For items relating to popular education for union democracy, including blog entries, etc.
大貧民 - poor bastards
A Japanese card game which presupposes inequality both at the outset and as the game proceeds.
The flow:
The players are divided into five groups:
- the very rich,
- the rich,
- the middle,
- the poor, and
- the poor bastards
Monopoly with a real distribution of wealth and income
Simple idea:
Play Monopoly (or Life) with an initial distribution of wealth and income that matches the one prevailing in your society.
The flow:
Prepare the game. Joker gives participants a Monopoly set and a source like Wealth Inequality in America (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM) or G William Domhoff's "Wealth, Income and Power" (http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html) and asks participants to divide the property and cash among the players in a way that mirrors the actual division of income and wealth in the United States.
Hey! Shujinko!
I learned about the history of the japanese word 主人公 shujinko from Yurie Kumakura, a researcher of workers cooperatives in Japan. Goshu Nakanishi, one of the founders of the workers cooperative movement in Japan, used shujinko as an equivalent for protagonismo (which he may have learned from Jose Maria Arizmendiarrietta). The word is common in Zen Buddhism, where it is often translated as "Master," and the story goes that the Chinese monk Zuigan used to talk to himself while meditating, addressing himself, "Hey! Shujinko! Are you sleeping?" or "Hey! Shujinko!
Ken Loach Films online
The great director Ken Loach has uploaded many of his films, a wonderful resource.
Cards Against Humanity
This seems like a great game format, combining up to date culturally relevant* questions and answers, many of them inappropriate (a good thing), with random, surrealist play. The instructions are snarky but include many good ideas. It seems like a great game to re-tool to fit your situation, if you can find the right balance of elements: commercial culture, obscenity, poetry, social realism...
I will definitely be using this in some way.
Two week check in
A technique for encouraging participants to support each other in applying what they learn, that I got from Kaisu Tuominiemi, a coach at Mondragon Team Academy.
The flow:
At the end of a learning event, a course, a workshop, a class, the joker asks participants to write down one (or two) specific actions they want to take in the next two weeks, as a way to apply what they have learned.
Mistake Game
A fast-moving concentration game in which mistakes are celebrated. I learned this from Kaisu Tuominiemi, a coach at Mondragon Team Academy.
In a circle, five to maybe ten people.
Phase One
The joker starts the game by putting her left hand on her right shoulder and saying, "one!"
The person to her right repeats the motion, saying, "two!"
This continues four more times.
Chouseisan
I learned about this tool from Shimpei Ogawa.
In addition to being very useful for scheduling a meeting, or people's work schedules, it can be used for accountability in group work -- making a list of tasks and having the group members identify which ones they will do. You can easily visualize how well the group is distributing tasks.
Time Bomb
I learned this game from students in an English class at Meiji University.
In this game participants add words to make a sentence under pressure of time.
Part One:
Everyone stands in a circle.
One person starts a sentence by saying one word. The next person has five seconds to add a word that continues the sentence, and so on until someone fails to add a word, or adds a word that doesn't work. When that happens -- the group screams, or makes an explosion sound, etc.
Example:
1. My
2. mother
3. was
4. born
5. in
6. a
