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
- hands on and participatory, designed to get people working together as a group, sharing their experiences and ideas,
- designed to promote critical reflection and open-ended discussion,
- aimed at enabling workers to identify problems, plan strategy, and take action.
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?]
First and foremost, this handbook is a toolkit -- a collection of learning activities described in detail so you can use and adapt them. Books like Tecnicas Participativas Para La Educacion Popular, Educating for a Change, Popular Education for Movement Building, and Language and Culture in Conflict have been crucial resources in my own education as an educator. With this handbook I hope to share-alike, contributing my variations on others' work and some of my own ideas as well.
Educators crave techniques and activities -- we all want more tools in the kit -- so the activities are front and center. When I first read the popular education handbooks above, I started with the activities and only later got around to the commentary. Feel free to read this handbook the same way. The tags at the end of each book page should help you navigate through the activities as you go.
The activities included here are all:
Like all tools, these activities can be used in various contexts for different ends. This is a virtue -- they are adaptable and work on many levels -- I encourage you to experiment and tinker. But it also raises a question: how do we decide what technique to use, and when and how to use it? Most important: why do we want to use these techniques? What are we trying to accomplish? What are our interests and goals and how do they relate to the interests and goals of the participants?
The questions come up because when we use participatory techniques, we are always already using them as part of an education method or framework, or according to principles and objectives, whether we are aware of it or not. This is true of educators and learners alike. (side point: even just using them as games or icebreakers without more plan reflects an orientation...)
When I first saw the crude pictures that are often used to contrast the traditional "banking" approach to education and the "liberatory" method of popular education I found them useful -- not because of the often dogmatic answers they provided -- but because they opened up the issues: what are we doing? Why are we here? What are our principals and goals? What do we think is our role, what is the role of the participants? [include crude banking image from teaching for transformation?] (Note: crude is a very interesting term in popular education context, reminds me of Marx about "sophisticated goods" sold in England, like cakes with sawdust in them... reminds me also of Caliban...)
[[[As important as participatory techniques are to an educator, what really sets popular education apart is its method: techniques are used within a larger process of learning and acting that has certain basic elements. It is based on principals of democracy and equity and aims at social change. Participatory techniques are used because they help build a collaborative learning process in which we share experiences, question, analyze, investigate, strategize and act. The learning process not only leads to collective action for social change it incorporates action as part of a spiral of reflection and action.]]]
What does that look like? How does this work in a context where social movements are weak and people seem passive and disorganized?
A Case Study
While not written as a formal case study, this handbook... -- shows how I wrestled with those questions...
{An argument for pop ed for union democracy. What I'm hearing you say here is the following: (1) pop ed is more than a tool kit, it's a methodology and (2) that methodology has important things to say in the struggle for union democracy. The first point is a huge punch line to the whole project and maybe needs to be higher up in the introduction. I starred and underlined a lot the second paragraph in this sub-section ("As important as participatory techniques..."); it might not get read here, though, by the busy reader. The second point needs to be more clearly stated. For example, drop the 'an argument for' formulation and just say something like 'popular education's role in the struggle for union democracy.' Or, something that conveys that you've learned something important through your years of teaching about how popular education is meaningful not only for the classroom but also for the larger movement.
{Ditto for the section, 'an argument for union democracy for worker education.' Again, your argument is based on how you experienced trying to do worker education as a person committed to union democracy. I guess that's how you got to the following section, 'the product of a unique context.' Maybe that section should be farther up--providing context and the details of your own 'case study'. All that info about you and AUD and CWE would make the larger arguments more approachable.}
Why popular education? How is popular education important to union democracy and reform?
Popular education goes by many names (problem-posing, critical pedagogy, education for liberation, etc.) and has been defined again and again. (You can find some definitions here [link to sources].) There are many different practices of labor education that go by the name popular education, some with diametrically opposed goals. My first instinct was to write about "authentic" popular education and defend it against "phony" practices and ideas, but it now seems to me that there is little to be gained in that kind of battle over terms. So in this handbook rather than try to pin down its definition, I will emphasize certain elements in the broader muddle of ideas, techniques, and histories that is popular education: dialogue, freedom of speech and thought, self-organization, building the capacity for collective action, inclusion and equality, and above all democracy.
An argument for union democracy for worker education.
Why union democracy? How is union democracy important to popular education in the workers movement?
There are several other books on popular education and the labor movement -- my favorite is Education for Changing Unions -- but, to my knowledge, none of them start from the standpoint of movements for union reform and democracy. It is not because there isn't work going one -- there are some great educators doing that work, but their experiences have yet to be shared in print.
Most labor educators are employed by unions, university-based labor education programs, or union-sponsored non-profits. Independent community-based workers centers also employ worker educators, as do some small non-profits, churches and other government-sponsored adult education programs. Most educators enter the learning process dependent on the union leadership for their employment (those employed by academic worker education programs or labor non-profits enjoy somewhat more autonomy, but those programs often depend on union leaders for help getting funds).
If the US union leadership were distinguished by its commitment to internal democracy, this might not be such a problem, but the dominant model in our movement has been the union as one-party state or clerical hierarchy. As the director of a leading worker education program once said of me, "He questioned union leadership. In my religion, that's a sin." The trend toward consolidation and increasing centralization of leadership has only made this problem worse.
But the great promise that popular education holds for the workers movement is in its radically democratic conception of learning as a collaborative process of questioning, adding information, and strategizing through which workers develop their capacity for collective action in pursuit of their goals. Popular education is a natural fit for democratic unionism and can play a key role in the regeneration and transformation of the workers movement and its institutions... For this reason, the movement for union democracy is critical to the success of popular education in the workers movement.
Good popular education bites the hand that feeds it -- meaning that it questions everything, including the conditions under which it is conducted -- and union democracy is the same...
A Case Study
{The case study section should, of course, have more about you and your experience front and center. Before summarizing the period ("in a nutshell,..."), say more about your experience that allows you to draw such conclusions. That would be very, very helpful, I think. }
The activities collected here, and the examples used to illustrate them, also provide a kind of case-study of worker education in the union reform movement in the US (and to a much lesser extent Canada) in the late 1990's and early 2000's. I started out in worker education in the early 1990's, before the change in leadership in the AFL-CIO and the wave of academic support for union renewal...[sawsj, etc. See the "personal timeline" in Activity #?] Most of the activities in this handbook come from my work as Education Coordinator at the Association for Union Democracy, from 199--- to 2003.
As you read along, you will see that much of my work consisted of one-time workshops with groups of rank-and-file union members. ...
...[more about that work, who, where, why, how]
In a nutshell, that period saw the US union movement continue to decline, but it also saw the emergence of a dynamic new force ... Interestingly, this would be new "social movement unionism" mixed grassroots organizing with superbureaucratization...
[ a little more about the context ]
As a whole, the activities show [....] [move this: (See Kim Moody's US Labor in Trouble and Transition for a recent survey of this context.)]
What does it look like to practice popular education in the labor movement without dodging the problems of democracy and internal union politics?
Most of my work was with union members struggling to democratize and reform their unions in order to defend their living and working conditions in a time of labor decline. The activities reflect my work with workers -- usually rank-and-file and sometimes local officers and staff -- in a range of industries and trades: carpenters, university employees, transit workers, postal workers, teachers, nurses, and many more; and in a range of unions and groups: locals, councils, independent unions, reform caucuses, and labor-community coalitions.
That same period also saw the continuing growth of community-based immigrant workers centers. While intended as an alternative to traditional union organization, workers centers too have run into the problem of union democracy. Both externally -- their members often include unionists whose democratic rights have been violated or whose unions are unaccountable to their members -- and internally, because workers centers, like unions, are organizations that can be more or less democratic. Some of the material in this handbook comes from my collaboration with workers center activists and members - a collaboration for which I am very grateful.
All in all, while the work shared here was of limited scope -- mostly one-off workshops with small groups of unionists, few of which led to sustained reform organizing -- and thus fails to provide a full-blown case study of a popular education process (compared to, say, Tecnicas Participativas), it represents my answer to the question: what does it mean to practice popular education in a workers movement in desperate need of reform?
The product of a unique context
This handbook is a start. It is based on my work as Education Coordinator at the Association for Union Democracy (www.uniondemocracy.org) from 1997 to 2002, though some of the activities and examples are more recent and come from other work. The Association for Union Democracy is a small, resource-poor, non-profit organization with a rich history that plays a valuable role in the US workers movement. You can find more information about AUD on the AUD website www.uniondemocracy.org , which also provides a basic resource text for this handbook.
AUD is a wonderful place to be a labor educator. To begin with, you can work with unionists across the US movement, in all industries and unions, high-skill and low, native born and immigrant, from longshore workers to musicians to home attendants. And because the basic questions of union democracy are relevant not just to union members, but to all workers seeking to organize for power, the work can involve workers centers and other alternative organizations.
AUD is also a great place to explore popular education: our mission is to help union members make their unions more democratic and powerful through their own collective action and leadership. The strict focus on union democracy, and AUD's non-partisan role, help us steer clear of the instrumentalism and manipulation that undermine so many efforts at popular education. AUD doesn't have a line or program that we want to "move," we don't set the goals, we would have unionists set their own goals and develop their own programs for change.
Even if AUD wanted to implement some grand scheme for labor reform, the practical limitations make such a strategy impossible -- we simply have no choice to but to emphasize self-organization.
This has had important implications for my work as an educator. It was not my job to get people "on the program" or make sure they mastered the talking points. The measure of success was different -- if an AUD workshop, conference or class series helped workers move their organizing forward, that was success.
And, unlike my previous worker education jobs in organizations like the Consortium for Worker Education http://www.cwe.org/, at AUD I was not going to be fired if popular education actually worked, i.e. if workers reflected critically on their conditions, discussed possible ways to change them, and then organized and took action. I never had to censor myself or workers, or worry that I might be at risk of being charged for "insubordination" or "interference in internal union affairs." Free speech, democracy, and workers' self-organization were all part of my job description.
This may sound like bragging, but it's more like a sigh of relief from someone who has worked across the spectrum of union education programs and university labor education and knows how rare such opportunities are. I know the challenges labor movement educators (and 'students') face and what's at stake when you try to practice the popular education so many programs preach.
The combination of support (a full-time job), expert collaboration, and freedom to work with union members without fear of retaliation or censorship is a rare gift. Most labor educators work either for a university or a union, often as adjuncts or part-time employees. Others work in adult education or literacy programs where the students are workers, but the program goals (and often student's goals) are not related to worker organizing. In each case there are significant limitations to the educator's freedom to practice "full-blown" popular education. (This struggle to practice popular education is reflected in the activity Challenging the Educators)
A call for allies
This handbook is a call for allies and collaborators. Workers organizing for union democracy and transformation deserve the support of labor educators and activists. And movements for democracy and reform offer a perfect environment for developing a democratic, participatory, action-oriented teaching approach. I hope that other worker educators -- working in whatever context -- will find the material in this handbook useful and take inspiration for their own efforts to push the envelope that worker education programs offer for dialogue, freedom of inquiry, democracy, and workers power. I look forward to collaborating with you and hope I can be helpful to your efforts.
A Starter
Finally, popular education techniques have always been "open source". We all borrow, adapt and appropriate to the point where we often don't know where our best ideas came from. (One of my favorite activities -- the union democracy and power line -- is based on an activity I learned from a third generation photocopy of a handbook that borrowed the activity from another collection of activities that in turn were borrowed from who knows where.) While the origins of our tools are sometimes unclear, it is important to give credit, so I will do my best to do so for the material I have incorporated and altered along my own way.
This is a starter: I expect readers to take what they find here and tinker with it, stretch it, or completely rework it. That's why all of the material on this site is under a Creative Commons License: attribution, share-alike, non-commercial. Go ahead and mash it up, but please give credit (author's name, website name and url), share your own work in the same way, and don't publish material you got here for commercial purposes.
SAVE: While they were developed for helping workers learn about their legal rights and how to organize for democracy and power in their unions and on their jobs, like
This handbook is a toolkit, but it also calls on educators to take the underlying method of popular education seriously, explore it fully, and above all to challenge the instrumental or top-down uses of participatory techniques that often pass for popular education.