Rolling Earth, movement education

Learned a great opening activity in the Labor Education study group I participate in at Meiji University's Labor Media and Education Center. Needs a good title -- "Still Life with Union Movement"?

The activity is similar to Statues (where participants use other participants to create a statue representing an idea or situation).

Facilitator piles up three or four chairs in the middle of the room, some on top of others, in a jumble.

She asks participants to think of this pile of chairs as "The Union Movement."

Page two of the chart. Click on "popupsize" to get a larger image in a new window, then magnify.

This chart reflects a range of approaches to union education.

There are four issues and four models:
Issues:
1. pressures for change/goals and vision
2. top down/bottom up
3. Roles of staff and worker educators
4. Desired results

Models:
1. On the margins
2. On the move
3. In the program
4. Part of a wider change

(Note that it focuses on the question of worker educators -- workers trained to do popular education -- which the authors see as key to developing an effective, transformational, model of labor education.) Click on popupsize to see a larger image in a new window.

Interview with Augusto Boal on Democracy Now from 2007. Boal died recently, at the age of 78.

The interview is great -- he describes his evolution as an educator/actor as well as the evolution of movements in Brazil, including the MST, landless workers movement. I love the way he describes the moment when he realized that he needed an alternative to using theater to tell people what to do.

By Matt Noyes

(English version of an article written in Winter 2005 for the Center for Transnational Labor Studies. Slight edits made in April 2009)

A previous version of this article appeared in two editions of the Labor Law Semi-monthly Bulletin “Rodo Horitsu Junpo” No. 1594, Tokyo, February, 2005.

Thanks for their generous and thoughtful assistance to Hideo Totsuka, Seiichi Yamasaki, Jane Slaughter, Charley MacMartin and Sakiko Ishitsubo. Thanks too to Kent Wong for the provocative and articulate presentations that got me started. None of them is responsible, of course, for any errors (well maybe one or two!).

I. Introduction: a new union movement?

Union activists and their supporters have been laboring for decades to transform US unions, not just to replace one set of leaders or adopt one tactic or another, but to alter the basic orientation, structures, and practices of the union movement, to bring to birth a new union movement "from the ashes of the old," as the old song Solidarity Forever has it.

According to some in the US union movement, the long-awaited day has come. The new union movement has been born and is walking, talking, and growing like a weed.

At a recent workshop on participatory techniques for worker education I had the chance to be a participant, giving me the opportunity to study facilitation from the other side of the equation. While the facilitator was quite good, she made a couple of mistakes that are worth describing so as to watch out for them. (It's so much easier to troubleshoot other's mistakes!)