Activity

By Matt Noyes (and participants in the National Carpenters conference.)

ADJUSTMENTS COMMITTEE HERE

REWRITE THIS AS A CASE STUDY WITH WHAT WOULD YOU DO TYPE QUESTIONS

(Like much good popular education, this case was the result of painstaking collaborative planning and a spontaneous rebellion of the participants. Thanks to carpenters Michael Cranmer, Susan Cranmer, and Ken Little, to activist writer Dan LaBotz, to Carl Biers, Jane Latour, and Andy Piascik of AUD, and to Mike Orrfelt, popular educator, journalist, carpenter and building trades activist.)

Summary:

By Matt Noyes in collaboration with Carl Biers, Jane Latour, Mike Orrfelt, and Andy Piascik.

By Matt Noyes, from El Camino Logico in Alforja, Volume I.

Not everyone has experience planning actions and democratic, collaborative planning requires some method. This activity can help members of a group work together and develop a shared plan.

Summary:
In this activity, participants have to organize several sets of cards – each representing one part of a planning process -- that form a logical order, or do they…?

By Matt Noyes. (This case study is in the form of a "Problem-Based Learning" activity, an approach that is used often in medical schools to have students work through diagnosing and treating a condition. [[LINK]] Nick Bedell and David Bindman, teachers and fellow union members at the Consortium for Worker Education, introduced me to PBL.)

Summary:

My version of Leon Rosenblatt's great "Non-Trivial Pursuits."

Summary:
Participants discuss short case studies of workplace and union problems and answer questions about their legal rights and how to enforce them. Also puts legal rights in the context of reform organizing.

Good for:

By Matt Noyes. Based on a class taught for AUD by Steve Downs, a New York City train operator and reform activist who is an expert at Robert's Rules in the real world and a great improviser.

Summary:

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:

Grievances – complaints about workplace conditions – are a central focus of day to day trade unionism. There is a lot of educational material available on the various types of grievances and how to handle them – how to identify grievances, how to investigate, prepare, and present grievances, arbitration, etc. (See Schwartz guide, TDU book in Spanish and English, IBT Turn it Around, etc.)

By Matt Noyes. (I got the idea from the late Spalding Gray's "interviewing the audience" performance technique, which I saw him perform in Brooklyn's Prospect Park one summer night. Gray circulated in the audience prior to the performance, finding interesting people who he later brought onstage for a rambling, but very entertaining, interview and conversation.)

Summary:

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: