The shared object
A simple approach to emancipated teaching. As my friend Charley once said of a different activity, "This is a double black diamond!" To use this activity well you need to know what you are doing, and not doing, and why.
Learning Interview
I learned this from Emily Schnee and rely on it, especially for academic courses I teach. The form is simple, an interview activity with a report back and a chart to collect the information. But the content is rich: how have we learned well, what does that tell us about how learning is best done, what does that say about teaching and how it is best done? Starting with a skill also helps people recognize themselves as people who have skills and know how to learn, rather than starting where most education starts, with people's ignorance and lack of skill.
The flow:
Plastic Bag Education
The idea is to take a random object that is utterly familiar but considered unimportant and use it as an object of learning, finding the connections between that object and ourselves. (Reminds me of Marx's question in Volume One of Capital about how two objects can be made commensurable.)
Step one is just to take the bag and answer the question: What do you see? This step requires time and care, it should be detailed and very specific, a close description, a close reading.
