Rolling Earth, movement education

By Matt Noyes, adapted from "Power" in Literacy for Empowerment: A resource handbook for community based educators, as adapted from an activity by Barbara Greene of the Mountain Women's Exchange.

[illustration: workers placing stickers on a democracy and power lineⁱ]

Summary:

I am collecting activities I have used in my English for Activists courses and other language teaching for a book on Participatory Techniques for Language Learning. Like Popular Education for Union Democracy, to get access to all the activities, and comment on, ask questions about, and contribute to the book, you need to register on this website. See "how to participate."

The book is here.

A collection of participatory activities I have used in teaching English, particularly in my English for Activists courses for Labor Now and PARC. (As content is added, I will see how best to organize it into broad categories. In the meantime, it may be easiest to navigate by clicking on the tags.)

Comments and suggestions are welcome (gratefully received)!

All content is under a Creative Commons license (see footer).

Registered users can now find draft intro material and activities for each chapter. There is much to tinker with, but it's a start. Feel free to ask questions about the activities and to offer corrections, improvements, doubts etc about them as well.

I've been working on setting up the site (the software I am using -- Drupal -- is great, but with more control comes more work!).

• I have started adding bits to the book, which I retitled. Two activities online so far (draft form, but usable): Challenging the Educators, and The Union Democracy and Power Lineⁱ.
• I've added several annotated links, still need to set up a page for viewing them.

This step can be tricky for popular educators. It is easy to slip back into the old "banking" model of education: and play the role of the expert whose job it is to give people information or ideas, treating your fellow participants like so many empty vessels waiting to be filled.

Providing new information (or helping people find it themselves) and helping them learn how to use it is essential in any educational process. Obtaining and learning to use information is a central part of building power. Sharing information and helping others learn is essential for democracy.

Another term for popular education is problem-posing education. We are getting people together to identify, analyze and figure out how to solve problems.

Popular education has been described as a "pedagogy of the question." That's especially true of the starting point.

You've come together with a group of participants for a workshop, or meeting, or retreat. Ideally, you have done enough research to have a good idea of who the participants are, what the context is, and what the main issues that concern people are. But, do the people in the room have the same information about each other? And what if your information is wrong, or incomplete, or one-sided?

Et toi? Quand est-ce que tu pars? Elle est ou, ta place? (from Ressources Humaines, Laurent Cantet)
What about you? When are you leaving? Where's your place?

Tu, con que intencion y como pretendes utilizar las tecnicas? (Alforja, Tomo 2, "Advertencia!")
And you, what are your intentions, how do you plan to use these techniques?

Where and how does popular education for union democracy begin?

BOOKS

Books you must have:

Tecnicas Participativas Para La Educacion Popular The best resource book for popular educators, combines technique (lots of activities) with method and embodies the work of popular educators in Central America.