by Highlander Research and Education Center

Located 20 miles east of Knoxville, TN, the Highlander Research and Education Center is comprised of a series of small structures (office, retreat center, library, intern house, and Myles Horton House) on a 104-acre farm nestled in the Smoky Mountains. The Center brings together grassroots activists from around the world to help them to analyze their work, share their experiences and visions, and help each other in their organizational work. (1) One of the participants, Corianna Yannone, can tell you more about the physical space of Highlander if you click on her name.

History
In 1932, the Center was founded by Myles Horton who believed that poor, working-class people could take control of their lives and their circumstances. Since that time, the Highlander Center has touched the lives of countless individuals in their struggle for social, environmental, and especially economic justice. Highlander's history has been described as a series of social justice schools, however, as Myles Horton himself once said, it is really the same school with different people dealing with diverse and continually changing issues of injustice along the way. (2)

In the 1930's and 40's, Highlander was involved in CIO organizer training and other labor and economic justice issues. In the 50's and 60's this focus changed to farm and labor but especially civil rights organizing and training. It was at the Center that Esau Jenkins and others started the far-reaching literacy programs for poor, southern Blacks who desired to vote but couldn't because they could not read the required text from the South Carolina state constitution. It was this program that in large part spawned the Civil Rights Movement. Highlander served as a meeting place and training ground for Civil Rights Movement leaders including Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Andrew Young, Stokie Carmichael, and members of SCLC and SNCC. In 1960-61, the Center was shut down and sold piece by piece at auction (primarily for operating an desegregated education center) due to an enormous effort on the part of white southern politicians who hoped that the death of Highlander would mean the death of the Movement. But Highlander wasn't a place as much as an idea, and as such it couldn't die so easily. Instead, the staff and supporters simply picked up and moved to Knoxville. In the 70's and 80's, Highlander became increasingly involved with issues of environmental justice by helping grassroots community groups who were concerned with strip mining floods, toxic waste dumping, and farm labor and land use disputes. (3, 4) At the present time, the Center is concentrating its efforts more locally--within the Appalachian region--with programs including SALT (Southern Appalachian Leadership Training), STP (a program whose acronym is filled in by the environmentally-oriented workshop participants who come to them), and other environmental justice groups.

Philosophy and Approach
In its own words, the Center "works with people struggling against injustice, supporting their efforts to take collective action to shape their own destiny. (It) seek(s) to create educational experiences that empower people to take democratic leadership towards fundamental change." (1) To anthropomorphize the organization for the sake of brevity, the Highlander has a strong belief that people have fundamental economic, political, civil, and environmental rights which they can and should be able to assert. People are the focus of the Center's efforts, not institutions or structures. People are seen as having the ability to learn and to change themselves and the world. Highlander's role is to help them learn from their own experiences and to show them how they can continue their learning process--to help them grow as people and to become democratic leaders of others. (3)

Highlander believes in using education to promote grassroots action: "by sharing experiences and building solidarity, community groups become better equipped to confront the problems which threaten their everyday lives.... (The Highlander) aim is to provide a helping hand to these communities as they continue their fight to achieve fundamental change" toward social, environmental, and economic justice. (1) This means that Highlander trusts individuals to make their own decisions regarding what actions are the "right" actions to take to transform their reality.

Highlander is committed to working with grassroots community groups to resolve pressing social problems through collective action. Individual strength is enhanced by being a part of a group and is often absolutely necessary when fighting those bigger battles. Much of their educational technique relies in educating by example. All learning activity is focused toward the empowerment of all participants (i.e. not just the louder few) so that the activists can do what is needed and not have things done for them. In this way, they can own the process as well as the outcome. Highlander's approach is not to "teach" but to help adults learn--to help them take control over their lives, and to help them see that they CAN do so.

At Highlander, activists start by analyzing their own life experiences (the building blocks of adult learning, according to Mesirow--see below). A favorite quote of Myles Horton is, "You only learn from experiences you learn from." (2) The participants start with where they are, naming their reality through storytelling and describing their problem or issue. The next step is building self-esteem through the validation of those experiences. Being told what to do by others hasn't work for the activists or for their communities. Through their stories, learners share with others their problems and come to understand how those problems are related and how they as activists can learn about possible solutions from each other. Each person has a piece of the "knowledge pie"; each can contribute to the whole, and the whole becomes the basis for working toward a solution. Highlander then helps activists motivate themselves by asking, "who better to do the leading in solving this problem than you? You KNOW the problem best, and you can lead others in creating the solution." At the end of a workshop, participants make a promise to take the next step in the justice-seeking process once back in their own communities and to report back to the Highlander group on their status at a later time.

