Thesis for Ed.D. at University of Toronto, 1994.
CHAPTER 1 - RESEARCH STANCE
D'Arcy Martin
This study asserts the value of informal as well as formal knowledge, highlighting the badges of ability among working people that challenge the "book smart" climate of academia. The educational practice described here takes as its starting point the "street smarts"30 developed from the lived experience of unionized workers in English Canada.
The informal knowledge developed by trade union activists over generations of struggle sharpens a set of tools, of tacit skills which are little valued in professional circles.31 Seasoned unionists have learned when to call for the vote at a local meeting, whether to speak as well as vote against ratifying a contract, on which issues to pound the table during negotiations. These matters of subtle judgment are "practical knowledge" in the first instance, yet become with time and discussion part of the capacities for a "reflective practitioner" in the working class.Effective union activists must respond to pressures from members, other union activists, management and the community. Yet the knowledge of how to keep these pressures balanced is in people's heads, rarely on paper. It is communicated by story-telling, rather than by traditional academic or political discourse.32
By its nature, this informal knowledge is eclectic and comprehensive. It cannot be assimilated by "objective" intellectual processes alone, by shifting relations of intellectual production in the sphere of ideas. At stake are the feelings and dreams and bodies of workers.33
My self-image when I joined the Steelworkers in 1978 was as a bright but impractical person, whose insights from books and Third World experience were less valid somehow than those gleaned from the "shop floor route" by most union staff and activists. Dealing with the attraction and intimidation of my colleagues' "street smarts" was a major aspect of the learning I needed to undertake. Since I entered the union movement at a high level of responsibility, any mistakes were visible. As nervous as a new steward dealing with sudden dismissal of a co-worker, I had to learn under pressure. Struggling to control my own anxiety, I gradually came to empathize with the participants in my courses faced with layoffs, grievances, and other pressured situations for learning and action.
Today I try to assign equal weight in my practice to both kinds of knowledge, and will try to keep them balanced in this text. As suggested in the Introduction to this chapter, a conscious effort by myself as writer and by the reader will be needed if the "matter that is understood" is not to undermine and deprecate informal knowledge as so often happens in society at large.34
The significance of street smarts has been recognized by many adult educators, particularly those engaged in participatory research. The contribution of this approach to oppressed people and popular movements must be assessed by those people and those movements; however, the influence on adult education research has been in five areas: to re-legitimize people's knowledge, to refine their capacity to reflect on their reality, to re-appropriate the knowledge that dominant systems have gathered about them, to assemble knowledge needed by people in struggle, and to challenge the hegemony of ruling class thought.35 This approach situates the encounter of teacher and learner as a moment in an alternative system of knowledge production.36
Trade unions and many other membership organizations engage implicitly in participatory research when adult learning is facilitated, and its results applied in collective organizational action.37 Yet conscious and rigorous engagement in this approach can greatly increase its effectiveness. Certainly the participants in trade union courses are in a strong position to contribute what they know to a shared venture. They are an empowered and activist group within the working class. They have chosen to attend a course, and have the financial and political support of co-workers in attending. Their sense of dignity provides a basis for questioning dominant forms of thought. The spirit is that of Armstrong McGuire:
"Armstrong McGuire builds boats to take on the sea and her many moods. The round of her belly and place of ribs particular. Sculptor of keel and cedar stem post, sees with his hands her punishing blows and raging seas' storm. He knows the way of wood and with his plane can cut the true line of utility from any plank. Armstrong McGuire, builder of boats, sizes me up with the same wooden eye and sees my store-bought education for a brain. "Can you make money here?" said I.
"I don't make money.
I make boats", comes the reply."38
The process of critical dialogue in union courses is one place where street smarts can challenge "store-bought education". In one Steelworker seminar which I conducted, an exasperated participant burst out: "What you know isn't what we need". In the discussion which followed, we negotiated a contract which allowed both myself and himself to contribute and to learn. For him, this meant respecting academic knowledge, and for me it required respecting popular knowledge.39 Such friction is to be expected between people like myself with professional credentials and the emerging street smart intellectuals in the movement.40 In alliance, we can best shape ideas and practices that are a serious and supple challenge to the current power system. In the process, it is essential for union activists to fully experience and critically re-work the messages they receive from the powerful.41 Only by creative resistance, and tension with the educator, will a truly democratic learning interaction be developed.
