Feed the People! From Alternative Schools to Anarchist Pedagogies

Nothing Never Happens

What is anarchist pedagogy? What does it have to do with so-called “alternative” schools, where mainstream educational systems often send students they have expelled, suspended, or otherwise excluded? How can working at the intersection of anarchist pedagogical philosophy and marginalized educational spaces open up new layers for how we rearrange power and accountability in learning spaces?

This episode—which features teacher, educational reform leader, and principal Rodney Powell—dives into all of these questions and more.

The term “anarchist pedagogies” is not the first thing that comes to mind when we hear that someone is a high school principal. And yet this is exactly the combination at the center of this episode. Rodney Powell exposes preconceptions not only about this administrative role, but also about what “anarchy” can mean in theory and practice. Powell is the founder of EdArchy.org, described as “a youth development program committed to providing young people with the resources to imagine and create their own community-focused, authentic learning experiences.” He has his feet in two worlds: the traditional school where he pushes, when possible, for more democratic relations with his teaching staff through resistance and revolution (not reform), and the EdArchy program. Given the strictures of traditional educational systems, Powell has imagined this other space to subvert the dominant educational paradigms, where students can practice the student-centered and consented, co-designed, mutually-empowering, dream-incubating, and community-connected learning possibilities of education.

Over his twenty-four years in education, Rodney Powell has led school systems in Baltimore, Hartford, and in his current role as a principal in Danbury Public Schools in Connecticut. A 2023-24 member of the Nelle Mae Foundation Speakers Bureau on racial equity in public education, he is also pursuing his doctorate at Northeastern University. There, as in all his other work, his research focuses on partnering with youth toward greater agency, consent, and justice in learning.