Activities that help people begin to analyze their experience. Some are also useful for adding information to the discussion, or for practicing knowledge.
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.
I came up with this in a Field Study course in which I took at group of students to NYC to study unions and workers centers. The students had no experience of unionism, so we needed to come up with a working definition of "union" so that we had a common basis for discussion. (As opposed to me just explaining what a union is, or given them someone else's definition. - What's wrong with explaining? Read on.) This activity gave us a great starting point for our discussion and it captured something essential about unionism and any social movement: the need to constantly reinvent and reimagine.
The task we set ourselves in an English for Activists class was to analyze an upcoming local election with major implications for parliamentary elections that would follow later in the year. The context was a recent victory by the Liberal Democratic Party in the Upper House elections and the continuing decline of the radical left/green parties which most of our participants support.
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:
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.
This activity combines "What do we want? When do we want it?" with "Ten levels of 'Why?'"
Good for: animation, personal reflection, starting discussion of goals and strategic vision.
Set-up: circle-game, sitting or standing, walking (like on picket line), followed by individual work and then, at the end, circle again
Number of people: enough for a "we"
Materials: none (could be interesting to have people create placards or picket signs at the end)
A nice way to dig under obvious truths. I learned the basic technique here from Emily Schnee, from whom I learn so much. I have found that many students experience this as a revelation because it calls on them to question again and again when they are typically called on to give one answer.
Take a simple statement of an identity (I am a teacher), or a problem (I don't have enough time to do work I want to do), or just about any simple sentence (slugs leave a trail)...
Spoken version:
The player says her/his sentence out loud, then one person asks "why?"
For this activity, rather than an example of using the activity, I want to provide "talking points" and questions I might use to orient myself before facilitating this activity. These are not notes for a lecture I would give. They are not the right answers that I am looking for, they are just to help me clarify my own thoughts. They may help you do the same. But you will need to clarify your own ideas.
On the three points of the triangle:
intro - explain pbl format
Round One
In an English as a Second Language class for immigrant workers, Ramona is sitting in the back of the classroom, talking excitedly in Spanish with the person next to her. Standing at the front of the class, Matt is frustrated and curious.
Over time, the standard chants and slogans used on picket lines and in demonstrations, protests, and marches, become stale and cliche. The content gets lost and the music becomes sing-song. The chants have no impact. The whole experience becomes disempowering. (This has been true for so long that even complaining about it is stale and cliche!)
