Tu, con que intencion y como pretendes utilizar las tecnicas? (Alforja, Tomo 2, "Advertencia!")
And you, what are your intentions, how do you plan to use these techniques?
Questions: Who are we? What do we bring to the educational and organizing process? What are our experiences? What are our goals and assumptions? What do we want to avoid? What is the context in which we are working? How does it limit or enable our work? What are our conditions as educators? What are our problems and why do they exist? What are we doing to solve them? How far are we willing to go to push the boundaries?
You want to do some popular education. Where do you begin?
When planning this handbook I decided to try build it on the spiral model, with each chapter more or less corresponding to a moment in the educational spiral. But the beginning posed a problem.
The first step of the spiral model of popular education -- which I found completely eye-opening when Emily Schnee first drew it on a blackboard for me and my coworkers -- is sharing experiences and building trust. By starting with the experiences of the participants and their interests, goals, fears, conflicts, etc., we can build a learning process that is both democratic and transformational.
The idea is that through dialogue and questioning the participants will identify the context and their problems -- "name their world" -- and explore solutions. So, in principle, you can start anywhere -- the key is to start where you and the participants are.
But I felt that this starting point did not put enough emphasis on the factors that shape an educational process even before it begins. The spiral process always starts somewhere, in a particular place and time, with particular people and issues. In my experience the context in which you work has a huge impact on what you will be able to accomplish, how long it will take, what will be required.
This is certainly true in the fields of labor education and worker education where teachers often lament the limitations placed on them by the institution -- "I'd love to have a discussion about the problems my students mentioned, but it's too risky." It's one reason I was so happy to be able to do this work at AUD.
Looking at the context can help us identify some of the biggest problems we face in popular education.
One problem is the educator her/himself. Who is the teacher? What experiences formed us? What do we bring to this work?
Another problem is the time and space we work with. It's hard to imagine much popular education happening in a one hour workshop facilitated by an educator who "parachutes" in and then is gone.
The institutional context and the goals it reinforces are another problem -- for example when a program is organized for purely instrumental purposes, like passing an exam or weeding out applicants. My experience teaching Labor History to IBEW Local 3 apprentices was like this -- at times it seemed like the union's educational program, which required all members to get an Associate's Degree in Labor Studies, was designed to subvert meaningful learning. (This was not true, I think, of the courses which taught job-related skills.) My teaching in English As a Second Language Classes was often like this, too. (You find yourself spending what seems like an eternity at the first step in the spiral, with few chances to move towards problem-posing.)
The institutional context can also distort the learning process by creating pressure on the educator to subordinate the learning process to the priorities of the organization's leaders.
At times the context is so inhospitable that it is simply impossible for a popular education process to get off the ground. This is not a judgment on the educators who work in those conditions, it is a call to assess the conditions of possibility for popular education and act to bring them about.
As educators, then, we need to name the context -- as much as we can -- even before we begin. In practice, we often come to these questions last, after running into problems in our work. But it makes sense to put them up front, I think.
The first activities are for challenging ourselves as educators. Then we open the dialogue with the participants. The other crucial piece of the educational process that happens before the spiral begins is the dialogue and negotiation that establishes the when, where, who, and what of the educational event. Before I begin the dialogue with the participants in a workshop, I have already been in dialogue with someone who is organizing the event. I may have already worked with that person on union democracy issues, helped them understand legal rights and organizing options, for example.
Questions:
Who is sponsoring the educational event? Who is paying for it? Why? What are their goals? What do they fear/hope to avoid? What are their expectations? Who opposes it? What have they done/might they do to discourage workers from participating? What are the stakes? The risks?
Who will participate? How do they get there, who recruits them? What are the positions and interests of the various players? Who are the people who will be in the room? What do they do? What experience, interests, skills, resources, etc. do they bring? How did they get there (who organized them)? Who is not in the room? Why not? What do you know about what they want? What else do you want to know?
Who are you? What do you want? What are your goals? Fears? What do you bring? Who are you working for? What are the goals and fears of the institution or organization? What do you hope to achieve? What are the minimal conditions you require in order to do your work? What is your bottom line? What are your expectations and assumptions? What are your nightmares?
Great, but who am I working with? Where? When? Why? What are my intentions? What are theirs? What is the context?
Context is a critical factor in determining the possibility or impossibility of popular education. This activity places educators in context and challenges us to develop a shared (or not) vision of labor education, and explore the uncomfortable gap between our rhetoric and goals on the one hand, and our daily practice, on the other. The hope is that by better understanding how context shapes our work, we can find ways to get closer to where we want to be.
Sometimes the problem is not restrictions placed on the educator (or the participants) but a program design that thwarts the goals of popular education, for example a retraining program for workers whose jobs are being eliminated but who may be able to survive if they can pass an upgrading exam.
Such a program may be a valuable aid or may be a soft way to downsize (or both), but the premise of the program runs counter to the purpose of popular education. (This is not to say that a dedicated educator can't "teach the moment" and work from this difficult starting point, but the context is working heavily against her.)
Participants in such a setting may also embrace the premise and reject attempts to start an open-ended dialogue as a diversion from their goals. (Another example is immigrant workers in a union sponsored language program -- there is often a tension between the educator's agenda, even if it is democratic and participatory, and the agenda of the participants.
Few of us are really free to practice consistently, where we are it is because we have found a context in which we can work. So, our teaching is itself a struggle and a problem.
The institutional context and the goals it reinforces are another problem -- for example when a program is organized for purely instrumental purposes, like passing an exam or weeding out applicants. My experience teaching Labor History to IBEW Local 3 apprentices was like this -- at times it seemed like the union's educational program, which required all members to get an Associate's Degree in Labor Studies, was designed to subvert meaningful learning. (This was not true, I think, of the courses which taught job-related skills.) My teaching in English As a Second Language Classes was often like this, too. (You find yourself spending what seems like an eternity at the first step in the spiral, with few chances to move towards problem-posing.)
The other crucial piece of the educational process that happens before the spiral begins is the dialogue and negotiation that establishes the when, where, who, and what of the educational event. Before I begin the dialogue with the participants in a workshop, I have already been in dialogue with someone who is organizing the event. I may have already worked with that person on union democracy issues, helped them understand legal rights and organizing options, for example.
Activities in this chapter: