Kneeling with the People: Lessons from “Take a Knee” about Social Justice Pedagogy, Learning, and Movement in a Celebrity Culture

Kaela Jubas, University of Calgary

Abstract

In this presentation, Kaela explores Take a Knee as a site of social activism and adult learning about race relations. Take a Knee began in the US in August 2016 when National Football League quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt on the field for the playing of the national anthem. In tracing the development of Take a Knee, Kaela uses a model developed by Dykstra and Law (1994) to confirm that Take a Knee grew from the protest of one player against police killings of African American boys and men into a full-fledged social movement. That movement illustrates Dykstra and Law’s three “systematically interrelated” elements of “vision, critical pedagogy, and pedagogy of mobilisation” (p. 123). In the reverse, Take a Knee is used to test the ongoing utility of that model, developed some 25 years ago, but distinctive for its grounding in the field of adult education. Despite the model’s continued potential, it can be enhanced through recognition of education’s multidimensionality and the pedagogue as learner. In closing, Kaela considers how societal shifts since 1994, notably the emergence of a celebrity culture, might account for the changing role of celebrities in social movements or “movement celebrities.” The possibility of what she refers to as a “celebrity movement” is evident not only in Take a Knee, but also in the feminist Me Too/Time’s Up movements that she is studying with colleagues Christine Jarvis and Grainne McMahon, based at University of Huddersfield.

Biography

Kaela is an Associate Professor in Adult Learning at the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Canada and a past co-president of the Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education. Her research focuses on three areas that sometimes overlap and other times remain separate: popular culture and public pedagogies, social movement learning, and work-related learning. Those interests grow out of previous employment with community-based not-for-profit organizations, as well as an interdisciplinary educational background. Current or recent projects include an exploration of faculty members’ and female students’ learning about and response to the #MeToo movement (funded by a Werklund School of Education Outbound Fellowship, with co-investigators Drs. Christine Jarvis and Grainne McMahon), a qualitative multi-case study about learning impacts of popular culture in professional education (funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada), and an investigation of how LGBT and ally faculty, staff, and students encounter and make sense of coinciding discourses of equity and internationalization (funded by U of C). That work is discussed in her books Equity and Internationalization on Campus: Intersecting or Colliding Discourses for LGBTQ People? (2018, Brill | Sense), Popular Culture as Pedagogy: Research in the Field of Adult Education (2015, co-edited, Sense Publishing), and The Politics of Shopping: What Consumers Learn about Identity, Globalization, and Social Change (2010, Routledge).

A joint event with HHS Centre for Citizenship, Conflict, Identity and Diversity and HUDCRES

Part of the Huddersfield Centre for Research in Education and Society (HudCRES) events.

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