Organizing Against the Neo-Liberal Privatization of Education In South Los Angeles Reflections On the Transformative Potential of

PEDAGOGY it takes place within collective, grassroots spaces. My attempt is to expand on the burgeoning public pedagogy research that has documented how public spaces mediate pedagogical processes that are themselves political strategies of community resistance and struggle (see Brady, 2006; O’Malley & Roseboro, 2010; Roseboro, O’Malley, and Hunt, 2006). Thus, I build upon the conception of public pedagogy as a rich, nuanced, yet contested “organizing framework ” (Sandlin, Schultz, & Burdick, 2010) for understanding pedagogical processes outside formal educational sites, a project that de-centers cognitivist notions of “pedagogy ” (Ellsworth, 2005) and problematizing “the public ” and “public space ” (Savage, 2010). In their review of the literature on public pedagogy, Sandlin, O’Malley, and Burdick (2011) identify several tensions that are a resource for enriching, conceptually, what we mean by public pedagogy. First, a clearer articulation is needed with respect to the theories (and politics) that inform the public pedagogies we enact, document, reflect upon, and investigate. Second, existing public pedagogy scholarship can be strengthened by studies that demonstrate, theorize, and unpack how various non-institutional sites function as pedagogy. This latter concern is, as I see it, a question of pedagogical mediation. In the ensuing reflection, I invite readers to inquire how the set of experiences within the grassroots campaign against the privatization of a public elementary school in South Los Angeles are mediated and mediate a critical, political and social consciousness among its participants. Rather than define the set of practices within the campaign as instances of public pedagogy, I argue that an investigation of the pedagogical T Zavala w Organizing Against the Neo-liberal Privatization of Educatio