Learning Work Group at Decolonize/Occupy Seattle

Learning Tent Manifesto

The Learning Tent at Decolonize/Occupy Seattle began with the desire to deeply and critically reexamine our behaviors and assumptions, from a space of love and a space of hate. We love the community and its whole, recognizing that capitalism is an isolating force and challenging its logic of competition and divisiveness with the transformative power of community. Frequently we descend into debates where the goal is to win, rather than to communicate. Fighting oppression entails building solidarity through dialogue. Each of us has things to learn and things to share. Instead of reinforcing the privilege of dominant narratives, which appear from a rich, white, cissexist, male perspective, we seek to make room for liberatory education. Liberatory education means not shying away from difficult, politically charged conversations. It means making room for others to change their minds. It means critically re-evaluating our own behaviors and changing our minds. As students, activists, and workers, we understand that we exist not only as thinking and feeling human beings but as individuals categorized and differentially affected by our respective races, genders, sexualities, ages, and physical/mental abilities. In order to provide supportive space for our siblings and friends, we seek to learn about and examine the networked systems of oppression that alienate us from each other. We seek to make all forms of knowledge--physical, experiential, intellectual, artistic--comingle. We want to deprivilege school learning, which is so often hierarchical and unidirectional.