Plebs,pedagogy,and praxis: Reflections on research at Ruskin College

Abstract

The critical approach to the study of international labour and trade unions, as advocated for and practiced by the Critical Labour Studies network, once had an institutional home at Ruskin College, Oxford. In light of the demise of the International Labour and Trade Union Studies (ILTUS) programme, and Ruskin as an independent home for working-class education, in this article, we – a former student and a former member of teaching staff at Ruskin – argue that Ruskin was a site for the production of ‘really useful knowledge’ for labour and social movements. We conclude with a consideration of the role that the Critical Labour Studies network can play in a radical and collaborative working-class education and research agenda.

Keywords

Ruskin College trade union education trade unions working-class education

Introduction

The marketisation of Higher Education in the United Kingdom (Molesworth et al. 2011; Ross & Savage 2021) has led to descriptions of universities as places of ‘Uberisation’ (Collins et al. 2022) and managerialism where ‘targets and terror [. . .] and total administration’ (McCann et al. 2020: 431) predominate, thus generating questions of what universities are for. The status of industrial relations and labour studies – perhaps especially critical labour studies – within the academy has been framed in terms of crisis and decline (Hodder & Mustchin 2024b: 1; see also Darlington 2009) despite its continued importance and relevance (Hodder & Martinez Lucio 2021; Hodder & Mustchin 2024b; Thomas & Turnbull 2024). Furthermore, the changing nature of the class composition of the student constituency has potential ramifications for theoretical and social contributions to the field (Meardi 2014: 596). Outside of the academy, there is a view that trade union learning programmes apply an instrumental rather than transformational approach to activist and working-class education (McIlroy & Croucher 2009; McIlroy & Croucher 2013).

It is our contention in this article that despite this paradigm, up until 2017 an education which provided a valuable counter-hegemonic and emancipatory alternative to both the neoliberal academy and perfunctory union ‘training’ programmes had an institutional home at Ruskin College, Oxford. This was realised through its emphasis on radical pedagogies and student-centred learning for ‘really useful knowledge’ (Johnson 1979), and a critical approach to the study of international labour and trade unions as advocated by the Critical Labour Studies (CLS) network.

Promoted as ‘the workmen’s university’ into the 1990s (Kean 1996: 212), Ruskin was a unique and ambivalent institution – juxtaposed between its academic relationship to Oxford University and its historical links to working-class radicalism and socialist movements. It was founded in 1899 by Charles Beard, an American historian who had studied at Oxford University, and Walter and Anne Vrooman, liberal American philanthropist educationalists who sought to provide an alternative education for working-class people, a place where students would come ‘not as mendicant pilgrims went to Jerusalem, to worship at her ancient shrines and marvel at her sacred relics, but as Paul went to Rome, to conquer in a battle of ideas’ (Kean 2010: 30). The principle was to provide an education which was metamorphic, but not just for the student: Vrooman said the aim was to ‘take men who have been merely condemning our institutions and [. . .] teach them how, instead, to transform them’ (Lightfoot 2019).

From its inception, Ruskin has always been a site of contestation (see Andrews et al. 1999; Gentry 2013; Kean 1996; Phillips & Putnam 1980) especially in relation to ‘the independence or incorporation of the working class . . . [and] different definitions of “really useful knowledge”’ (Thompson 1999: 125). This is perhaps best articulated and known by the Plebs League strike early in the development of Ruskin College. Workers who were often already engaged with the radical working-class education movement from industrial unionists, syndicalists and other revolutionary and socialist organisations such as the Social Democratic Foundation (SDF), the Socialist League, the Independent Labour Party and the Socialist Labour Party (see Fieldhouse 1999) at that time formed the Plebs League at Ruskin in 1908 and began to organise for greater democratic control over course content and of the college more broadly. As one of the economic tutors at the time reported to the college governors: ‘the students all with one voice chose Karl Marx, Karl Marx and nothing but Karl Marx would please them [. . .] This sort of thing could not go on’ (Phillips & Putnam 1980: 22). When the Head, Dennis Hird – an Oxford graduate and prior member of the SDF himself (Waugh 2009: 5) was sacked, they struck in his defence, demanding the severing of Ruskin’s relationship to Oxford University, and instead to strengthen the links between Ruskin and the labour movement (Gentry 2013; Miles 1984). (See also Waugh 2009 for a full account of the Plebs League and development of the labour colleges.)

