Activities that help people begin to analyze their experience. Some are also useful for adding information to the discussion, or for practicing knowledge.
Adapted from "The triangle tool" in Educating for a Change.
Summary:
Using a simple analytic tool, this activity helps people become aware of the different factors -- structure, culture and participation -- that combine to make a union more or less democratic. It also emphasizes the role of the rank-and-file as well as the officers and staff.
Good for:
put my line here, image first
Here's the problem. Evaluating a course at the end, and/or at various points during the course, is essential to good teaching/learning practice. But, the tools I have used have sometimes felt dull and plodding, like busy work, especially when I try to get people to make the evaluation more specific and concrete.
The problem is worse when the participants are friendly and compliant. Then it really feels pro-forma.
By Matt Noyes, adapted from "Power" in Literacy for Empowerment: A Resource Handbook for Community Based Educators. Washington, D.C. : Association for Community Based Education, 1988. (ACBE credits this activity to Barbara Greene of the Mountain Women's Exchange.)
[illustration: workers placing stickers on a democracy and power line]
Summary:
These are categories we used in the power line at the 2000 National Rank-and-File Carpenters Conference in Boston, Mass. that AUD organized with Carpenters for a Democratic Union.
Note:
Use this to check-in, to get people's reactions, to get out of a circular discussion....
Taking turns, each person speaks...
Time...
Rules: good to have rules like no cross-talk...
Listening...
A simple way to record both individual opinions and the sense of the group.
Use color stickers (red, green, blue, purple, brown... stay away from orange and yellow -- too hard to see).
....
MOVE THIS TO CHAPTER ONE AND LINK TO IT
My coworkers and I used The Educator's Journey in the Popular Education and Activism Working Group we had in the mid 1990's. I found it helped me better understand my fellow teacher/activists and helped me place my current work as a teacher in the context of my experience. (The activity is universal in popular education. I first learned it from Joao Paulo and Eleanora Castano Ferreira in a workshop for teachers at the old ILGWU Worker-Family Education Program.)
By Matt Noyes.
Summary:
This activity uses a simple game to help people learn and remember the basic terminology of Robert's Rules of Parliamentary procedure. (See links to Robert's Rules sites.)
Good for:
Making the jargon and basic procedures familiar, helping people see how to use the terminology to do what they want to do.
Materials:
By Matt Noyes. I started using diagrams to help explain the framework of legal rights and the importance of organizing, then found that the diagrams could also be used to explore people's visions of what unionism is and can/should be. I added the handout later as a kind of summary of my own view of the diagrams.
Objectives:
