Resistance is fertile.
This case study begins with Ramona, a student in an English as a Second Language class I taught for the Consortium for Worker Education (CWE) at a high school in Washington Heights, NYC. Ramona was typical of the students in that class: she was an older woman from the Dominican Republic who had lived and worked in the United States for several years. She was a home attendant and, I would come to learn, like most of her coworkers she was very angry about the way her managers treated her, and the way the union representatives treated her. Ramona and her coworkers were members of Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU), Local 153.
When I met Ramona I was already a would be popular educator. I had studied popular education both on the job at the CWE and in a working group I formed with other teachers and union and workers center activists (see Activity 1.4 The Working Group). I was also one of the leaders of my small but feisty Teachers union chapter [link]. I spoke Spanish and lived in the next neighborhood up from Washington Heights, Inwood. Some of my friends were social movement activists from the Dominican Republic, including longtime union activists and leaders of the anti-IMF struggles of the 1980s. I had been a labor activist since my days as a graduate student at the New School for Social Research, where I helped form a group called The Student-Worker Solidarity Committee, and I was convinced of the need for radical, bottom-up, reform in the US workers movement. A typical worker educator? No, but not so atypical either.
Bad student
Ramona was a "bad" student. I say this a bit ironically, I don't think it's helpful to judge students that way especially when you are trying to get away from the traditional teacher and student roles. But also a bit sincerely, as a teacher I was frustrated by her role in the classroom.
She always came late. She sat in back of the classroom, the zone Ira Schor calls "Siberia” (his book When Students Have Power describes the dynamic of "bad" students very nicely), where she could get down to business: talking with her fellow workers in Spanish.
This was a problem for me. As an ESL teacher, I was looking for a Nina Wallerstein-type experience. (Wallerstein is a popular educator who wrote my favorite book about problem-posing education, Language and Culture in Conflict, based on her work as an ESL teacher in immigrant communities in California. That book was the closest thing I had to a model of how popular education might look in the context of ESL teaching in the US (as distinct from literacy training in rural Brazil or health education in rural southern Africa). Through dialogue and participatory activities, I hoped to find in this ESL class the generative themes that might lead to real problem-posing. Action? I couldn't see that far ahead.
The starting point was English; I had to get people talking in English, together, in order for anything to progress. And Ramona was back there talking it up in Spanish.
She had all the resistance skills students develop: she'd keep her eye on me as she talked with her friends, watching me move around at the front of the room, ready to look my way attentively if she thought I was checking on her. She'd lower her voice if she thought I was close to asking her to be quiet. But, even in those moments, she didn't quite come to a stop, continuing to talk quietly while she kept her eye on me, ready to get the conversation back in higher gear.
Like a holier-than-thou angel on my shoulder, the traditional teacher in me (who was also an employee feeling pressure to "teach") would ask, "Why doesn't she even try to use English? Why won't she listen to me? Why does she come to this class? What is she doing here?!" At the same time, Ramona presented an intriguing challenge to my devil: how to "get through" to her. If I were a better teacher I could get her to stop...
The popular education "devil" on my other shoulder sensed something more at play: her fellow students didn't get impatient with her, it seemed they respected her and paid attention to what she was saying. "What is it that is so important? What is going on? What is she doing here?" Here was someone determined to connect with her fellow students -- how to get into that dialogue and bring it into English?
The class was relatively new, so my fishing for generative themes -- asking questions about family, community, work, etc. -- was not advanced, I was still just getting to know people and learn about their lives and experiences. I was not familiar with the world of Home Health Care Attendants, nor with their union, the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU).
Bringing the class to Ramona
So one day, when Ramona was particularly determined to talk things over with her classmates back in Siberia, I took a page out of Ira Shor's book and moved the focal point of the class to her. I took a seat in the back of the room near Ramona, and encouraged her to explain the issues in English. If she couldn't explain them in English, then, I said, we would all act them out together. Ramona could narrate and we all would act. (See Acting it Out and Cuento Vivo).
It worked. Aided by her coworkers Ramona told the story, in a mix of English and Spanish, and they all acted it out as she talked. I was the person who knew the least about the context (of course), so I asked a lot of questions to clarify the story (of course, this also fit my goals in terms of English conversation practice).
Ramona explained a problem she was having at work. She was having trouble getting enough hours to make a living, while the manager was sending out newer, younger and lower paid, workers in her place. Many people in the class shared this problem.