While the Plebs strike ‘lost’ on its own terms (Kean 1996), it did result in fundamental changes which ‘provided the basis of Ruskin’s structure and work’, for the subsequent decades (Pollins 1984: 23). Namely, the new Governing Council consisted solely of representatives from the Trades Union Congress, the General Federation of Trade Unions and others, which strengthened Ruskin’s relationship with the organised labour movement and was responsible for the majority of its funding; the remainder came from Department of Education or Local Education Authority grants (Gentry 2013: 190). Regrettably, Ruskin College was not immune to cuts to these grants over subsequent decades, and to Further and Higher Education funding more widely, and the pressures of the market (Hughes 1995). Bryant (1999) has detailed extensively how policies of successive governments had a detrimental effect on Ruskin’s ability to provide adult education. However, this perhaps economically deterministic narrative obscures the more complicated and contested Ruskin story.

An article in The Guardian (Lightfoot 2019) enquired whether Ruskin had ‘lost its way’, prompted by the destruction of Ruskin’s archives (see The Guardian 2012; Kean 2012) and the closure of the ILTUS courses, which drew condemnation from academics, alumni, and activists, as expressed and documented in a letter to The Guardian we wrote and coordinated at the time (The Guardian 2017). In 2021, Ruskin accounts revealed it was not operating as an ongoing concern and there were ‘inadequate resources to continue in operational existence for the foreseeable future’ (Whieldon 2021). In August of that year, Ruskin merged with the University of West London and lost its status as an independent institution (Rice 2021). There is a wider debate to be had about the internal and external political context of Ruskin’s demise, but regrettably that is outside of the scope of this article.

Instead, here we – two former Ruskin students, one of whom also taught at Ruskin – aim to provide an ‘insider’ account of our time at this unique institution and describe what an attempt at radical pedagogy and research agenda can look like in practice. As both researchers and trade unionists who are part of the CLS network, while we appreciate and align ourselves with those colleagues engaged in radical and collaborative research and in developing ‘counter languages’ (McCann et al. 2020: 447) from within the academy, here our focus is on what took place in the ‘academy-adjacent’ Ruskin College. By doing so we attempt to relocate and integrate Ruskin and its direct and indirect effects on the labour movement into the industrial relations literature. Extant research on Ruskin is either historical in nature, or is situated within the field of education studies, perhaps indicative of the neglect in the trade union renewal and industrial relations literature more broadly of the ‘conscious appreciation of the intellectual life of activism in aiding strategy’ (Manborde 2019: 96) (see also Croucher & Wood 2017; Lévesque & Murray 2010). We assert that the education, research, and intellectual labour conducted at Ruskin warrants a place within the overall union renewal project and its debates in the associated literature. Ruskin gave a practical example of a model of pedagogical practice for labour, social, and other allied working-class movements who are best placed to rise to these challenges. In this sense we are proud to uphold the legacy of Ruskin College History tutor Raphael Samuel in his approach to historical interpretation and the generation of ‘really useful knowledge’ by those at the heart of movements they build and sustain (Samuel 2024; Scott-Brown 2017).

The collective experience: pedagogy and praxis

In the following sections we detail the pedagogical methods that were used throughout the ILTUS programmes, focusing on the curriculum and the learner-centred teaching methodologies grounded in the iterative processes of critically reflexive practice.

The MA ILTUS programme started in 2010, a continuation of a tradition articulated by the Principal of Ruskin College from 1979 to 1989, John Hughes, as providing the institutional and intellectual base to enable organised labour to generate the philosophy and strategy to respond to ‘the conditions for change’ (Hughes 1984). As Principal during the era that ushered in the deep, structural changes that precipitated the onset of trade union decline, Hughes bolstered the role of the College in providing the critical research function of organised labour when he established the Trade Union Research Unit (TURU). While the TURU excelled at, for example, supporting the then Transport & General Workers Union to prepare its annual pay claim in the Ford Motor Company bargaining round (Haffner 1979), the Unit was premised on the basis that it would draw upon the knowledge and experience of trade unionists as ‘activist researchers’ to provide the rigour and authenticity of its research output. The initiative sought to demonstrate that knowledge produced by activists from their localised perspectives within a capitalist economy were as valuable as that produced through conventional means in traditional scholarly settings. The staff of TURU, working with a network of College associates and supporters across the trade union movement, went on to create the ILTUS programme reflective of this tradition and as a means to structure a pathway between its significant trade union educational activity and an undergraduate programme; from 2010, the MA.

The MA programme

consciously sought to generate a new layer of activist-scholars willing, in the Gramscian war of position, to take on notional and literal roles of leadership across the labour movement and civil society [. . .] with attention to praxis generating from research, and understanding to aid [union] renewal. (Manborde 2019: 103)

The course consisted of a 2-year residential learning programme, during which students were exposed to a variety of academic research from the CLS network and beyond. The underpinning features of the pedagogic approach were premised upon critical thinking, epistemology, research methods, and feminist approaches to social science. Module reading lists were co-produced in order that, while there was a focus upon classic industrial relations texts and historical and sociological scholarship (e.g. Davis 2009; Hyman 1971), there was an accent upon a Gramscian practice of accommodating student perspectives and interests across the broad, international field of emerging material, both questioning and uncovering evidence of trade union renewal (e.g. Ledwith & Hansen 2013; Lopez 2004).

The MA programme rested on two core internationally comparative foci:

The dominant, existing, and emerging threats to organised labour, and an appreciation for the prevailing and evolving changes to the nature and organisation of work and employment.

The capacity, culture and dynamics of organised labour globally to respond to those challenges.

The radical pedagogical Freirean (Freire 1970, 1976) approach of the MA in exploring the above featured heavily on counter-hegemonic critiques of trade unionism – not just the authority and power relations inherent in the means of production, but the authority and power structures within the labour movement institutions the student body was drawn from. As such, students of the programme were driven to gain a renewed sense of identity, agency and consciousness of their role within organised labour, and of their capacity to drive change through praxis as ‘renewal actors’ (Manborde 2019).

It was emphasised from the start that students were now part of an academic community. Ruskin was an associate member of the Global Labour University, a network of other labour studies institutions around the world. Ruskin was also an associate member of Oxford University, and on the first residential weekend students were obliged to take part in a rather archaic ritual of being ‘sworn in’ to the Bodleian Library (2010), pledging an oath to, among other things, not ‘kindle therein any fire or flame’. In the classroom, however, it was reiterated that this new academic community was non-hierarchal and that students and teachers learn from each other: ‘every teacher is always a pupil and every pupil a teacher’ (Gramsci 1971: 350). As two of the course teachers reflected, ‘It is from this starting point that we are able to build relationships with our students, and undertake a process of mutual learning and development, clearly rooted in a shared agenda of change and transformation’ (Porter & Walsh 2019: 117).

Ruskin was host to the CLS symposium from 2013, with students becoming part of the network and encouraged to participate and receive feedback on their research plans. CLS academics assumed the role of external research supervisors – supporting, encouraging, and mentoring, and students were also encouraged to participate in continuous peer review, reading and commenting on each other’s work. There was a demonstrable and intentional synergy between what was being studied and its real-life implications – for example, when studying research on the seminal Justice for Janitors campaign in the United States (e.g. Erickson et al. 2002), two students, both migrant workers themselves, would contribute to discussions with insights gained from their involvement in the creation of migrant worker networks and organising projects in their respective unions (Ciupijus et al. 2020; Fitzgerald & Hardy 2010). Debates on trade union bureaucracy and democracy (e.g. Darlington & Upchurch 2012; Fairbrother 1984; Hyman 1971, 1975) provided a theoretical basis for those students who were engaged in projects to democratise their unions through rank-and-file networks in the civil service (CSRF 2012), or who were supporting the development of new labour organisations that had formed as a reaction to entrenched bureaucracies (Smith 2022). This aspect was further complemented by guest seminars delivered by Ruskin alumni (e.g. Keenan 2015). This evidenced praxis was an inspirational pedagogical tool, which further contributed to the processes of confidence-building that Ruskin tutors engaged in, which was an explicit and fundamental part of their theoretical approach.