Highlander educator Helen Lewis has a 12-step program for building sustainable communities. She starts with the following basic assumptions:

Start with local resources and needs.
People are your major resource.
Use culture and creativity.
(Any plan or action) must be ecologically based.
Plan for the future.
Stay for the long haul.

She describes the 12 steps as:
1. Understand you history--share memories.
Tell your stories--share work histories
Study past development: industrial, economic, survival history
Research past social movements, resistance history
Understand community's role in the economy

2. Mobilize/organize/revive community.
Find or develop a community meeting place
Hold meetings, reunions, festivals, parades, discussions, study groups, celebrations
Develop a community organization to coordinate the efforts
Include all segments of community
Seek full and democratic participation

3. Profile and assess your local community.
Survey and map your community: resources and needs
Do a simple cost-benefit analysis of local industries and businesses
Catalog people resources: skills, gifts, talents, local expertise
Survey land resources: water, soil, timber, minerals, beauty

4. (Seek out) visions, alternatives/analyses.
Talk and plan together for the future
Organize study groups, bible study, civic group meetings
Look back to traditional values and forward to change
Look for models, alternatives, new ways of development
Analyze strategies for change
Understand root cause of problems
Concentrate on potential and resources

5. (Foster) education in the community.
Develop new skills
Leadership development--rethink leadership styles
Education for democratic participation
Literacy/GED/community college classes/workshops
Study circles/tutoring/women's support groups
Youth programs/older citizens programs

6. Build confidence and pride.
Use history and music and theater/community performance
Get rid of "dependency" models
Encourage participation, recognize people's work, give rewards
Encourage educational achievement/provide incentives to learn new skills
Use arts/encourage creativity/spiritual growth

7. Develop local products.
Link needs and resources
Encourage local entrepreneurs
Develop community-wide and group projects
Encourage youth enterprises
Establish small grants for incentives
Provide recognition and celebrate all efforts and victories

8. Strengthen your organization.
Leadership development--collective leadership
Democratic participation
Fiscal management
Fundraising skills
Staff and board training
Strategic planning and evaluation

9. (Foster) coalition-building and collaboration.
Make linkages, form networks and partnerships
Use and control outside resources
Learn from others' efforts: successes and failures
Use existing networks
Make connections and linkages: local, regional, national and international

10. (Encourage the following) political activity.
Advocacy and challenge the system
Redirect resources to community
Enter the political arena
Voter registration and participation
Education
Attend all council/commission/board meetings
Lobby elected officials

11. (Encourage the following) economic activity.
Develop home-grown businesses
Confront plant closures
Look for alternatives for survival
Community contracts with industries
Policy changes (banks, recruitment, capital, development funds)
Self-sufficiency measures

12. Enter local/regional/national/international planning process.
Attend/participate/confront/investigate policy planning boards and bodies
Understand how global economy impacts local community
Join with communities internationally to control the economy (5)

Another often overlooked part of social transformational processes is the role of music. At Highlander, music, like other forms of cultural and personal expression, is encouraged and even celebrated. It "enlivens" people and readies them for their "enlightenment" work. (4) Music is a cultural activity; it is used to cultivate the spirit and to increase the sense of dignity in one's cultural heritage. Inherently action oriented, it is a rose in the "bread and roses" that people need and strive for in life. (2) One of the most well-known and powerful activist songs, "We Shall Overcome," is a sort of theme song of Highlander. Adapted from an older, more complicated song called "I'll Overcome Someday," it was simplified by Zillphia Horton, Myles Horton's first wife, during the 1940's and shared at union gatherings, civil rights trainings, and etc. until it had circled the globe. (6)

Musician Guy Carawan plays his hammer dulcimer at the Center

Highlander's role is to help people to discover (or "unearth") their "seeds of fire"--to confront reality and then to change it; the method of the Highlander educator is one of hands-off facilitating. Highlander educators need to resist any temptation to tell the learner-activists what to do: they must completely let go of any power they feel they may have "over" the learner-activists--even when the activists state that they want to be told what should be done. Educators need to engender a number of qualities to be most effective. These include (but are not limited to) the following:

a willingness to continually question their OWN experiences in and assumptions about the world;
excellent communication skills, especially listening skills (and this may include needing to "unlearn" academic jargon etc. that can put a wall between facilitator and learner;
a deep trust and love for people and their abilities;
immense creativity in keeping the process going and in trying to find solutions;
patience to stay with this process that can take months--often years--to complete;
a healthy fear of the "enemy," but a fear that is tempered by a willingness to take risks;
a strong belief in the work they are doing;
and a basic dissatisfaction with the status quo.

