Rolling Earth, movement education

A simple way to help people tell a story by providing prompts that keep the story moving and demand richer description and reflection.

Sitting in a circle, participants take turns telling a story with the facilitator (or as Boal says, the Jokerⁱ) providing the links:

Participant 1: "My friend called me this morning and told me she was going to quit school..."

Joker: "because..."

Participant 2: "...she needs to make money and she feels like school has no meaning."

Joker: "But..."
...

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...

This is a simple tool for equalizing participation in small group discussion and raising awareness of how much people speak. It's probably not original, but I can't recall seeing it before.

Flow:
In a smallish group (ten people) in one of my courses, I prepared a set of chits -- small rectangular pieces of card stock (cut up index cards) -- and gave each participant five chits (including me).

Standing/sitting in a circle.

The facilitator starts the game by pretending to pick up and hold in his/her hands an imaginary object. S/he considers the object, then declares, "This stinks!" and wrinkles his/her nose.

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.

Some articles related to worker education, internet speech, and union democracy.

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?]

The Spiral Modelⁱ: The Spiral Model as it appears in Educating for a Change.

The spiral model illustrates several important principles of popular education:

• that it begins with the experiences and interests of the participants,
• that the content of the educational process flows from their experience,
• that new information is needed,
• that through a collective process of dialogue participants explore their experiences and identify problems they wish to address,
  

Not a new idea, but a particular use of it that has worked very well. The activity revolves around a close reading of a poem by Langston Hughes, using an eraser…

In this activity participants memorize/study the following short poem by Langston Hughes.

My People

The night is beautiful.

So the faces of my people.

The stars are beautiful.

So the eyes of my people.

Beautiful, also, is the sun.

Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.

Flow:

• write the poem on a blackboard
• ask everyone to read it silently