26.021 - Community Resistance to School Closings: Defending Public Education in Chile and Chicago

Session Type: Working Group Roundtable

Abstract

The school closing process has been identified as a neoliberal policy that undermines public education around the world. This Working Group Roundtable is focused on how communities have experienced and resisted the school closing process in Chicago and Chile. Communities in these areas have experienced this phenomenon as an imposition. In articulation with the student social movement and other community activists, they have fought against these policies to defend “their right to the city,” and their right to education, using schools as spaces of resistance and social articulation. This Working Group Roundtable can initiate an international comparative research team to analyze the larger social processes of neoliberalization and relative resistance experiences, in order to promote and protect public education.

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies / Division B - Section 4: Spatial Justice: Youth, Community Activism and Ecologies

Chair

• Rhoda Rae Gutierrez, University of Illinois at Chicago

Papers

• A Chicagoan–Chilean Laboratory of Educational Policies: Rising and Social Resistance - Jorge Luis Inzunza, Delavan Darien School District

• School Closings in Chicago: Learning From and With Parents and Community Members - Pauline Lipman, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Rural School Closing in Chile - Carmen Gloria Nunez, The Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaiso

• Parents' Defense of Their Children's Right to Education: Resistance Against School Closings in Chile - Mauricio Pino-Yancovic, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso