I have been posting activities & techniques, tagging them somewhat casually. But I think it would be helpful to think about the flow of activities over time, e.g. in a course.
The "Spiral Method" offers such a flow:
- start with experience
- identify themes
- question and analyze
- add information
- plan action
- act
- start over (in a new place)
The Spiral flow is about initiating and cultivating a problem-posing dialogue for the purpose of taking transformative action. What makes it interesting is the way in includes action as part of the flow of learning.
Alforja offers something like a flow, too, in the order of chapters from dinamicas de animacion to techniques for political and ideological analysis. Alforja's flow is about deepening (profundizacion) in a political and strategic sense. The activities are arranged in an order of complexity and depth. Action is assumed as part of the context (as in the activities designed to help groups deal with provocateurs).
Jacotot also has a flow, though it is much harder to identify because of his rejection of "methods." The "method" is choosing an object and asking: What do you see? What do you think of it? What do you make of it? Any object can make a good starting point and the flow will take care of itself as people verify the equality of intelligences through practice. Still, Jacotot's own "Langue Maternel" starts with observing the simplest details, followed by memorization, and then improvisation, art and rhetoric.
For me, there are different levels on which to think about flow.
There is the flow of group-building, which starts with recognition and moves towards deeper trust and collaboration, which we can practice and verify with a series of activities that turn our thoughts, experiences, feelings into shared texts.
A key part of the first flow is the displacement of the teacher and the cultivation of a learning process in which the teacher role is limited to, as Jacotot put it, standing at the door.
Then there is the content flow, the movement through, or in relation to, some object of study.
So, in more concrete terms, a flow might go like this:
Phase one:
Introduction
Recognition
Getting to know each other
Reading our experience: pattern recognition
Reading My People (start with the "Beautiful Clinic")
(In this phase, we are also beginning to practice the basic approach of the course: participatory activities, feel free, play, changing roles, humor, creativity, verification, mutual understanding, equal participation, etc. The content here comes from:
- recognition, in itself, the originary and profoundest content
- the play itself, that is the players and what they bring,
- sharing experiences, as in the Spiral.)
Phase two:
Multiple forms of communication and verification
Questioning
The shared object of study (text, alforja cartoon, videos, etc)
Students facilitate two activities each time, using book (rule: it has to be interesting and participatory)
Constant return to recognition, comparison to experience, dialogue, questioning.
(We started from the outset, but in this phase documentation of observation and reflection is important.)
Phase three:
The course itself as object of study
Multiple drafts as a form of verification of mutual understanding
Feel Free (to set basic terms and give people info about my starting point/assumptions)
Stop me if you don't understand (to verify mutual understanding, demonstrate commitment to actual understanding, willingness to take time, to set humorous tone).
Me--> You (recognition, first shared object to question, proof of roles, initiative, participation, democracy in study)