Prophetic naming as informal adult education

This is an educational ethnography of collective informal learning and education in social movements based on five years of participant observation among Boston's New Majority from 2003-2009. The New Majority is a "movement of movements" and an organization of People of Color in Boston that seek to address an egregious obstacle to democracy: though People of Color are now a majority of the population in Boston, that majority fails to be reflected in many social and political institutions, and in much of the cultural and economic life of the city. People such as those in the New Majority, who organize together to make change in their communities, are also visionary adult education innovators demonstrating that "community is more important to learning than any other method or technique." This ethnography provides a detailed description of prophetic naming, a form of collective informal education found in the New Majority. The main intellectual activity at the heart of prophetic naming--and at the heart of all social movements--is the process of collective identity. In prophetic naming, the process of collective identity can be understood as situated learning in a community of practice. Situated learning in the New Majority community of practice is described through three characteristics: associative life, purpose and values that guide and delimit learning, and the fostering of collective learning through conversation, action and learning strategies. An analytic model for identifying and analyzing radical conversation in social movements is proposed and applied in this study: five interrelated learning tasks that decolonize the imagination.