Embedded Files
Education I EDUC 110 Popular Education, Democracy, & Social Movements I Spring 2025
Amanda Lashaw, a Lecturer in Education, used film and critical dialogue in her course, Popular Education, Democracy & Social Movements (EDUC 110), to navigate students' experiences with disagreement. How do people committed to the liberation of oppressed groups challenge each other’s ideas in pursuit of truth?
Lashaw regularly teaches a course on Popular Education, a tradition in which “critical dialogue” is central. In Spring 2025, this asynchronous course engaged students to build trust, community, and active listening skills in order to move beyond common pitfalls of polite conversation. The goal was for students to explore the power of disagreement through readings theorizing critical dialogue and through discussion of multiple case studies, on topics ranging from racist policing to toxic waste to discrimination against people with disabilities.
In Lashaw’s experience, students in Education courses find it emotionally and intellectually “difficult” to disagree with each other. They are skilled at critiquing peer competition and at reflecting on the ways that one’s voice in discussions is shaped by social position. Maybe for these reasons, they tend to associate public disagreement with a lack of care for each other’s perspective. This spring’s conversation strategies were designed to help students appreciate how people who are committed to the liberation of oppressed groups actually need to challenge each other’s ideas in order to interpret social problems and plan actions.
In EDUC 110, students watched, discussed, and wrote an analysis of Crip Camp, a documentary about the movement for rights for people with disabilities.
Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire continues to inspire activists and educators with revolutionary ideas about learning and social change.
Dialogue in the Popular Education Tradition
Lashaw introduced students to Paolo Freire’s theory (1970) that oppressed groups need to be able to name their conditions in order to transform them. Dialogue is the primary method for sharing experiences, examining existing patterns of thought in the group, investigating political and economic structures, building an analysis of injustice, and developing transformative action.
Students learned from social movement icons such as Ella Baker and Grace Lee Boggs that you have to seek out and discuss contradictions and tensions in common-sense ways of understanding social problems and solutions. Only by surfacing a diversity of perspectives can people learn to see their own ideas more clearly. Examples from visual and performing arts illustrated the different ways that people can express and act out their ideas.
“How do people committed to the liberation of oppressed groups challenge each other’s ideas in pursuit of truth?”
Practicing Active Listening
From the start, students in Education 110 used guidelines for active listening and democratic discussion as they interacted with peers. They participated in weekly, whole-class discussion boards as well as small-group annotations on readings and film transcripts using posts and replies in Hypothesis (a group annotation tool). They tried out frames and questions such as “Can you tell me more about what you mean by. . . ?” and “I think of this issue differently, because. . . .” The course TA visited the annotation group space and modeled the dialogue principles with probing questions and observations about discussion themes.
A scene from the documentary Crip Camp (2020)
For a bigger assignment, students watched, discussed, and wrote an analysis of Crip Camp, a documentary about the movement for rights for people with disabilities. To help students surface the gray areas of problem analysis and movement decision-making, Lashaw developed four movement “dilemmas“ that students discussed in their annotation groups. For example:
Should people whose disabilities make it hard to understand their speech represent the movement as public speakers?
What values should guide the decision?
What are the strategic issues involved?
Who should make the decision?
They shared opinions about these sorts of conflicts of interest with no easy resolution. For extra credit, students were invited to share reflections on the process of trying to surface diverse perspectives.
Building Trust
One advantage of asynchronous courses, according to many students, is that people can take more time to develop their thoughts when contributing to small group discussions. This slowed pace helped to transform people’s fear of judgement and of saying the wrong thing, which was key to building trust for disagreement. To prepare for the “dilemmas“ assignment, students were invited to contribute to an anonymous discussion thread about their own experiences with, knowledge about, or ignorance of ableism. The idea for an anonymous space came from students, and they used it poignantly to paint a picture of who was “in the room.”
Lashaw built on students’ willingness to be vulnerable by talking about her own health and disability struggles in the set-up of the “dilemmas” assignment. She also described her view that even though the hilly campus makes it impossible for her to get around easily, she thinks that not all spaces have to be accessible to all people. In reflections, students said that her naming an unpopular view gave people “permission” to reflect on their initial opinions and get them thinking about the limits of the principle of inclusion.
Septima Clark (center), Alice Wine, and Bernice Robinson (standing) at a Citizenship School in the South Carolina Sea Islands. Late 1950s.
Effectiveness: Lashaw found that the “dilemmas” discussion prompted more nuanced analysis and comfort with disagreement than usual. In reflections, some students described how the conversation built something, how they moved from taking stances on practical details of the issue toward naming and claiming principles. One group first discussed what the campus could do to make transportation easier and then debated which kinds of spaces would be most difficult to make accessible. Some people resisted the idea that there could be any limit on efforts at inclusion, while someone else said that what mattered was the genuine effort to accommodate everyone. In dialogue with a key scene from Crip Camp, they ultimately named a deeper question that transformed their understanding of the problem: When does separation become segregation?
One helpful strategy was requiring everyone to participate in the discussions, regardless of their experience with ableism. A student who identified themselves as a person without disabilities reflected that they started off thinking that their voice should not be influencing the ”dilemmas” conversation. Perhaps because of the time they had spent with their small group beforehand, they pushed past that discomfort and found a way to both listen to classmates and express a point of view.
Lashaw reflected that, in the future, it will be important to craft better prompts for people to reply to each other’s comments on discussion boards and in annotations. More frequent practice is essential for students to move beyond surface agreement and feel the power of “difficult” conversation. The strategy of posing dilemmas that people with shared values might face is promising.
Page updated
Report abuse