Gramsci’s understanding of praxis has been fundamental to the approach we have taken to learning, challenging the privilege that has emerged in knowledge based on assumptions of expertise [. . .] for us it has always been important to enable people to connect what they know from their life experience with a consciousness of this as knowledge and expertise. For us it is important that people know that they know [. . .] This is what Choudry (2015) has called the ‘social character of all knowledge production’. (Porter & Walsh 2019: 114)

These open sessions with alumni, often attended by the wider Ruskin student body drawn from social work, history, or politics courses, would take place on a Saturday night after eating a meal together, and debates and discussion would continue in the canteen or the pub in the village. The residential aspect of the programme, where students would stay for long weekends in Ruskin’s Arcadian grounds, contributed to and nurtured the feeling that this was a community of practice, highlighting the importance of the social dimension of transformative learning. The opportunity for situated learning (Lave 1996; Lave & Wenger 1991) references a given space or site as a point for engagement in identified activities but more importantly, the sharing of this experience as intrinsic and essential to the process of learning and the creation of communities of practice. Such an appreciation of a site of situated, critically reflective learning exemplifies Bourdieu’s (1984, 1986) theory of habitus and an understanding of how identity and learning is reinforced through extended periods of socialisation (Ollis 2012). Thus, Ruskin acted as a place of critical reflection and analysis of movement practice – an essential space to afford independent critique of individual and collective effort and enabling the nexus between research and practice. The research element will be discussed in the next section.

Participatory action research (PAR) for the course

The second year of the programme further developed its leitmotif – trade union renewal – in a real and practical sense. Students’ assigned work for assessment was the design and execution of their own research. The question of what we were organising for (Simms & Holgate 2010) was for students to determine. This was illustrative of Ruskin’s multi-faceted approach to education in terms of the synergy between democratised pedagogic methods and also an appreciation of trade unions as revolutionary ‘schools’ of and for the working-class (Draper 1978). As Choudry (2020) explains,

The intellectual and educational aspects of organising for change include intentional, explicit, programmatic educational activities within activist and social movement spaces, as well as multiple forms of incidental, informal learning that are not always obviously linked to learning, embedded as they are in a host of activities including the often mundane but vital tasks in the hard grind of organising work. (p. 32)

In this way, as Porter and Walsh (2019) – both previous ILTUS teachers – confirm, the purpose of assigning this research was to locate

the experience of activism itself as a site of learning and knowledge [. . .] in the ILTUS programmes students were supported to build on the idea of the ‘radical intellectual’ and the role of the activist in opening the horizons of knowledge and understanding – for example, the relational knowledge of and with people and communities which often lies at the centre of successful organising strategies. (p. 117)

The very act of deciding on the focus of their research put unions and their practices into question and prompted critical and existential questions about students’ own trade union ‘work’: Were their organising strategies working? Could they be done differently and how? How is success measured? Could organising be made more inclusive and democratic, and what are meant by those terms?

Examples of the types of research conducted among this specific cohort included (among others): how best to organise privatised call centre workers in precarious employment; black female representation within a public sector union; two migrant worker organising initiatives; fighting the impact of austerity in a public sector union; the development of a rank and file network campaigning against union victimisation; and an ethnographic account of a workplace ‘sit-in’ and industrial action campaign.

