animated my reading
of the rest of the essays in this volume. How
might we conceive of an adult education
that aims not so much at “liberation,”
but at providing specific groups in specific
situations the political leverage they need to
improve their lives Or, more bluntly, what
if the goal of “progressive” adult education
programs was not liberation, but power –
political power Of course these are difficult
questions, and they are not necessarily ones
that this collection sets out to answer. But
other essays in this volume lead to some
productive considerations.
In Janise Hurtig and Hal Adams’
contribution, as well as in John Gordon
and Dianne Ramdeholl’s essay, we
find descriptions of how an egalitarian
educational space was created, one in which
students from marginalized backgrounds
felt safe to begin to create and share stories
of their lives. Moreover, as students gained
confidence as writers, as they came to
realize they had important things to say,
a collective dynamic took over. Hurtig
and Adams witnessed an important shift
in their Chicago-based writing workshop,
“a transitional process by which the role
of the educator is increasingly assumed
by the group” (p. 19 ). As the traditional
relationship between teacher and student
breaks down, the practice of “popular
education leaps from being a humanistic,
progressive approach to education to
providing a vision, however modest, of an
egalitarian world” (p. 19). Gordon and
Ramdeholl’s experience in a New York
City adult literacy center revealed a similar
dynamic, one that was rooted not only in
a democratically structured classroom, but
in a program that was itself organized in a
way that gave students a real say. Dialogue
and collective writing, they suggest, not
only “articulated a yearning for freedom,”
but brought “student voices and their life
struggles into the center of the curriculum.”
Further, these practices were “inseparable
from [the program’s] commitment to student
involvement in decision making, to a
democratic community” (p. 32).
But how do we begin to move from the
vision to which Hurtig and Adams refer
to reality, from democratic classrooms
to a democratic society Not easily. As
Hurtig and Adams explain, the program
they directed was not planned as “actionoriented”;
the goal, rather, was the writing
itself. And wouldn’t consciously and openly
designing a program as action-oriented in
itself pose certain difficulties After all, these
programs need funding, and funding might
be hard to get, either from government
sources or foundations, if the stated goal
of a program was, for example, a socialist
revolution! And as Gordon and Ramdeholl
point out, since the 1990s, a tighter funding
landscape has gone hand-in-hand with
accountability standards that have become
increasingly instrumentalist, more tightly
focused on data about how well adult
education programs are preparing students
for employment. In this context, programs
that focus on much beyond job training are
an endangered species.
A closer look at Hurtig and Adams’ essay,
however, shows some room for maneuver,
some space for “praxis.” One workshop,
taught by Adams, was run out of a Chicago
public elementary school. The students’
children attended the school, and many
of them lived with their families in a large
In the process,
they’d discover that
there is a range of
institutions, from
community organizations,
labor unions and
grassroots political
organizations, that are
also reimagining that
world, and fighting in
various ways to create it.
public housing complex nearby. At the time,
the Chicago Housing Authority, under the
direction of the federal HOPE VI program,
was dramatically repurposing its public
housing stock, a process that included
the demolition of some of the city’s larger
projects, followed by the relocation of the
tenants. There was much uncertainty about
the program, and since a number of students
in the workshop lived in a project slated for
demolition, concerns about housing often
came up in discussions and in writing.
Because housing issues had become a
particular focus of the collective effort
of the workshop, when the time came,
that effort moved seamlessly beyond the
classroom. One of the participants faced
sudden eviction, and the group swung into
action to buy her and her family some
all-important time. The principal of the
school, along with other members of the
community, joined forces with them as
they successfully appealed the terms of
the eviction. Here was, without doubt, a
small, but very real victory. How might
the circle of effective struggle be widened
still further It seems to me that, in this
instance, the workshop setting was critical
in creating a common narrative, grounded
in common experiences and concerns about
day-to-day life – in this case, about the
roof over one’s head – that mobilized the
group to take action, however small. This
represents a kind of leadership, one that
needs to be nurtured even further, especially
because of the way in which this particular
issue – housing – was a “live” one, in that
HOPE VI had stirred organized resistance in
Chicago and indeed in other cities.
Essentially, timing matters. Perhaps, back
in a workshop setting, students could be
encouraged to look at the politics of public
housing more generally, explore the broader
structural context of their own particular
struggles, engage the debates that resulted
in HOPE VI, and then, in charge of their
political education, rewrite public housing
policy in their own collective image. In
the process, they’d discover that there is
a range of institutions, from community
organizations, labor unions and grassroots
political organizations, that are also
reimagining that world, and fighting in
various ways to create it. As Mechtild Hart
suggested in her contribution to this volume,
suny empire state college • all about mentoring • issue 39 • spring 2011