Not long ago, we concluded our second annual School Revolt festival, and with it being summer in the northern hemisphere, we decided to take a moment to reflect on what it is that we want to do along with the strategies that we want to engage with. We wanted to take our time to reflect upon the following: What have we done to further our collective work in creating anarchist communities that are based on radical and alternative educational processes? What has and hasn’t worked about what we’ve been doing?

And what can we do from this point forward?

Read the full text at: https://anarchistpedagogies.net/blog/where-we-go-next/

Read the related works here: https://anarchistpedagogies.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/stroud-musicvideocontainer.pdf

Audio descriptions increase the accessibility of visual media, and the descriptions for the music videos "Montero (Call Me by Your Name)" by Lil Nas X and "Hustle" by Sons of Kemet read like short stories when separated from the music. Along with this, there is a discussion of the essay "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" by Ursula K. Le Guin and how it relates to analysing these music videos.

As a form of storytelling like novels, paintings, and poems, music videos can also have protagonists.

Subtitles in English are available, but the full transcript is available here: https://anarchistpedagogies.net/transcripts/tips-on-creating-childrens-fiction

Have you ever thought about how children read and the contexts in which they learn? Have you wanted to work on a children's book but found it too daunting?

Well, here are a few things to think about! We tried to create a quick video that helps give a little bit of that background!

This is part of 2023's (de)School Revolt.

This is an audio version of the call that we put out at the following link: https://anarchistpedagogies.net/school-revolt/

This year we're focusing on storytelling and building space for people to tell and share a wider range of stories that can imagine many different worlds!

Using free choice and imaginative teaching can be rightly claimed as part of the teaching armoury of many educators who would never consider themselves to be anarchists. Equally, radical education is so often used as a term for any teaching that seems new or different. I have recently been lucky enough to spend time in conversation with a Finnish anarchist educator who influenced my thinking on what real anarchist education should aspire to being, which is to equip learners to live their lives completely independently from society in sustainable ways. It is only once we have the tools to live on our own terms that we can position ourselves where we choose in society, if at all. Free from societal dependencies anarchist education then becomes more about what we teach than how. Education that teaches us how to live without money rather than climbing a meritocratic ladder to join the super rich. Within this model of anarchist education learners would learn the skills to build, sow, weave and more. Craft would be central to all education. Within this anarchist model of education we would ‘Let the universal culture of schooling aim at an apprenticeship in freedom, and not submissiveness’ (Stirner, 2005, p19).

About the Presenter:

Garry is an adult learning educator with a lifelong aversion to rules. In the early 1980's, from late January onwards, he spent Wednesday mornings in the school science cupboard poring over the pages of the NME. A score of 4% in his O level German mock deemed him as being a lost cause. Not that this mattered because the plan was either an apprenticeship at the local printers. With some disbelief, thirty-six years later he finds himself in the latter stages of a long and fulfilling teaching career. Not only that but also a career in which he has largely been left to his own devices! He's currently undertaking a doctorate degree with Sunderland University that focuses on the pedagogical praxis and wisdom of folk schoolteachers. Little did he know that he would be exploring a world of socialist and anarchist thinkers. He believes that neo-liberalism has led to a narrow overemphasis on developing economic capital and that education should be person-centered and emancipatory.

What is self-directed education, and why should anarchists care about it? We like to define it as education that derives from the self-chosen activities and life experiences of the learner, while remaining embedded in and shaped by the learner's communities. It's an umbrella term for such diverse approaches as unschooling, free schools, Agile Learning Centers and Flying Squads. Self-directed education and anarchism seem to both of us to be deeply compatible philosophies, and we'd like to share the reasons we feel that's the case and answer any questions attendees might have, as both grown unschoolers and anarchists ourselves.

About the Presenters:

Idzie is a grown unschooler who has been living, thinking, and writing about self-directed education for most of her life. Her writing is deeply informed by her anarchistic politics, her experience of queerness and of chronic illness. She is a sporadic but enthusiastic reader of novels and nonfiction alike, and sees her writing as a constant quest to untangle chaotic thoughts and forge connections with others through words. Idzie lives in the Montreal area of Quebec, Canada, but dreams of living in the woods.

Idzie's writing can be found here, and she's easy to find on Twitter (@Idzie).

Bria Bloom, along with her older brother, grew up in an unschooling family, and now is a parent of a self-directed young person, and a passionate advocate for collective liberation, Self-Directed Education, & young people's rights.

The unschooling and deschooling world was her gateway into a whole lot of questioning — realizing that the systems that try to define our lives, and "school" us, are not limited to just school. She now spends her time finding new ways to build & live in community, seeking disruption of harmful "norms," and reimagining the way our living can be. All of this led her right to the connection between unschooling and Anarchism, a connection she continues to explore and play in as much as she can. She also loves to engage & play as an SDE facilitator and parent.

Some of her passion projects include Flying Squads (http://www.flyingsquads.org/) and working with the Alliance for Self-Directed Education (https://www.self-directed.org). You can find her on Instagram @bria.bloom and on Twitter @briablooms.

Hosted on: 22 April 2021

During the early 20th century, radical educators from different parts of the world engaged with Peter Kropotkin’s anarchist theory when devising and implementing educational experiments in diverse socio-political contexts. While Kropotkin was not known as an educational figure like Dewey or Montessori, his anarchist theories, and his support of educators, made him an important figure for many intellectuals and educators. In this webinar, Yotam Ronen will present Kropotkin’s influence over radical educators in different sites of learning throughout the first half of the 20th century, and investigate the diversity in which educators have engaged with his work and applied it to their educational practice.

In this experiment, we will challenge established modes of learning and teaching by engaging in conversation with one another through improvisation. Seeing each other as both teacher and student, as storyteller and listener, we will exit the world of the uttered word and meet together in sound. There, we hope to find spaces to learn from one another in how we offer notes, melodies, chords, and silences.

About Judit:

About Yotam:

Are institutionalized pedagogies preparing us for becoming the critical, capable, and active individuals the present state of the world requires us to be? Are the orthodox learning objectives of our curricula in synch with the current needs of our society and our immediate communities? How do immediacy and improvisation contribute to critically reconsidering these orthodoxies and opening up our pedagogical methods towards viable extra-institutional ideas and practices? You are hereby invited to join me in a radical reflection and discussion on the past present and future possibilities of our collective pedagogical imagination.

About the Presenter:

An enthusiast of music cultures, a supporter of socially and politically involved arts, and a veteran fan of free improvised music and punk, Judit has been involved with various alternative associations across Europe over the years. Among them is a long association with Mediawave Festival in Hungary, where she served in various functions; program curator, international network representative, and festival coordinator. Another example is the Doek collective in Holland, where Judit was involved in starting a collective community calendar for the local creative music scene. She was also a part of the independent record label Barefoot Records in Denmark as a label and project manager. Judit is now working on a research project investigating the changing political horizons of free improvised music scenes in Europe as a Ph.D. student at the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation.

Carl Eugene Stroud joined us to present four colored flyers as didactic (not ideological) tools to be used by people to communicate and understand common theories, concepts, and strategies. His presentation was about the specific flyers and how they can be used, and he also touched on the importance of learning tools in general and why they are integral in revolutionary practices.

The flyers can be found at the following links: