The Anarchist Pedagogies Collective (APC) is a digital meeting place that promotes anarchist pedagogical practices based on the principles of freedom, collective self-organisation, and mutual aid. We seek to create a space where people can exchange ideas and experiences, share resources, and promote events associated with anarchist practices across borders and languages. We support people in building spaces that enable them to practice collective self-organisation and individual learning while growing local and international relationships. Our intention is to expand alternatives as part of a larger liberatory framework with the goal of abolishing formal education systems. These systems are both part of and reproduce globalised neoliberalism and free-market capitalism.

We are committed to:

  • Creating a space that actively includes and platforms voices that are commonly overlooked, frequently devalued, and oppressed. This includes providing support for informal and loosely structured learning spaces as well as structured learning. As part of this, we also acknowledge and critique extractive practices around knowledge and commit to working towards learning among ourselves and with others.
  • Having zero tolerance for bigotry of any kind and continuing to unlearn internalised bigotries as a result of our upbringing. This includes reflecting upon the harm that we’ve enacted (intentional or otherwise) through the systems and cultures we exist within. Explicit in this is a recognition of adultism and adult supremacy as serious oppressions that must be resisted.
  • Building a range of learning spaces that are both accessible to and organised by people of all ages. We believe that intergenerational learning is important as it helps us to develop deeper and more sustainable connections.
  • Bringing together both practical experience and theoretical knowledge, building a space that helps focus on the multiple needs that come with people existing in different geographic locations and within different cultures. 
  • Refusing to create hierarchies of knowledge and valuing different experiences and expertise. We seek to relate horizontally to each other, recognizing that all of us have both things to learn and share.
  • Actively working towards becoming a supportive activist space while refusing to become an academic one. Academia has its own oppressive structures, and it is not possible to “decolonise” an institution that was built to further settler colonialism and imperialism. Liberatory solutions cannot be found in academia, as the overwhelming majority of them require that academia be dismantled in the same way as the compulsory school system. This does not mean that we hold an inherent disdain for people within compulsory school and academic systems, but it does mean that we do not view their experiences and knowledge as being more important or above those of others.
  • Committing to a focus on practice by creating spaces in which we can exist and learn as anarchists. We cannot be anarchists without direct action. If someone only has an academic or theoretical understanding of anarchism, they have an incomplete and detached view of anarchism.