After School: Radical Experiments to Reimagine Education

How have people reimagined education and created new organizations and learning formations from within, on the edges, and outside traditional schools and universities? How does examining the history of radical and experimental education across time and geographies shape the ways we think about education and social change today?

My current book project, After School: Collective Experiments in Art, Study, and Education, takes up these questions by looking at an expansive ecosystem of radical, experimental, and non-traditional education from the 1920s to the 1980s. Each chapter turns to different learning formations—labor schools, student-led experimental colleges, liberation schools, free universities, community art schools, freedom schools, the Black Panthers’ schools, the University of the Earth (Universidad de la Tierra), and more—in which artists, activists, and educators have convened to rethink dominant structures of education and actively create alternative education projects and organizations. I argue that the hundreds of educational experiments created outside and on the edges of traditional schools and universities constitute a vibrant and often overlooked ecosystem that is a central to histories of education and social change. Through archival research, I aim to bring to life the pedagogies and practices within these counter spaces, surfacing tools and resources for those who want to reimagine education and educational organizations today. 

In this talk, I will give an overview of the central arguments of After School and delve into a handful of case studies from the Bay Area—the California Labor School (1940s-1950), the San Francisco State Experimental College (1960s-1970s), and the Black Panthers’ Oakland Community School (1970s-1980s)—that are part of this larger ecosystem and history.

Laura Nelson recently finished a Mellon Humanities and the University of the Future Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Southern California and is currently the Barbara Thom Long-Term Research Fellow at the Huntington Library. She has a Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University, where she was a lecturer in History & Literature. She has also taught at non-traditional colleges, including Deep Springs College and Tidelines Institute. Her current book, After School: Collective Experiments in Art, Study, and Education, is under contract with Princeton University Press. Alongside teaching and research, Laura co-organizes community-based education projects that experiment with where and how learning can happen.