The Pedagogy of Action: Small Axe Fall Big Tree: Neighborhoods, Communities, and Urban Marginality

This is the story of teaching consciousness as a requirement for transformations in social justice. In artful narrative, Nesha Haniff traces her own conscientization as a colonized child in Guyana, exploring the cultural and intellectual forces that shape the creation of the Pedagogy of Action. Drawing from Paulo Freire and Ela Bhatt, participants in POA teach an oral HIV education module to marginalized communities in the USA, South Africa and the Caribbean, as the nexus for dismantling traditional pedagogies of race, gender, service and American hegemony. The many challenges of institutional and cultural obstacles, mainly those that excluded poor and black students from overseas travel, required innovation and persistence. The book features essays written by POA students and South African participants reflecting on their own transformations. These essayists are among the hundreds of participants who, over 15 years, in the practice of radical love, grew the Pedagogy of Action.

Winner of the 2023 IARSLCE Publication of the Year Award.