Activist Educators and the Production, Circulation and Impact of Social Movement Knowledge

The burgeoning research on contemporary educator movements provides insight into what activist educators know and believe, what they learn through their collective organizing and activism, and how they conduct inquiry to generate new knowledge for praxis. Yet, although this work suggests that these educators engage, generate, circulate, and mobilize social movement knowledge, the process remains mostly tacit. In this article, I draw from several studies of educator movements to discuss examples of how communities of educators engage with knowledge generated by social movements, develop new local knowledge for their activist activity, and promote that knowledge within and beyond their movement communities. Circulating their knowledge through networks extending over time and space, activist educators ultimately bridge social movement knowledge into spheres of power and influence in education.