Stewart and Martinez Lucio advance the view that participatory action research (PAR) comprises a spectrum ‘running from the formally engaged research participant (subject) deliberating research results, to the other end [. . .] on which “subjects” are full participants deciding not only how and who does the research but why’ (Stewart & Martinez Lucio 2017: 538). There are of course issues associated with PAR in one’s own organisation (see Huzzard and Bjorkman 2012 for a discussion) and these need to be navigated carefully, but for the most part, the institutional context in which students’ research took place was key and highlights the unique importance of Ruskin in that it permitted an engagement with research which could overcome some of the inherent issues associated with conducting PAR within the confines of the neoliberal university and its institutional restraints (Stewart & Martinez Lucio 2017).

Brook and Darlington (2013), in their call for an organic public sociology of work, argue that to be ‘organic’ is determined by the extent to which ‘the researcher is organically pre-connected, such as being an established activist, having a prior research relationship or a history of related interventions and valued publications whereby their politics and affiliations are already known’ (p. 239). Ruskin students were uniquely placed to engage in PAR or other forms of action research (Reason & Bradbury 2008) and create organisational and social change with agents rather than for them (Freire 1970: 30) because of their own positionality as a legitimate member of the community (union/social movement) under study in a way which was axiomatic, without the issues of extractive research or legitimacy that researchers within the academy can wrestle with. Furthermore, as Thomas and Turnbull (2023: 707) highlight, the ‘emancipatory partisan’ must first invest considerable time in developing a relationship and trust with participants whereas for Ruskin students this was (in most cases) implicitly accorded. The time and space accorded at Ruskin for research in students’ own organisations permitted the type of ‘slow’ immersive research which allows for deep knowledge claims (Almond & Connolly 2020). Indeed, in terms of its credibility and legitimacy ‘such knowledge and experience are at the very heart of PAR, where the more important test of knowledge is practical adequacy rather than peer review, as knowing is more valuable when it is enacted’ (Thomas & Turnbull 2023: 708). The ‘Ruskin’ approach to research exemplified genuinely collaborative and democratised relations: ‘an equalizing [of] the research relationship – doing research “with” instead of “on”’ (Pillow 2003: 6).

At its simplest, the MA curriculum was designed to enable students to draw on their experiences of trade unionism and to examine the topic of union renewal from both internal and external perspectives. In combining radical and feminist research approaches, students were tasked with applying materialist critiques to determine how and whether, through ongoing relations of power, systems of oppression or exploitation were as prevalent within labour movements as without. It is through that critical interrogation of social worlds that students were encouraged to pursue activist theories of renewal. They would produce what we would contend is a form of oppositional knowledge, enabling them to consider their own roles in deploying this through praxis, and in doing so develop Freire’s (1976) discipline of conscientisação. It was through this process that the MA sought to create a new tier of activist scholars capable of generating new theory and practice to support renewal.

What is to be done?

In 1908, the Liberal government produced a report which Ruskin College participated in, called ‘Oxford and Working-Class Education’, which considered the role of higher education in the education of the working class. Fieldhouse’s (1999) thesis is that its purpose was to quell revolutionary tendencies within the active and widespread independent working-class education movement and labour colleges at that time and instead equip workers with the education and ‘knowledge’ to choose a pluralist life of industrial peace and social harmony. Yet, even within this context, a premise of the report ‘was that working class students should not be educated to abandon their class or escape from it, but “should remain in it and raise its whole level”’ (Fieldhouse 1999: 51). While Fieldhouse believes this meant an indoctrination into the labour aristocracy, the sentiment bears a remarkable similarity to the old labour movement adage expressing political opposition to the notion of social mobility: ‘rise with your class, not out of it’, attributed to the Red Clydeside activist, Scottish Labour College founder, and Marxist educator John Maclean (see Humes 2018 for a discussion of his contribution to working-class education). Most Ruskin students had experienced marginalisation in the labour market and/or the education system (Bryant 1999; Hughes 1995), yet the purpose of the ILTUS courses at Ruskin was not for individualised advancement (nor as training for the labour aristocracy): Ruskin provided a synergy and complex interplay between advancement in self-confidence and identity empowerment but which could only have been achieved through its collective realisation. Students have been shaped and informed by the ‘Ruskin experience’ (Thompson 1999) and what education and meaningful engaged research can ‘do’: ‘the sense of legitimacy and confidence that comes with academic achievement enables our students to take their place as change agents within their own movements, who can build the strength of their movement and its role in changing the landscape of rights and dignity for workers’ (Porter & Walsh 2019: 123–124).

