Rethinking schools: transformative hope and utopian possibility

This paper explores the work of Rethinking Schools (RS). RS is at one and the same time a grassroots movement of teacher-activists, a quarterly journal and a publishing house. For almost four decades the movement has sought to enact Freirean-inspired curricular/pedagogical initiatives within US public schooling. What makes the work of RS significant is the way it connects critical pedagogy to specific examples of concrete practice. Of particular interest is the explicitly utopian dimension to the work of the movement. Underpinning all the curriculum materials, resources, lesson plans, reading lists, and pedagogical strategies is a desire to provide children and young people with an opportunity to flex their utopian imaginations. As yet, little academic attention has been paid to Rethinking Schools. Indeed, not a single journal article has been written by anyone outside the movement itself. I seek to rectify this in the current paper. Drawing on Freirean theory to reflect on the practice of the movement, the paper highlights the ways in which RS finds utopian possibility blooming in that most unpromising of grounds—public schooling. While the context for utopian praxis feels unpropitious to say the least, Rethinking Schools offers a corrective to doom-laden assessments of the scope for radical pedagogical initiatives within public schooling, not only in the US but more widely too.