The Power in the Room cover art

The Power in the Room

Radical Education Through Youth Organizing and Employment

Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

The Power in the Room

By: Jay Gillen
Narrated by: Ron Butler
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

How community-centered, peer-to-peer, youth knowledge exchanges are evolving into a strong economic and political foundation on which to build radical public education.

Following in the rich traditions in African American cooperative economic and educational thought, teacher-organizer Jay Gillen describes the Baltimore Algebra Project (BAP) as a youth-run cooperative enterprise in which young people direct their peers’ and their own learning for a wage. BAP and similar enterprises are creating an educational network of empowered, employed students.

Gillen argues that this is a proactive political, economic, and educational structure that builds relationships among and between students and their communities. It’s a structure that meets communal needs—material and social, economic and political—both now and in the future. Through the story of the Baltimore Algebra Project, readers will learn why youth employment is a priority, how to develop democratic norms and cultures, how to foster positive community roles for 20–30 year-olds, and how to implement educational accountability from below.
Education Racism & Discrimination Social Sciences Discrimination Student Youth Education

Listeners also enjoyed...

No Study Without Struggle cover art
Rich Thanks to Racism cover art
Race to the Bottom cover art
On Belonging cover art
America the Beautiful cover art
Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays cover art
Moving Up Without Losing Your Way cover art
A Place to Grow: The Culture of Sudbury Valley School cover art
An Inconvenient Minority cover art
You're More Powerful than You Think cover art
The School Revolution cover art
Ghetto cover art
Reading, Writing, and Racism cover art
How to Change It cover art
Positive Populism cover art
We Want to Do More Than Survive cover art

Critic reviews

“Readers interested in the intersection of political activism, economics, community, and education will find ample food for thought in Gillen’s insightful call for action.”
Library Journal

“A must-read for activists and theorists who are concerned about democratic life in contemporary America.”
—Theresa Perry, author of Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students

“A visionary tour de force built on a rock-solid foundation of teaching and organizing.”
—William Ayers, coauthor of “You Can’t Fire the Bad Ones!”: And 18 Other Myths About Teachers, Teachers’ Unions, and Public Education

“Anyone who wants to learn how to support youth development outside the dominant paradigms needs to wrestle with Gillen’s argument that economic empowerment, political activism, and education aren’t three different things; for Black people, they are three aspects of one thing. An extraordinarily important book, one Ella Baker would have loved.”
—Charles Payne, author of I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement
No reviews yet