Seeds of Solidarity: Practicing Educational Justice Through a Liberatory Research Methodology

Research on educational justice movements increasingly calls for methodologies that align with the relational and collective nature of organizing work. This article examines The People’s Think Tank for Educational Justice (PTT), a national network of organizers, cultural workers, movement leaders, and scholar-activists representing more than forty community-based organizations whose mission is to build knowledge to strengthen education justice movements. This article describes the participatory research processes the PTT developed to build knowledge about solidarity building within educational justice and allied struggles. Drawing on collaborative methods developed through the PTT, including shared analysis of interviews with frontline organizers, transcribed conversations, and collective reflection across regular convenings and national retreats, we examine how research can function as a space for collective meaning-making. Analysis of multi-year and multi-faceted data collection points reveals that some of the most generative moments of insight emerged not only through formal queries but because of our shared storytelling, interactive gallery and nature walks, and poetry workshops. Our exploration suggests that solidarity building is not simply an outcome of movement research but can emerge as a methodological practice embedded in the research process itself. The PTT offers a way to reimagine research as a transformative function of educational justice that dismantles extractive practices and cultivates justice-oriented forms of collaborative learning.