The personal and political transformations that Ruskin facilitated can be profound, yet difficult to quantify. The Ruskin experience ‘was one that expressed a renewal of confidence, identity, and consciousness gained through radical pedagogy, and expressed through praxis’ (Manborde 2019: 100) and which has informed academic and activist lives. One of Ruskin’s important contributions was to provide a space which facilitated not just learning through academic and written material, but through embodied experiences of activism. It was a place to deeply consider, from an individual and collective standpoint through participation and dialogue, ‘not only what trade unions are, but what they might become, and how’ (Hyman 2001: 225).

Ruskin was a site of independent working-class education which privileged knowledge production obtained through a dialectical and organic relationship with social and labour movements (Thompson 1999), and the lack of similar critical independent spaces and possibilities for worker education and researcher/activist networks continues to be a politically contested terrain and an inhibitor to genuinely collaborative research. As Croucher and Wood (2017) argue, ‘Activists need equivalent sites where their background ideational capacities may be developed and, crucially, where collective interests may also be freely defined by participants, and appropriate action planned. There is, in short, a need to revive independent workers’ education’ (p. 1018). We contend that as in the old SDF adage ‘educate, agitate, organise’, the ‘educate’ aspect – overlooked in the union renewal literature (Manborde 2019; Smith 2022) needs a revitalisation. We acknowledge this is an ambitious aim and draw attention to the extant efforts of colleagues collectively deliberating what that can look like (Ella Baker Organising 2024; Noble & Ross 2019; Porter & Walsh 2019).

Furthermore, what can a participatory and emancipatory research agenda look like? What are the possibilities for the ‘feasibility and desirability of a left-radical organic public sociology of work in which the researcher is overtly partisan and active on the side of the marginalized and labour’ (Brook & Darlington 2013: 233)? Hedges (2020) has demonstrated the range of creative and socially useful teaching and research that can be produced when not constrained by academic labour, and the contributions in this CLS issue of Capital and Class illustrate what can be done internationally still from within the academy. Recent, genuinely collaborative research in the United Kingdom, such as that conducted by Griffin (2023) used methodologies such as archival research, storytelling and oral histories which unearthed and developed the gently radical potential and cultures of solidarity within ‘non-movement’ spaces, in this case unemployed worker centres. Hodder and Mustchin (2024a) collaborated with the organisers of the activist-led Strike Map website to painstakingly use their crowdsourced data from workers and trade unionists reporting their own industrial action to produce a report on the 2023 strike wave. In addition, the workers’ enquiry tradition can demonstrate democratic, embedded, and emancipatory engagement at the micro level (Woodcock 2014) and Thomas and Turnbull (2023) provide an illustrative example at the macro level, but as they argue PAR is not a panacea. Furthermore, the aforementioned research is across a variety of disciplines, illustrating that CLS is a tradition without a ‘home’ both intellectually and institutionally. Nevertheless, we conclude with the sentiments of Katherine Hughes, who was the co-ordinator of the Ruskin Learning Project:

In the present climate of reaction [. . .] it is perhaps more vital than ever to do our utmost to keep radical adult education alive, to live within the cracks in the system, to challenge the ‘new realism’ at every opportunity and be part of the process of a regeneration of socialist ideas and practices which will surely come. (Hughes 1995: 109)

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Holly Smith

Author biographies

Dr Holly Smith is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Work and Equalities Institute, University of Manchester. Her current research explores trade union activism in the caring and creative industries. She graduated from Ruskin College in 2014 with an MA in International Labour and Trade Union Studies.

Dr Ian Manborde is Midlands regional official for Equity, the performing arts and entertainment trade union. Ian has spent his working life as an educator in the UK trade union movement and was programme co-ordinator of the MA International Labour and Trade Union Studies at Ruskin College 2010-2017.

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