*Lew passed away peacefully, October 27, 2025.
Jorge Jorquera
Lew Zipin was an intellectual. Taken in the modern spirit this would not be a compliment. But Lew was old school. In all frankness, I often felt like I had to prepare myself for conversations with Lew. When he grabbed onto a problem, he wasn’t satisfied with cursory observations or the ahistorical eclecticism typical of modern day academia. Lew wanted to dig deep, all the time. It could be exhausting. But I figured this was as much a comment about me and the world, as anything else. Lew never adapted, to paraphrase Debord, to the neoliberal “academy of the spectacle”. He wanted to understand the real world in all its complexity and all its truths.
In recent years my main engagement with Lew’s work was around pedagogical questions. Questions that interest me not only from the point of view of teaching, in schools or any other settings, but which I also consider of political relevance.
Together with a team of other greats who fought the good fight at the OK Corral (Vic Uni), Lew did some great work on building school curricula around “problems that matter” to students in their lives and for their futures. For my mind, the work done was not your average “co-design” justified in the language of constructivism. It was curricula based on shared exploration and conversation, the sort of historical materialist framework that Freire would have lauded. Lew’s work in this area suggested the importance of a Vygotskian view of how learning happens and what role teachers can play in “contributing further expertise to understanding problems that matter as local-global matters”.
But Lew didn’t have some elite idea of teaching and learning, it was dialectically understood: teacher knowledge is only as useful as its ability to help learners make the connections given their own “funds of knowledge”. We might say, to help “learners in themselves” become “learners for themselves”.
This is why I found chatting to Lew so interesting, if exhausting. It constantly brought back to mind Freire’s problem of conscientização. Any meaningful learning requires critical consciousness, an understanding of what is, why, and how it might be changed. Likewise, any thoroughgoing social change requires class consciousness, an understanding of who we are, why we are when and how we can change it.
This might all seem rather abstract, and Lew’s writing often required some concentration to get through, but it’s important stuff. More important because the traditions of radical intellectualism have been so eroded away. Lew will be missed by his loved ones, but also sorely by those who hadn’t got the chance to meet him as yet, but could have learnt from his uncompromising search for what is and how we can change it.
On this note, I can’t leave unsaid Lew’s final battle, against Zionism. I know there was a part of Lew’s soul that was hurting deeply at what is happening in Palestine. He spent a lot of his time in the last two years finding ways to contribute to the Palestinian struggle and to learn from it. In usual, indepth style.
In many ways, Gramsci’s description of himself is quite apt for Lew, “a pessimist because of [his] intelligence, but an optimist because of [his] will.” Lew understood how bad things are, but never seemed to lose the conviction that change is possible.
Lew Zipin, Presente!