In today's episode, we talk with Dr. Joe Curnow, currently an assistant professor at the University of Manitoba. Joe studies the learning that happens as people participate in social movements. Our conversation begins with Joe recounting her early days as an undergraduate student at Northwestern, as an organizer on Chicago's north side, and working on fair trade policies in Washington, DC. She talks about how she became politicized and started to see that the issues she cared about were really just indicators and outcomes of larger societal issues in our economy and trade policies. We focus a good chunk of our time talking about her most recent work, including the article called Politicization and Process: Developing Political Concepts, Practices, Epistemologies, and Identities Through Activist Engagement. That article, among others, came out of her efforts to describe the learning processes she saw happening. We also talk about the relationship between organizing, learning, and taking action. Much of this is contextualized in a book that's been formative for her career called We Make a Road by Walking. The book is a transcript of a facilitated conversation between Myles Horton and Paulo Freire.

Episode transcript.

Works discussed:

1. Horton, M., & Freire, P. (1990). We make the road by walking: Conversations on education and social change. Temple University Press.

2. Curnow, J., Fernandes, T., Dunphy, S., & Asher, L. (2020). Pedagogies of Snark: Learning through Righteous, Riotous Anger in the Youth Climate Movement. Gender & Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2020.1786014.

3. Curnow, J., Davis, A., & Asher, L. (2019). Politicization in Process: Developing Political Concepts, Practices, Epistemologies, and Identities Through Activist Engagement. American Educational Research Journal. 56(3) 716-752. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831218804496