The turning point came when I asked Ramona, "what do you do when you have this problem?" Ramona played out a phone call to the union representative (played by another student). I won't try to reproduce the language she used, I've forgotten by now, but the content went more or less as follows:
{phone rings}
Ramona: "Hello, Victoria?"
Victoria: "Yes." ("She knows how to speak Spanish," the workers pointed out, "but she only speaks to us in English!")
Ramona: "I have a problem. Miss Washington won't give me any work, but she is giving hours to the young girls. It's not fair. I don't get enough hours to live."
Victoria: "Okay, don't do anything, let me call Miss Washington. I will call you back."
{later}
Victoria: "Ramona? I called Miss Washington. Everything is fine. She is right about the hours. We can't make a complaint. There is nothing we can do."
{End of call.}
Bingo! Generative theme, anyone?!
I was energized -- here was a live issue that affected nearly everyone in the class, a real knot of problems that was at the center of people's lives as immigrant workers. As a union activist with a reform orientation the basic issue was familiar and important to me: one of the problems of US unions has been the weakness of shop-floor representation, a problem that especially affects non-English speaking workers.
(You can see here how the context in which education takes place -- the fact that the class was full of workers from one employer, with shared problems, located in their community, in a neutral space, with a teacher interested in popular education and union reform -- made the moment possible.)
I had lots of ideas about how to use this theme: we would explore Ramona's problem, not just that call or her particular case, but the underlying problem that they shared. I had some good ESL materials in the form of English for Action, a problem-posing curriculum by Wallerstein and Auerbach and I had my own union experience to draw on. This was a dialogue to which everyone had a lot to bring.
Where to go next? It was clear that people were not aware of their their contract and what it contained; we could get the contract, and read it together. We could do the same with the local union bylaws. We could use a problem tree to analyze the problems and their roots. We could do participatory research to find and assess resources. We could use role plays to practice action. Both on the technical side and the content side, the possibilities were flowing. And it all started with Ramona being "bad." Resistance is fertile.
(What I didn't find out until later was the the class itself was a product of the workers' activism -- the same people who were unhappy with the employer's abuses and the union's response had successfully pressured the union to hold an English class in Washington Heights.)
In the following classes, the students and I talked about what a union is, and how to get a copy of the union contract and constitution. They brought up other problems, like the fact that they had to pay a fee to get their paychecks (which is of course illegal). We determined it made sense for me, as teacher, to ask the union representative (the same Victoria they had complained about) for a copy of the documents to use in the English class, which was, after all, sponsored by the union. (My asking also protected individuals from any unwanted attention.)
I wrote a friendly memo explaining how this would be useful for English learning and cited the chapters in ESL for Action which have activities related to reading the union contract. (In conversations with Victoria before the class started I had already identified ESL for Action as a text I would use. ESL for Action makes it sound like using the contract in an English class is standard worker education practice, but I knew I was reaching -- in my experience, union staff are often reluctant to share those documents with members.)
Nothing doing. I got a memo back saying in effect my job was to teach English, the union would teach its members about their rights.
This reaction increased students' interest in the contract and constitution. I didn't need to tell people it was important to have the contract -- the fact that it was a banned subject said enough. We brainstormed other ways to get their contract and constitution and switched to other good union-related activities in ESL for Action.
Bad Teacher
My request also brought me a class visit from the union representative. One evening, accompanied by my manager from the Consortium for Worker Education, Victoria came to observe me at work and make contact with the students. As the two of them moved through the classroom, chatting with students, handing out new three ring binders with the union label pasted on the front, and looking at the materials for the lesson, one of the students slipped a copy of the union contract from her bag and passed it to me, literally behind the union rep's back. I put it in my bag. We would later go over parts of it in class, starting with the language on how hours are assigned.
Why ignore the union rep's request that I "just teach English"? Three reasons: first, it didn't make any sense. To me, teaching English starts with a dialogue about our lives and the issues that concern us. I was "teaching English." Second, our teachers union chapter, of which I was one of the chapter leaders at that time, had won Academic Freedom language in our contract. Moreover, the union representative was not my boss. I felt no obligation to follow her advice about how to teach. But, the most compelling reason, of course, was that I had stumbled into a real live generative theme and was not about to let it get away. The union rep's resistance only confirmed that there was something there, something important to explore.
