Full Title: How We Learn - A Local Reader on Critical Pedagogy and Popular Education Practices
Edited by Daniel Tucker
Chicago: AREA, 2007
Pages: 40
Dimensions: 11.5" x 17"
Cover: soft (newspaper stock)
Binding: double-fold
Process: digital
Color: two-color cover, black and white throughout
Edition Size: 5000
ISBN: none

How We Learn?

Healthy social movements need spaces for learning and experimentation, healthy democracies need wise citizens to make wise decisions about resources and politics, and healthy people need outlets for dialogue in order to learn about new ideas and form cooperative tendencies to help one another.

In this issue you will be able to better understand the motivations of a wide variety of artists, educators and activists that seek to create more of a link between lived experience and formal education; political organizers who interpret their mission as requiring the group and/or self-education of their members in order to become critical of the structures they participate in; and narratives and interviews highlighting the relationship between spaces, education and imagination.

The amount of discussion and reading groups, free public programs geared at promoting critical understandings of the world, and informal classes and workshops going on in this city is astounding. These gatherings offer a time for eager and passionate people to slow down, to think about their goals and their work and to look forward equipped with new ideas and a better sense of history. So what does this say? People are trying to learn something; they are trying to move in new and different directions. This issue of AREA Chicago uses this tendency or desire as a jumping-off point to ask not only “How We Learn”—but also what we learn and why education is important for effective and meaningful social and cultural movements.

These are the questions we sought to begin to address with this issue:
— What is the role of the reading/discussion group in social movement work - are they filling the void of rigorous thinking and research for activists or are they just a bunch of people “talking” that should be “working”? How does such activity challenge notions of what is or isn’t productive?
—What role does formal/informal/experimental/creative education play, historically and in present day, in the strength of social movements?
—How do we learn what we learn, learn to keep learning, and constantly refine our use the city as a curriculum for articulating a shared vision of a better and more livable Chicago (and world)?

Contributors include:
Irina Zadov, Sarah Alford, Mike Wolf, Sarah Atlas, Therese Quin and Erica Meiners, Joanie Friedman, Faith Agostinone-Wilson, Mary Patten, Walt Senterfitt, Jeanne Kracher, Debbie Gould, Euan Hague, Beth Gutelius and Sarah Miller, Lisa Sousa, Daniel Tucker, and Dave Stovall

Project profiles of:
Fire This Time Fund, Green Lantern Gallery, Popular Education Alliance, InCubate, and Pomengranate Radical Health Collective

Interviews with:
Jesse Senechal and Maura Nugent, Mia Henry, Paula Ladin, Pauline Lipman and Rico Gustein, Nance Klehm, Homeschooling Parents, Aaron Hughes, and Eric Rodriguez

Special features:
Map Insert: Public Education, Public/Private Golf and Racism in the Chicago Region