Links to the Field of Adult Education
The philosophy and approach of the Highlander Center fall squarely within the traditions of adult education known as critical pedagogy or "empowering education" (7), "emancipatory education," critical reflection, and transformational learning. Critical pedagogy "seeks to reinvigorate democracy as a public process, as well as grapple with ethical issues of domination and control." (8). As a liberatory umbrella, critical pedagogy encompasses a broad category of related theory and practice: critical postmodernism, border pedagogy, neo and post Marxism, feminist poststructuralism, ritology, border identity, postcolonial pedagogy, discourse analysis, historical genealogy (9). The critical reflection approach is rooted in the humanist tradition but with very different power conceptions; it has been characterized as involving "the learner in identifying and evaluating the assumptions, beliefs, and values that underlie his or her thoughts, feelings and action (in a process that) can lead to a transformation of these underlying structures and new ways of looking at (and acting in) the world." (10) In this tradition, the most significant and meaningful kind of learning takes place through a process of analyzing our own experiences, discovering our basic assumptions, and coming to understand the power issues woven throughout our lives. Techniques in this tradition include (but are not limited to) focus group inquiry, critical incidents, critical debate, action learning, participatory action research, participatory research, reflective judgment, crisis decision simulation, historical narrative, decoding media and analysis of documents, metaphor analysis, language analysis, impact analysis, preference surveys, imaging the future, and scenario building. (10)

A Little History

In the 1960's, one of most influential of early critical pedagogists, Paulo Freire, approached the field of adult education with a mission. He was concerned with the poor and uneducated people of "developing" countries who were being exploited in large part because of their inability to read, so he developed a liberatory pedagogy for teaching reading and writing as tools to help prevent these people from remaining oppressed.

Freirian pedagogy is based on dialogic methods that steer away from the traditional form of educating learners that "deposits" information into them. It helps learners become full participants in their own education--liberatory education--that encompasses problem posing, building of a critical consciousness, questioning the roles of teacher/student (subject, "expert"/object, passive receiver of knowledge), and changing education from a process of domestication to one of empowerment. Participants become teachers and students in a dialogue process and through a praxis he defined as reflection plus action. Learners and instructors are both actively engaged in the investigation of life and perception; hierarchy is subverted into a process of open dialogue between equals. Dialogue is important in that the learners' reflection does not take place in the abstract but in the context of the world. Furthermore, this dialectic is not necessarily about getting to a higher form of knowledge and "truth"; it is about being very grounded in the experiences of people in a concrete world.

Six conditions must be met for this kind of liberatory education to succeed: love, humility, faith in humanity, trust, hope, and critical thinking. When these are in place, "the oppressed can express the reality of their lives, not as defined by the oppressor but as the oppressed really experience it...and the oppressive, dehumanizing social situations that envelop [them] be perceived as challenges to be met and transformed." (11) Paulo Freire and Myles Horton were close contemporaries and often spent time with and learned from each other.

Other Critical Theorists' Contributions

In the early 1980's, critical pedagogist Jack Mezirow made a crucial distinction between instrumental, communicative (or dialogic) and transformative learning. Instrumental learning involves learning to control or manipulate other people or environments. Communicative or "dialogic" learning involves "understanding the meaning of what others communicate concerning values, ideas, feelings, and moral decisions." (12) Transformational learning seeks to engender perspective transformation through the use of critical reflection. "Critical reflection addresses the question of the justification for the very premises on which problems are posed or defined in the first place.... We become critically reflective by challenging the established definition of a problem being addressed, perhaps by finding a new metaphor that reorients problem-solving efforts in a more effective way." (13)

For Mezirow, the most significant learning activities done by adults is through this process of critical self reflection. The process works something like this: through our socialization, we learn particular ways of doing things...and ways of not doing things. We learn that we have a certain limited capability (due to our socially constructed identity) and adjust our expectations of what we might "realistically" achieve for ourselves, our families, our society, etc. accordingly. This can become dangerous to us when we stop thinking that we deserve to or can acquire certain basic rights (clean air and water, fair and equal treatment by others, etc.) because we have formed a distorted perception of how--and why--the world works as it does. Distortions can be in various forms, including those related to the nature and use of knowledge (epistemic), those related to personal anxieties that stop action before it can start (psychic), or those involving belief systems regarding power and social relationships (sociocultural). (14) When we critically analyze our experiences, we can uncover these faulty assumptions/perceptions. We start to understand how our own values, beliefs, behaviors, ideologies, and moralities are culturally transmitted, that they are provisional, relative, CHANGEABLE. We can better understand who makes decisions--and how we can more effectively and justly think and act on our own behalf and on the behalf of others in powerless positions.

