Lived experience as a source of knowledge. What has the room been through? What do participants already know from the inside?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.
Everyone in the room has been schooled, and school taught each of them something about how smart, how capable, and how welcome they were. Everyone has also learned things that no school gave them. This lens, in a theme about education, starts by taking the room’s own history as a learner seriously: the teacher who saw you, the classroom that shut you down, the knowledge you carry that was never tested. That history is the ground the whole theme stands on.
Anchor questions
Sample prompts to open experiential work in this theme. Adapt to your room. See the facilitator guide for general guidance on experiential prompts.
- What is your earliest memory of being taught something? Who taught you?
- What did school make you believe about how smart or capable you are? Was it true?
- When did you learn something outside of school that mattered more than what was inside it?
- Have you ever been made to feel stupid or silenced in a place of learning? What happened?
- What have you taught someone else? What did you learn from teaching it?
- Where do you learn best, and with whom?
Materials that may help
Experiential work begins from the room. These outside materials extend or challenge what the room can offer. All are free unless marked otherwise.
Oral histories and testimonio
- Chude Pamela Allen, Interview on Being a Freedom School Teacher (Civil Rights Movement Archive). A first-person account of teaching in a 1964 Mississippi Freedom School, and of learning as much as she taught. Free: crmvet.org
- Remembrances of Freedom School Students (Civil Rights Movement Archive). Three first-person recollections of what a Freedom School did to students’ sense of themselves as learners. A powerful pairing with the teacher’s account above. Free: crmvet.org
- Septima Clark, oral history (Southern Oral History Program). Clark recounts starting at Highlander in 1954 and building the Citizenship Schools that taught tens of thousands of adults to read and register to vote. Free: crmvet.org
- Literacy and Liberation (Septima Clark, Teaching for Change). Clark’s own words on how basic literacy became civic power, paired with a free nine-minute film, They Say I’m Your Teacher, on the first Citizenship School teacher Bernice Robinson. Free: civilrightsteaching.org
- StoryCorps, Education stories (StoryCorps). First-person audio in which people describe teachers, schooling, and learning, plus a toolkit for students to record their own oral histories. Play one and open the room. Free: storycorps.org
Video
- “RSA ANIMATE: Changing Education Paradigms” (Ken Robinson, The RSA, 2010). Roughly 12 minutes, about 17.9 million views, the most-watched item across this theme. A whiteboard-animated critique of the industrial schooling model. A mainstream, liberal framing, useful to open the room’s own experiences of school and then push toward the sharper analysis of the later lenses. youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
A note on method
This theme carries a particular risk: that the room defers to whoever seems most “educated,” reproducing the very hierarchy the school exists to undo. Starting experientially is the guard against that. When a person who left school early describes what they learned raising children, fixing engines, or organizing a shop floor, and the room treats it as knowledge, the theme has already begun to make its argument. Freire’s claim that no one is empty and no one knows everything is proven in the room before it is read on the page.
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially first-person accounts of adult literacy work, prison education, and learning in movements and workplaces.