Renewing Workers’ Education

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A Radical Vision Renewing workers’ education focuses on educational forms created by workers for workers. It extends beyond trade unions to include the range of educational initiatives aimed at the working class more generally, including working class women, casual and informal sector workers, migrant workers, and workers’ political parties. This book contributes to filling the gap in the South African literature on workers’ education and documents the more recent history of workers’ education as well as current practices and perspectives, including some international experiences. It explores conceptual tools that may assist in reflecting on and theorising the practice of workers’ education and analyses current challenges. This essential book also seeks to inform future policy and practices on workers’ education and is key for those who wish to reinvigorate and contribute to building an alternative future for workers’ education.

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Introduction

Linda Cooper and Sheri Hamilton

PART 1: Learning from history to understand the present and envision the future

Chapter 1: Union education as ‘structuring a process of appropriation by workers of their own history’

Dinga Sikwebu

Chapter 2: Organising, mass mobilisation and worker education: Experiences with political

worker education in South Africa and Namibia

Kessie Moodley and Herbert Jauch

Chapter 3: For our children tomorrow: Workers making, learning and teaching about history

Jonathan Grossman

PART 2: Institutionalising workers’ education: Democratising or domesticating?

Chapter 4: The formalisation and institutionalisation of workers’ education in South Africa:

Prospects, questions and anxieties

Mphutlane wa Bofelo

Chapter 5: Is there still space for women’s only programmes?

Grischelda Hartman

Chapter 6: Ploughing back workers’ education: A critical review of an education programme

for trade union women

Vanessa Pillay

Chapter 7: The Nigerian Labour Congress: Towards systematised trade union education for

social transformation in Nigeria

Baba Aye and Valentine Udeh

PART 3: Educating workers on the local and global periphery

Chapter 8: Workers’ education and informal workers

Chris Bonner

Chapter 9: Learning and leadership in organising temporary agency workers in Canada

Aziz Choudry, Mostafa Henaway and Eric Shragge

Chapter 10: Workers’ education in the context of precariousness:

Thinking outside of the union box

Mondli Hlatshwayo,

Chapter 11: Plays as education: Producing useful knowledge for / with precarious workers

Astrid von Kotze

PART 4: Rethinking workers’ education: A conceptual toolbox

Chapter 12: Rebuilding workers’ education on Marxist foundations: Reclaiming ideas of

working-class struggle and socialism

Sheri Hamilton

Chapter 13: Anarcho-syndicalism and union education in South Africa: A critical evaluation of

the tradition of the Congress of South African Trade Unions

Mandy Moussouris and Lucien van der Walt

Chapter 14: Workers’ education and working-class hegemony: Distilling lessons from the past

in order to rebuild the future

Linda Cooper

List of contributors

Index

Linda Cooper is an Associate Professor and teaches in the Adult Education programme at the University of Cape Town. Her interests lie in widening access to adult learners in higher education, radical traditions of workers’ education, and the relationship between ‘everyday knowledge’ and more formal knowledge. She has a long history of involvement in trade union education and other adult education initiatives that seek to promote radical social transformation. Recent publications include Cooper L & Ralphs A (Eds) (2016) RPL as Specialised Pedagogy: Crossing the Lines. Cape Town: HSRC Press

Cooper L & Luckett T (2017) Past and present intersections: Legacies of Popular Education in the 1970s and 1980s. In A von Kotze & S Walters (Eds) Forging solidarity: Popular education at work. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers

Cooper L, Harris J & Ralphs A (2017) Recognition of Prior Learning: The tensions between its inclusive intentions and constraints on its implementation. Studies in Continuing Education, 28(3): 1 – 17 Von Kotze A, Ismail S & Cooper L (2016) Social pedagogy in South Africa: Holding the tension between academia and activism. Pedagogía Social. Revista Interuniversitaria, 27: 281-305

Sheri Hamilton is an activist who has been involved in workers’ education for most of her life. She continues to do so through the #OutsourcingMustFall campaign, whose main purpose is to insource workers in private and public institutions through mobilizing, organizing and struggling. She is a lecturer in the Department of Education and Curriculum Studies at the University of Johannesburg. Her recent academic publications include:

Hamilton S (2017) A pedagogy of struggle: #Outsourcingmustfall, In Forging solidarity: Popular education at work. In A von Kotze & S Walters (Eds) Forging solidarity: Popular education at work. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers

Hamilton S (2015) Reclaiming Workers Education. In E Motala & S Vally (Eds) Education, Economy and Society in South Africa. Pretoria: Unisa Press

Hamilton S (2015) Adult Education: Imagining What Might Have Been. South African Labour Bulletin, 89 (4).

Hamilton S (2015) Book Review: Selling Out Education: National Qualification Frameworks and the Neglect of knowledge. Post School Education Review, 1 (3) July.