Expansive Democratic Literacy and Living Possibilities of the Civil Rights Movement

Andrew Stein

Andrew's dissertation examines how education spaces act as key sites for social movement building. His interdisciplinary project connects theories of collective political learning (in learning science) with work on American political development (in political science) to conceptualize critical mobilizing structures of the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) as "collective third spaces" (Gutiérrez, 2008) for political education. Andrew engages in a historical archival analysis that traces the development of several such spaces at Howard University Law School, New York Public Library's Harlem branch, Highlander Folk School, and Freedom Schools from 1929 to 1979. First, he examines how elite and non-elite educational actors developed a strategy, which he calls expansive democratic literacy, for collectively shaping ideas around "rights" and "freedom" in the larger CRM. Andrew demonstrates how these actors worked with, against, or outside traditional political institutions to exercise collective empowerment logics that offered an alternative to respectability approaches to racial progress. Second, he shows how educational actors' expansive democratic literacy drove a dual CRM agenda - one characterized by grassroots actions for physical, economic, and intellectual self-determination and a legal strategy aimed at expanding legal definitions of belonging. By the 1970s, this agenda resulted in seeds of what he calls a democratic family rights policy regime: conditions characterized by inter-racial, class, and gender coalitions and intergenerational Black and Brown communities' leadership in designing and implementing civil rights policies. Andrew's account of CRM drivers and impacts advances our understanding of how approaches to racial and social justice and liberation can be developed collectively.

About Andrew Stein

Andrew Stein is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. His research examines the relationship between education and political change using historical and qualitative methods. Primarily, Andrew explores how collective learning spaces, including and beyond schools, can contribute tools and ethics to design and evaluate pathways for strengthening and expanding democracy. Andrew leads an inter-university collaborative of peers working to bridge educational subfields and connect scholars and practitioners by using queer and trans methodologies, including through forthcoming work in Review of Research in Education. Andrew’s work has been supported through a dissertation development fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, a research-practice fellowship in the Multidisciplinary Program in Education Sciences from the Institute of Education Sciences, and the David L. Clark Scholars Program in Educational Administration and Policy of the AERA. He has partnered with leaders of the National Association of Secondary School Principals on developing caring communities of practice for school leaders. Previously, Andrew served as 11th and 12th Grade Dean and History and American Studies Instructor at the Berkeley Carroll School in Brooklyn, New York. There he designed and led intensive trips to the U.S. South for high school students’ place-based learning of the Civil Rights Movement. Andrew participated in the National Endowment for the Humanities summer teacher institute on the Grassroots Civil Rights Movement. He received a BA/MA in History from Yale University where he studied intellectual currents of the African Diaspora.