Learning and Education for a Better World: 
The Role of Social Movements

Budd Hall, Darlene Clover, Jim Crowther & Eurig Scandrett (eds), 

Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 2012, 204 pages

The editors of Learning and Education for a Better World: The Role of 

Social Movements established for themselves an ambitious goal. 

As indicated in the introduction, they intend for the book to offer 

‘new insights into the theories of how social movements work, 

deeper insights into the theory and practice of adult education in 

the context of political struggle, and new resources for hope’ (p.x). 

Each contribution to this edited volume investigates a different 

aspect of the intersection of adult education and social movement 

work. The volume is divided into three parts. The first is focused 

on theoretical and historical perspectives, the second on learning 

through cultural struggle and the third on ‘changing the world’.

The interplay between education and social movements/

social change is the theme that ties the chapters together. While 

some chapters focus on education as a part of social movements 

(such as in the opening piece about an adult education program 

for South African militants), others show how education is the 

target of social movements, as demonstrated in Steinklammer’s 

piece on Austrian kindergarten teachers protesting for better 

education funding. 

Liam Kane provides a primer on popular education and 

a nice history of the popular education movement in Latin 

America. Darlene Clover’s and Stephen Brookfield’s respective 

articles both describe how art is an educational tool that is 

specifically appropriate for social movement work. In one of my 

favorite articles of the compilation, Astrid von Kotze describes a 

grassroots-based adult education system in South Africa in which 

the ‘students’ set their own curriculum and build the radical 

imaginings of an alternative social world. The examples von Kotze 

describes provide excellent lessons for teachers of all kinds about 

how to involve students in their own education. In addition, the 

‘bottom-up’ model of freely available education described by von 

Kotze could provide a fascinating contrast with the largely ‘top-

down’ massive online open courses or MOOCs that have been 

touted as democratizing higher education. Likewise, Budd L. Hall’s 

article describes the grassroots training and educational processes 

at the heart of the Occupy Movement, and how Occupy’s use of the 

Gateways: International 
Journal of Community 
Research and Engagement
Vol 8/No 1 (2015): 167–68
© UTSePress and the author

ISSN 1836-3393

Jennifer Chernega



168 | Gateways | Review

online social media website, Twitter, extended these educational 

processes beyond the groups directly involved in the protests. Mark 

Malone’s article also investigates the use of Twitter and Facebook 

as organizing tools during the Egyptian Revolution. Catherine 

Etmanski uses her own experiences to argue that organic farms 

serve as sites of simultaneous education and social movement 

organizing in response to the environmental and social dangers of 

industrial farming practices.

Learning and Education for a Better World could be useful 

as supplementary reading in classes on social movements or 

the sociology of education. Essays from the initial section could 

also be used as good examples of applying critical and Marxist 

theory in courses on social theory. The theoretical ideas of the 

book draw heavily from the work of Paolo Friere and Antonio 

Gramsci. Students reading the text will find it easier to understand 

if they have some familiarity with these theorists’ work on critical 

education and hegemony. 

More field note or interview excerpts throughout the volume 

would have strengthened and clarified the authors’ arguments. 

Many of the articles felt heavy on theory or argument but light 

on evidence. This deficit was even more jarring given the focus of 

the volume on the creation of meaning, a focus that meshes so 

clearly with the well-established goals of observation and interview 

research techniques. 

Although it is not immediately clear from the title, Learning 

and Education for a Better World is one installment in a series of 

volumes on international issues in adult education and, therefore, 

is focused on adult learners and adults in education (i.e. teachers, 

professors, etc) and does not investigate how younger students may 

engage with social movements. 

Learning and Education for a Better World begins with 

ambitions of providing a ‘new resource for hope’, which is an 

admittedly lofty goal. Crowther and Lucio-Villegas’ contribution 

provides a more moderate assessment of the impacts of this work 

and one appropriate for summarizing this text: ‘Adult educational 

work at the level of communities does not, of course, transform 

global capitalism and the kind of movement it generates may not 

easily scale up to become such a threat. But it does begin to turn 

people into critical and active agents who are less easily managed 

or manipulated and it provides an opportunity to make visible 

alternative values and visions which animate people’, which is 

certainly an excellent place to start. 


	_GoBack