Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-995ml Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T17:28:17.486Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Grace Lee Boggs's Person-Centered Education for Community-Based Change: Feminist Pragmatism, Pedagogy, and Philosophical Activism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2021

Tess Varner*
Affiliation:
Concordia College, Department of Philosophy, 901 8th Street South, Moorhead, MN56562
*
Corresponding author. Email: tvarner@cord.edu

Abstract

This paper offers an overview of Grace Lee Boggs's community-based and person-centered philosophy and pedagogy, highlighting how education can foster social responsibility and create democratic habits in students, better equipping them to create radical change within their communities. The essay demonstrates Boggs's commitment to philosophical-activist pedagogy and its alignment with a feminist-pragmatist approach, which emphasizes lived experience, pluralism, complexity, and equality, as well as praxis. The essay then considers how Boggs's philosophical activism can be enacted inside and outside the traditional classroom, concluding by describing an educational and activist project called Narrative 4.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Boggs, Grace Lee. 1978. Women and the movement to build a new America. [no city]: National Organization for An American Revolution.Google Scholar
Boggs, Grace Lee. 1998. Living for change: An autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Boggs, Grace Lee. 2000. Freedom schooling. Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, December 1.Google Scholar
Boggs, Grace Lee, and Kurashige, Scott. 2011. The next American revolution: Sustainable activism for the twenty-first century. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boggs, James, and Lee, Grace. 1974. Revolution and evolution in the twentieth century. New York: Monthly Review Press.Google Scholar
Evans, Mari. 1989. Ethos and creativity. In Where we live: Essays about Indiana. ed. Hoppe, David. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Lake, Danielle. 2015. Dewey, Addams, and beyond: A context-sensitive, dialogue-driven, action-based pedagogy for preparing students to confront local wicked problems. Contemporary Pragmatism 12 (2): 251–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, Grace Chin. 1945. George Herbert Mead: Philosopher of the social individual. New York: Kings Crown Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Putnam, Julia. 2010. A lifelong search for a real education. In Another Education is Possible. The James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership.Google Scholar
Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. 1996. Pragmatism and feminism: Reweaving the social fabric. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Whipps, Judy, and Lake, Danielle. 2016. Feminist pragmatism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/femapproach-pragmatism/.Google Scholar