Rolling Earth, movement education

What makes games useful in learning is not just that they get people participating, that they involve physical movement and responding to a changing environment, that they require creativity and quick responses, that they create a kind of mini-world in which what we say and do has immediate and obvious relevance and measurable impact, not just that they are fun...

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."

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.

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!)

Are you planning a workshop or other education activity and looking for advice or feedback? Want to use activities from this site, but not sure how to adapt them to fit your circumstances? Send me an email and we can set up a time to skype or conference. I'm happy to share experiences and provide feedback or a sounding board for your planning process. Of course it all depends on how busy I am at the time, but it's a good way to use me, so give it a try!

Over time, the standard chants and slogans used on picket lines and in demonstrations, protests, and marches, become stale and cliche. The content gets lost and the music becomes sing-song. The chants have no impact. The whole experience becomes disempowering. This activity takes one chant -- What do we want? When do we want it? -- and "reverse engineers" it to open up a discussion of the goals and expectations of individuals and groups. After all, these are the big questions: What do we want? When do we want it? How can we have an impact?

So, what's this handbook about?

This handbook is:

• a toolkit for educators and activists
• a case-study of grass-roots worker education in the US workers movement
• [an argument for popular education for union democracy, and
• [an argument for union democracy for worker education
• [a call for allies
• [a starter

A Toolkit
[box]What kinds of activities can I use to help workers learn their rights and develop their ability to organize for democracy and power?[image: we're all here, now what do I do?]

I have made some progress: you can now find one activity from each chapter in the handbook: Popular Education for Union Democracy, along with an introductory piece that lists all the activities from that chapter and puts them in context.

Click on the link at left for a full table of contents.

Please let others know about the site and feel free to register and comment.

"Popular Education for Movement Building" or マットの英語でデモクラシー（仮）

I will be teaching a course at PARC's Freedom School in Tokyo, Japan, this May. The course is six sessions, from May to July, 2008. The cost (which may change) is 15,000 yen. The maximum number of participants is 15 people. Contact PARC to register.

It is an English course, but the subject of the class is unique. Here is the course description from PARC, followed by my description of the course in English:
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Put this in glossary and also in action?

Source: Theresa El Amin, Ira Shor

Negotiating control over the education process, good test of democratic facilitation and group's capacity for control.