The course soon ended, the CWE conveniently reassigned me to teach nurses in a hospital on the other side of New York City, in a program run by SEIU 1199, but I kept in touch with the home attendants. They had used contact information I gave them and joined an immigrant workers center, The Latino Workers Center, where friends of mine worked. The workers, including many of my former students, started a rank-and-file committee: Trabajadoras Unidas to fight for change in their union.
My involvement could have stopped there. But my former students invited me to attend their meetings, and the Latino Workers Center welcomed me as a volunteer, asking me to facilitate a couple of workshops for their core activists, one on "What is a union?" another on alternative strategies (using the problem tree format -- see Activity 3.1 The Problem Tree).
The popular education process continued, but, my role changed. Outside of the two workshops, I wasn't their teacher anymore, what was I? I wasn't a member of the workers group, nor was I an organizer -- the workers center staff and the core activists played that role. The term the workers used to describe my role was "asesor" -- advisor. This shift in roles as the education process moves to action is described more in Activity 6.2 From facilitation to intervention).
My vacation time came up and I left town. While I was away, the workers held a protest in front of the company office. Because some workers had made signs and briefly walked in a circle the employer charged them with picketing -- a violation of their contract's very detailed "no strike" clause (a clause we had not read carefully in the ESL class, unfortunately). The employer fired several key activists and the struggle was side-tracked into a campaign to defend the fired workers. The grievance machinery began its slow grind, the union choosing to handle each case separately.
There is more to the story, but those familiar with US labor-management relations in this period may already be able to guess how it ended. Time dragged by. The home attendants charged with picketing in violation of the no-strike clause eventually lost their grievances and NLRB charges (at least one settled and returned to work, I think). The reform movement was suppressed and eventually the fired workers moved on.
In the meantime, OPEIU's International President demanded that the Consortium for Worker Education fire me for "interference in internal union affairs." The CWE, which risked losing a member union, obliged. Long story short: I grieved it, filed an Unfair Labor Practice charge, went to arbitration, lost. Our little teachers union chapter put up a good fight -- protests, petitions, etc. But my case, too, was lost.
The moral of the story
This is supposed to be a case study in popular education? Not exactly an uplifting story, is it? The moral seems to be that if you are looking to get fired, and help others get fired, popular education will help you get there. Go ahead and use participatory techniques, talk about generative themes, but when the problems workers pose involve the union and they start talking about doing something about it, better switch to safer topics. And above all, keep it in the classroom -- don't cross the line from discussion to action. Isn't that the lesson?
I don't think so.
Sometimes, often, workers lose. Even in the best circumstances. In this case, the workers had been losing without even fighting back. When their fledgling group tried to fight back, the employer and their union were able to outmanouever them. If the leadership of OPEIU 153 had responded constructively to the resistance they were getting from the home attendants, seeing it for the organizing opportunity it was, instead of as a threat to their power -- the story might have ended very differently.
So what's the moral? I learned that popular education in the context of a union-sponsored ESL class is possible, that it is vital and exciting, that under the right circumstances you can find generative themes that organically link English learning/teaching to organizing for change. I learned, too, that popular education depends more on the participants and their activity than on the teacher but that the teacher can open up the dialogue and help people get new information. As I followed the learning/acting process from the classroom to the organizing meetings, I learned how to play a new role as a supporter and advisor.
Of course, I also learned about the risks and boundaries that we face as popular educators in the labor movement. At one point in the grievance process, I was given a choice: I could keep my job if I stopped all support and contact with the home attendants and agreed to a new policy that teachers would not interfere in internal union affairs. I rejected the offer.
Usually the compromises that lead worker educators away from popular education come in small increments. In this case it was big, which was helpful: it made it all the easier to see the basic limits placed on popular education in the labor movement.
Yes, like collective action, popular education can be risky. Popular education can be "dangerous" in the eyes of those with power, not the ideas of popular education (managers love "empowerment"), not the teaching methods (group work is great!), but the possibility that workers will raise real issues of power and control on the job and in the union and that those issues may become "actionable." It is not hard to find labor education programs, whether in unions or university-based programs that define their work as popular education (see Teaching for Change) -- after all the Consortium for Worker Education had paid me to participate in workshops on popular education and to facilitate workshops for other teachers -- but it is understood that the education process is subordinated to....