Student Solidarity as Praxis: Popular Education in Action with Tony Nelson

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“I don’t understand anyone who thinks they can educate without loving their students. And I don’t see any students developing respect for any educators or administrators who cannot very clearly demonstrate that they love them.”

“I want people that I meet that are interested in social justice to know this is a long-term and for a long-term struggle and for you to be able to do it sustainably, you’ve got to be savvy and strategic because the forces working against us are extremely well funded and savvy and strategic.”–Tony Nelson

In this episode of Social Justice Origin Stories, Relando is joined by Tony Nelson, who explores his development from his rural Michigan upbringing to becoming an active participant in progressive movements and education. Tony revisits the significance of his time as an undergraduate student at Grand Valley State University, recalling how attending a campus presentation by Jane Elliott served as a starting point for his emerging consciousness and involvement as a student on campus. Tony also reflects on his years of work at the intersections of social justice, higher education, and the study abroad field, and his regular disappointment in top-down faculty and administrator relationship dynamics with students as an important turning point in his development, motivating him to think of ways he could influence educators and administrators to relate to students differently.

Tony shares that traditional education models are not liberating and don’t do a good job of creating critical consciousness, and Popular Education provides many tools for rethinking how we approach teaching and learning.

Meet Tony

I’ve never written something like this before, but I appreciate the opportunity.

I grew up in very small, conservative, rural areas of Michigan. However, I was lucky to have parents and grandparents that grew up in Grand Rapids and who never said explicitly racist comments. By my senior year in high school, I was determined to follow in the footsteps of many men in our family and go into the military or law enforcement. It was at the behest of my dad and aunt to “just try college” that I decided to apply to one school – Grand Valley State University.

During GVSU’s opening move-in weekend, I attended a presentation by Jane Elliott with hundreds of other first-year students and where she screened a part of her “Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes” documentary and spent the rest of the time excoriating the ills of racism and discrimination while showing us it was possible to confront and heal from. That presentation in 1998 continues to be a base for me as to what we can and should do to upset systems of domination in our societies.

The rest of my undergraduate years were spent getting very involved on campus with housing (as a Resident Assistant, then a Multicultural Assistant), student activism with Students Against Sweatshops (SAS), and developing friendships with fellow students that were Alphas, AKAs, and Deltas. I also did short-term study abroad programs in China & Costa Rica, then spent a very influential semester in Mexico studying Social Justice and Grassroots Development in Oaxaca, then Chiapas, Mexico.

During undergrad, then for 4 years after, I worked for the TRiO Upward Bound program at GVSU, where I worked closely with students and staff that believed in the transformative power of education and applied that philosophy to working with students from local Grand Rapids and East Kentwood high schools. Alongside that role, I also was a community organizer in GR and Muskegon fighting for immigrant rights to health care and driver’s licenses. During this period, I also worked for almost two years as the assistant director to a prison education program called the Working Classics Leadership Program at the Muskegon Correctional Facility. This program had ground-shifting impacts on my understanding of our carceral system as well as deepening my belief in the power of education. We recently held our first reunion with five of the men that graduated from our program and it was incredibly meaningful to reconnect and hear how they have been doing.

Accompanying all-star professors to teach their subjects in the prison ended up being what convinced me to go to grad school. One professor in particular asked me after class one night, “You seem to really enjoy learning and thinking about complex issues, you know that’s what grad school is all about, right?” This conversation led to me going to Syracuse for grad school to study how torture during the “War on Terror” was being normalized through a variety of communicative methods (news, presidential speeches, a TV series, and legal memos).

While nearing the end of grad school, a friend told me that the Mexico Solidarity Network was hiring and I applied with gusto. I had been an admirer of their politics and mission for many years and the thought of being able to contribute to their project in some way was meaningful and exciting. I landed in Albany Park, Chicago in August of 2009 to work with them and spent almost eight years running social justice-focused programs in Chiapas, Tlaxcala, and Mexico City, Mexico as well as touring the US with Mexican activist/organizers to talk about their powerful movements.

Since leaving that organization (though I am still on the board and collaborate on a voluntary basis), I have held two more positions in the international education field – one at Kalamazoo College and now remotely with CET Academic Programs (based in DC).

Connect with Tony on LinkedIn

Name Drops, References, and Resources from Tony

Mexican social movements, Zapatismo, Paulo Freire, bell hooks, TRiO Upward Bound, community organizing experiences in Midwest Michigan and Chicago, Mia Henry (friend & mentor), Dr. Paul Hernandez (author of “Pedagogy of Real Talk”), Ritu Bhasin (author & speaker “Authenticity Principle”) & the FrayBa Human Rights Center (Chiapas, Mexico).

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Social Justice Origin Stories is produced, edited, and hosted by Relando Thompkins-Jones