-Noah Nelson

July 16, 2025

The precarious times we find ourselves in, crafted onto us as we try to break free from this tumultuous, violent system breeding neocolonialism, imperialism, and racialism, calls us to engage in organizing with an emphasis on pedagogy. Pedagogy in its rawest form, is the art and science of transmitting knowledge . It is a skill requiring deep self-awareness, mastery of the subject, and an inquisitive spirit to truly understand the student. In organizing, we engage in a form of pedagogy through exposing contradictions in our Political Education. 

We understand the violence that colonial education has on colonized peoples, thus historically and contemporarily we have looked to provide alternatives that reach our people in ways that do not allow for the social reproduction of oppression. However, in our efforts in delivering PE, we must be cautious of enacting the same colonial pedagogical methods in which we have been taught ourselves to accept and believe in. There are dangers in solely understanding pedagogy as didactic. We deposit information into communities, presuming they have no thought or action, reproducing what Paulo Freire, Brazilian socialist educator, termed “banking education” in his book  "Pedagogy Of The Oppressed”. This does not allow people to come to their own understandings and context, rather, they receive information and wonder what to do next. 

The content we teach is critical, but the method of pedagogy is even more pertinent for what we are desiring to build. Political Education wears the mask of liberation, but the face that it covers is a pedagogy that is essential to the mask itself. 

In the history of radical educational traditions, we can find this very blending of pedagogy within social movement building. Educators like Ella Baker, Paulo Freire, Amilcar Cabral, Septima Clark, Walter Rodney, and many others found depth in understanding the usage of a pedagogy that allows people to determine their own lives as a community against the isms placed upon them. Some more than others, are seen, thought of, or identify more or less as educators, but hindsight tells us they unlocked a critical tool in organizing that truly got at an educational experience for communities. When asked about how to organize, Ella Baker gave insight to her pedagogical praxis in a 1970 interview with The Urban Review. 

“Then comes the question, how do you reach people if they aren’t already conscious of this right? You start with people where they are. For example, the burning question after the 1954 Supreme Court school decision in an urban center like New York, had to do with breaking down de facto segregation. You begin by organizing people around that issue in terms of their level of understanding. Then you try to reach from one level of understanding to another,” Baker said. 

Before connecting her own sociopolitical analysis, she understands that the community she chooses to organize in has their own knowledge and needs of their current situation. Understanding racial capitalism and schooling may be the end goal but means nothing if one does not understand what communities know, their needs, and why they exist in the first place. Only then, can these larger isms make sense to the local conditions of people. The veil begins to disappear, and communities can engage in critical thought and action to determine their own lives free from isms that dominate their locales. 

Walter Rodney provides another example of this type of pedagogy in his 1969 book “The Groundings With My Brothers” where he actively dismantled the separation of academy to community. It was his mission to raise consciousness, and he understood that pedagogy would be his tool of praxis. Similar to Ella Baker, he realized he had to be aware of what the people already knew and would bring into his teachings, preparing to meet Black people where they were, stating,

‘It might be in a sports club, it might be in a school-room, it might be in a church, it might be in a gully… ‘dark dismal places with a black population who have had to seek refuge there. You will have to go there if you want to talk to them… I was trying to contribute something. I was trying to contribute my experience in travelling, in reading, my analysis; and I was also gaining, as I will indicate.’

There was a leaning towards the working-class people, while understanding that the education would be mutually exchanged amongst one another. Rodney was not there to teach alone, but his pedagogical ideology pushed him to dismantle the lines of teacher student, finding groundings in being both. Nothing was assumed, rather it was sought to be understood. 

Both Walter Rodney and Ella Baker provide us a glimpse of the face behind the mask of Political Education. Pedagogy in a deconstructive critical, radical way is necessary in movement building. We have an abundance of Political Education, which is critical, however in the same way we emphasize PE, we must also emphasize the pedagogical praxis that can make it truly revolutionary. 

Many of our historical leaders were very keen on crafting their own pedagogies to build movements across the diaspora. They would understand that it is better to not attempt to control one, rather, to give them the tools to control their fate. Where educators such as Ella Baker, or Walter Rodney saw that the importance lay in people seeing themselves as actors in their own collective stories. 

Even further, there was never an end date such as formal schooling, students (community) could continue to refine, reflect, and react so long as their educators continued to allow for that. This is about developing a pedagogy that breaks didactics of teaching all together, a radical one that does not need to exist in a particular space, one that dismantles prescribed associations of teacher-student. Students and teachers alike should be active in their education, connecting theory to practice, with reflection and dialogue to continue to grow in consciousness and experience. 

We do not first educate, then organize. True organizing is pedagogy, and pedagogy, when done with liberation in mind, is organizing. Just to be clear, we need educators in organizing spaces, and we also need a distinct pedagogy fit to meet the demands of revolutionary movement building. This isn’t a call to abandon Political Education—it’s a call to abandon the empire's classroom. The difference lies in power: Do we facilitate praxis, or impose it?

Noah Nelson is a Doctoral Student and educator who studies Black Radical Movements and the utilization of education as part of movement building.