Many workers are convinced that they deserve their subordinate status. The "flair" or ease of the powerful maintains their cultural authority,42 while the "badges of shame"43 carried by working people are a fetter on learning that challenges hegemony. While this cultural subordination of workers is at times reproduced in union life, the goal of transformative union education is to ensure that wherever possible it is challenged.44
While valuing street smarts, it is not helpful to romanticize the wisdom of workers.45 Down that road lies frozen folklore, the condescension of newspaper columnists who quote barbers and taxi drivers rather than speaking for themselves. But neither should we treat the informal knowledge of workers as purely a matter of "false consciousness", a simple introjection of dominant ideology.46
In this study, the term "street smarts" implies knowledge which is earned as a way of surviving in adverse conditions, rather than received as a gift; it implies knowledge which is earned, by the effort of the learner and often at the cost of personal error and pain, rather than developed spontaneously and easily; it implies knowledge based on experience rather than deductive logic; it implies a comprehensive range of understanding, which is embodied rather than abstract. This is the learning process of union members from which any formal education program starts, whether or not the educator realizes it.
In socialist literature, its closest equivalent is the term "common sense", as used by Antonio Gramsci. For Gramsci, common sense is the set of widely-held information, popular beliefs and convictions about how the social system operates. It is often received knowledge, internally contradictory and relatively unexamined. It has some kernels of resistance to dominant ideology, and some hegemonic ideas internalized within it:
"Gramsci began with the assumption of the heterogeneous nature of working class consciousness: many contradictory ideas and attitudes co-exist in it. He refers to this heterogeneity as `common sense'. What are the major components of `common sense'? Partly it emerges from the practices of a corporate culture, which is based on defensive reactions to being a subordinate class: forms of negotiation, accommodation and resistance vis-a-vis the dominant class. The philosophical concepts used to illuminate this `lived experience' are drawn from various thought systems: from folklore codified in proverbs, from religion and other past ideologies and also from the current stock of hegemonic ideas."47
In this study, the link between street smarts and common sense is their similar location in terms of power relations, and the similar challenge they pose to the democratic adult educator.48 Gramsci suggests that, through critical dialogue, through conscious educational leadership, common sense can be deepened into philosophy. This is directly parallel to the ideas of Paulo Freire and other popular educators. In turn, such philosophy needs to be applied, which means in union life to test with members, fellow activists, political allies... and the managers with whom one deals day by day. When this philosophy is clear, and relevant to the struggle over hegemony, it can be considered to be "good sense". My use of the concept of street smarts encompasses the sequence envisioned by Gramsci, from common sense to good sense.The fruit of this process is a tool for a working class fully capable of exercising power:
"The fundamental assumption behind Gramsci's view of hegemony is that the working class, before it seizes State power, must establish its claim to be a ruling class in the political, cultural and ethical sense... Hegemony - rule by consent, the legitimation of revolution by a higher and more comprehensive culture - is the unifying idea of Gramsci's life."49
Clearly, such a formulation is not politically neutral. In order to build working class hegemony, the political task of the union educator is to weaken, carefully and skilfully, the hold of hegemonic ideas on the common sense of participants in union courses, and to strengthen the emerging good sense as part of the equipment of an increasingly confident social movement.50
In the process the educator can learn. While the broader political purposes outlined here certainly motivate me, the nourishment of union education for a practitioner like myself comes at this more immediate, embodied level. When I fully respect the street smarts in my courses, I am continually refreshed by creativity and insight, and challenged by irreverence. Analysis would suggest that a consistently democratic and problem-posing union education can tap wisdom and channel anger in ways that contribute to genuine social transformation. But the recurring, rewarding experience of personal growth, challenge and excitement in interaction with street smart workers is what has sustained me day by day.