Rough Draft

A collection of learning games and other activities that language learners and teachers can use to learn together, as equals, with joy and creativity.

Most of the activities are based on my work teaching English in Japan, but the games and ideas come from many sources. This book is designed for egalitarian, collective, self-learning, with or without teachers.

The games are written for English language learning but can be adapted for other uses.

It is a work in progress.

Make a collection specifically for language learning: Feel Free: 100 techniques for creativity, communication, self-expression for English learning.

Make a more general collection for creativity and entrepreneurship in the broad sense

Stick with Horizontal Ed. for Worker Self-Org.

Got this idea from the video The Story of Solutions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpkRvc-sOKk

Augusto Boal uses this game a bit differently, I learned it from his Games for Actors and Non-Actors.

In this case, the idea is to have people play with their awareness of the different sounds that can be made from the same letter. Using the Silent Way sound-color chart for reference, the joker can choose a letter, e.g. A, and then ask people to ...

Write up use of tag cloud and add this idea: use I love, I hate, etc to process the tag cloud, creating a kind of poem, can have three or four tags for each line, e.g. I love peace, freedom, mountains, chile. I hate militarism, racism, McDonald's, capitalism...

Slam the resulting poems.

Another idea: have people choose own personal key word from tag cloud and then slam it?

My reading of the Marfán cartoon, as a would-be ignorant schoolmaster:

Every activity is a box into which I put people -- of course, as in any game (except the Hunger Games or Battle Royale), people choose to participate at some level, but as Huizinga said about sorcery, that one chooses to be duped, it is a constraint nonetheless. Whether people will "get out" of the activity and, if so, how, is to be seen. My job is to uphold the integrity of the box and support the individuals as they seek their way(s) out.

It is difficult to describe this activity because it is so rich in content and so great a way to practice "horizontal" pedagogy. It is a mash-up of Jacotot's "What do you see? What do you think of it? What do you make of it?" and ???

Materials: color copies of Miguel Marfán's cartoon on the cover of Técnicas Participativas Para la Educación Popular, with the book title removed.

The flow:

Joker gives people a copy of the Marfán cartoon and ask them to look at it closely. Give them five minutes or so.

List of things to do to ready book for publication:

Common format for all chapters.

Rewrite introduction.

Prepare book proposal.