Education Activism, Art, and Imagination: What Can High School Students in Buenos Aires Teach Us about Learning?

• Main Author: Hillary, Anna
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest LLC 2023
• Subjects: Activism; Citizen Participation; Educational Change; Equal Education; Foreign Countries; High School Students; High School Teachers; Learning; Neoliberalism; Parents; Public Schools; Skill Development; Social Justice; Argentina (Buenos Aires)
• ISBN: 9798379544584

Since 2008 high school students in Buenos Aires, Argentina have consistently occupied their schools to criticize budget cuts to public education, demand repairs to deteriorating buildings, slow the standardization of their curriculum, and foster their inclusion in the educational decision-making process. By 2012, over 30,000 students occupied more than 50 of the 159 public high schools in Buenos Aires in protest of neoliberal education reforms. More recent waves of occupations highlight their continuity. In 2017, students from over 30 public high schools initiated occupations in "defense of public education." Although the actions are generally considered extreme by all, they produce heated debate across the city as parents, teachers, and the wider public have been divided on whether they support or oppose these protests. The academic literature and the popular press have largely framed the actions as student-led protests; I suggest we also consider them a case of prefigurative politics because the classes students organized demonstrate the education they seek and model collective, affective, and creative student-led learning. In this qualitative case study of the 2017 high school occupations in Buenos Aires, I draw on the sociological framework of prefigurative politics to analyze the artistic activism and forms of teaching and learning students engaged with while protesting neoliberal education reforms. Through 42 in-depth interviews with the students, their parents, and teachers, as well as document and audiovisual analysis, I discovered that students gained profound civic, academic, professional, and interpersonal skills in areas that included communication, critical thinking, and gender equity. This research is particularly timely as high school students around the world take on issues from racial injustice, climate change, and gun violence to discriminatory policing and women's and LGBTQIA+ rights. It fills a gap in the research on student-led learning and civic engagement as planned by high school students, contributes to the sociology literature on the pedagogies of prefigurative politics, and bridges a disconnect between social movement literature and scholarship on education reform. These findings hold relevant implications for education policy, as the students are advocating for policies that provide an equitable education and socially just curriculum for all youth. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]