One game I learned from the Kani Club improv workshop in Tokyo is Master and Servants. The idea of the game is simple: three players, one is the Master who is constantly demanding things of the servants. When the servants try to meet the Master's needs, the Master is never satisfied and yells at them. For example:
It would be fun to create a chart like this of mix and match affirmations that include radical and liberatory qualities. For example, in addition to sentences like, "Superstar, your life journey breeds miracles, you feel me?" You could end up with ones like this, "Fellow workers, we have stopped fearing our masters and started trusting each other, another world is possible!" It would be fun to look at books like adrienne maree brown's Holding Change, David Bollier's Commoner's Catalogue, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, or songs by Ana Tijoux and glean the various elements from them...
I saw this tree in a post by Irma Lila Zentle, from Ibero Puebla. Like a problem tree, it uses the roots, trunk, branches metaphor, but interestingly here the trunk is made up of fears, the roots are commitments, and the branches and leaves are hopes and dreams.
Back online after two years.
Thanks to the help of Clayton Dewey, this website is back online. I have some Drupal configuration work to do, but the site is back.
I am preparing to leave Japan and stop teaching English for Activists, a conversation circle that has been running in Tokyo for over ten years. As one step in thinking about how to continue EFA without me, I asked the group to write on index cards the features or ingredients I bring as a teacher. The idea is to have an inventory of skills and characteristics so that they can think about how to get them from various sources. In fact, much of what I do in EFA can be done by the participants. The elements they do not have or can not provide they can get from other people.
https://haha.academy/
The Humor and Hilarity Advancement Academy
This looks like another great resource for educators. We crave tools and this site offers hundreds of them. http://improvencyclopedia.org/categories/index.html
"This is a collection of games/exercises/handles/techniques for improvisation theatre. It's basically organized in Categories , and each improv Game is classified in a number of these categories. We also provide a number of Glossary and References to people, sites and books where you can find similar information.
"This site does not aspire to:
On Participation
In his essay Falacias de la Participación, Alfonso Vásquez describes three phases of participation in an organizational process:
The Labor Notes book Secrets of a Successful Organizer by Alex Bradbury, Jane Slaughter and Mark Brenner comes with a full set of handouts that are available for free online. This is a great resource for anyone designing education projects for worker organization. They could also be great discussion starters for critical reflection on organizing -- for example the first handout, on How the Boss Keeps us Disorganized, sets up three characters: Boss, Organizer, Co-workers. Look at the verbs in the three lists of actions -- how are they different? Why?
El Cajon de Herramientas
Un cajón para el trabajo de las organizaciones y grupos en la dirección de otro mundo posible…
http://cajondeherramientas.com.ar/
This looks like a great resource -- just need some time to explore it.
