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This chapter builds on and extends previous definitions of ‘alternative education’. By drawing directly upon the views of educators and learners involved in alternative learning spaces, a key spatial frame of reference is introduced: connection/disconnection. The chapter considers diverse ways which organisations and individuals position themselves in respect of the mainstream: from how alternative educators ‘distance’ themselves from the mainstream schools, to how they try to relate to local communities and policy-makers. The positioning of ‘alternative’ learning spaces is often multiple and shifting, incorporating many kinds of connection and disconnection. The chapter concludes by arguing that it is sensible to understand these multiple forms of connection and disconnection as the first of several versions of autonomy that, as suggested throughout the book, should be an important way to theorise the geographies of alternative education.

This chapter introduces the key conceptual frameworks that are deployed and developed in the book. It begins by situating the book within recent geographies of education and childhood, sub-disciplinary concerns that form the immediate context for this book and my own research. It then highlights three theoretical strands that inform the analysis and which each defy simple labels: ‘radical’ theories of education, informal education, and alternative education; diverse economic and autonomous geographies; nonrepresentational geographies and the politics of life-itself. Cross-reference to longer-standing work on sociologies of education and education studies is also made throughout this chapter. Attention is also paid to critiques of ‘radical’ and alternative education approaches.

This chapter introduces the main arguments and structure of the book. It sets out a broad definition of ‘alternative education’. It maps some of the social, economic and political contexts in which alternative education takes place, and especially trends in UK education policy-making. The chapter also provides an introduction to the theoretical frameworks employed in the book, before discussing the author's methodology and choice of case studies.

Chapter Three narrates the survival schools’ first unstable years and their achievement of relative stability in 1975. Then it describes and analyzes the schools’ academic structure, governance, learning environment, and relationships among staff members, students, and their families from 1972-1982. The chapter compares these aspects of survival school education to other Indian and alternative schools in this period and examines the challenges survival school educators struggled with as they tried to create this alternative school system.

Chapter Six describes and analyzes the survival schools’ outcomes, their influence on students and their families, their long-term impact on the Twin Cities Indian community and in the upper Midwest region, and their significance for Native American and global Indigenous histories, particularly their contributions to the practice of Native self-determination and processes of cultural and spiritual revitalization and Indigenous decolonization.

Chapter Two traces the origins of the AIM survival schools to the conflicts Twin Cities Indian families experienced with the public school systems and the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and to Indian people’s struggles with cultural dissonance and the pressure to assimilate in postwar urban society. It describes AIM’s efforts to help local Indian people in each of these areas and explains these issues in their national and international context. The chapter ends by narrating the founding of the two Twin Cities survival schools.

Chapter Four describes and analyzes the survival schools’ curriculum from 1972-1982, exploring its academic, cultural, spiritual, and political components and explaining the interrelationships among them. It explains how these aspects of survival school education reflected the founders’ goals and examines their impact on students, their families, and the Twin Cities Indian community. The chapter analyzes the challenges, conflicts, and critiques generated while creating and trying to balance the survival school curriculum and compares it to other Indian and alternative schools in this period.

Chapter Five describes and analyzes the schools’ development and evolution from 1982-2008. It describes the growing internal conflicts and external challenges that divided the survival school community and weakened school programs and explores both how the schools changed and how they maintained continuity in these years. The chapter narrates the events leading to the closure of Red School House in 1995 and Oh Day Aki/Heart of the Earth in 2008. It also analyzes the schools’ challenges, conflicts, divisions, and closure in their national and international context.

Chapter One traces the origins of the American Indian Movement to multiple historical sources: the consequences of U.S. settler colonialism in the upper Midwest since 1830; the legacy of the federal boarding schools; the development and activism of the Twin Cities Indian community since 1900; the conditions of urban Indian life in the Twin Cities since 1945; the influence of civil rights and empowerment movements in the 1960s; and the personal experiences of key AIM founders and organizers. This chapter also describes some of AIM’s early community activism in the Twin Cities between 1968 and 1972.

This book provides the first history of the AIM “survival schools,” two alternative, culture-based, community schools founded by the American Indian Movement and other Indian parents in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in 1972. It tells the story of the schools’ origins, founding, structure, curriculum, evolution, closing, impact, meanings, and significance from 1968 to 2008 and places them in their local, national, and global contexts.