Stephen Brookfield emphasizes "praxis" as being at the heart of effective facilitation for critical thinking and reflection, which he defines as "identifying and challenging assumptions and exploring and imagining alternatives."(14) Praxis embodies a process of activity, reflection upon activity, collaborative analysis of activity, new activity, more reflection, more collaborative analysis, and so on. His notion of "activity" can be as visible and noisy as a workplace strike to as quiet and invisible as simply thinking--cognitive activity. The aim of facilitation is to foster in adults a spirit of critical reflection and to nurture their becoming self-directed, proactive, and empowered. Brookfield also points out an oft-unacknowledged, ideological ("left of center") bias underlying critical theory. While some proponents might believe that once a person has become "aware of nature of the oppressive reality and of the distorting, hegemonic power of the dominant cultural values, (it is not inevitable that) learners will commit themselves to perspectives and movements that challenge these values.... A learner can perceive how power relationships operate to maintain inequality and decide to join the oppressive class, or he or she can simply refuse to acknowledge the truth of this reality...." (14)

In "Freire and a Feminist Pedagogy of Difference," Kathleen Weiler critiques, expands upon, and enriches Paulo Freire's visionary pedagogy with feminist pedagogy. As another form of critical, oppositional, and "situated" pedagogy, her feminist approach is "based on assumptions of the power of consciousness-raising, the existence of oppression, and the possibility of ending it, and the desire for social transformation." (15) Feminist pedagogy was born of the grassroots consciousness-raising (CR) groups of the late 1960's and early 1970's. These spontaneous and informal groups were based upon friendships and common political views and focused on sharing life experiences, the reliability of experience and feelings, collective political change, and a commitment to a lack of structural hierarchy and leaders. CR became both a method for learning the truth--or, at least, one truth--and a means for action and organizing.

Writing from a position of strong commitment to justice and empowerment, Weiler questions (as does Brookfield) the assumption that when people learn to perceive themselves in relation to the world, they will necessarily act collectively to change the world and their place in it with a uniform perception of oppression and a shared belief of ONE transcendent and universal truth. Weiler and other feminist writers see people as having experienced nonuniform oppression which, upon critical reflection, will not necessarily result in this shared perception of the problems or the solutions. Weiler warns facilitators to reflect upon their own position of privilege and about possible antagonisms coming from differences of power (based on class, gender, and race) between the teacher/facilitator and the members of a particular group. Weiler asserts that educational facilitators must take on a history if they are to live as human subjects, and this recognition of their own histories means "articulating (their) own subjectivities and (their) own interests as (they) try to interpret and critique the social world." (16)

Feminist theory questions the role and authority of the teacher by exploring the notion and praxis of authority and addressing the contradictions between the goals of collectivity and hierarchies of knowledge. Further, even more fundamentally than the Freirian ideal, feminist pedagogy recognizes the utmost importance of personal experience as a source of knowledge. More than abstract rationality, feeling is a guide to deeper truths. Experience can be interpreted through ideologically constructed categories and can form the basis of an oppositional perspective to the "dominant schemes of truth." (A contradiction emerges, however, when feelings are hailed as the source of deeper truths and at the same time are manipulated and shaped by the dominant society. This contradiction is lessened when we see society as shaping only a part of people's emotional makeup and when one believes in the power of "deeper feeling" to challenge the dominant definitions of truth.)

Feminist pedagogy emphasizes the importance of the exploration of the perspectives of people of different races, classes, and cultures. Unlike some other critical theories, feminist theories have historically and increasingly emphasized the need to see differences between women (and, by extension to larger critical theory, all people) as central to feminist pedagogy. Postmodern feminists, lesbians, and women of color exploded the unstated assumption of some universal experience of "being a woman," which seemed more often than not a replacement of the word "woman" for "white, heterosexual, middle-class women." This perspective further questions "the notion of a coherent subject moving through history with a single essential identity" and thus the "assumptions of the common interests of the oppressed ... [and] the use of such universal terms as oppression or liberation without locating these claims in a concrete historical or social context." (17) Thus while both Freirian and feminist pedagogies rest on a belief in the human capacity to feel, to know, and to change, the latter "suggests a more complex realization of the Freirian vision of the collective conscientization and the struggle against oppression, one which acknowledges differences and conflict." (18)

In sum, critical pedagogy focuses on learning environments that promote social change. That content of instruction draws from a societal socioeconomic and political context is essential to the learner's ability to understand his or her position with relation to society. Learning and knowledge are directed toward economic and political justice and liberation from oppression. (19) Educators need to be ever-vigilant to the inter and intra-group power issues inside and outside of the learning environment. As participants in the Highlander process, we group members can testify to their commitment to and practice of this emancipatory learning technique.
Totact the Center directly for information, general brochures, Highlander Reports newsletters, or Highlander Collections brochures, write or call: Highlander Research and Education Center, 1959 Highlander Way, New Market, TN 37820, (423) 933-3443.