Issue

An idea for an activity to help people think about different ways of organizing information to build understanding of historical events.

[the idea is that one role of the teacher is to create boxes in which people are constrained in such a way as to have to find their protagonism and freedom (or not -- always remains their choice and inconformidad trumps rules). So, practically speaking, a basic format like check-in/check-out is just a pair of boxes, like squares on a game board. Pre and Post-Motorola, the flow of a set of activities over one session (see Educating for a Change and Juegos), even the Spiral, are boxes of this type.

Need to compare the various spirals:
Bagnall and Koberg, Educating for a Change, Nonaka and Takeuchi, Senge, Partanen, Alforja dialectic process...

Compare these to Jacotot's "process" to tease out explication and progressivism, and democracy...

Focus is innovation and creativity as keys to emancipation (or vice versa)

Verification is a key concept/practice for Jacotot's ignorant schoolmaster. Often it is a question of verification through reference to a shared object of study. ("I see ten people in this picture." -- Really? I see six, let's check...) But verification is also about testing mutual understanding between individuals, and, as such, about recognition.

Sometimes, after a long period of using different ideas and tools, you find how they fit together, like cylinders aligning in a padlock.

Me --> You

I learned this rule of improvisation at Kani Club, and have found it very useful in my teaching. (A statement of the rule and nine others is here: http://improvencyclopedia.org/references//David_Alger%60s_First_10_Rules...)

It is most useful for any activity in which you will ask people to create a story or some other content together.

It can be added to the Broken Squares activity -- in which "Yes, and..." is a great tool for solving the collective puzzle.

A comment on the use of the question "What do you see?" and its application in debriefing activities.

Add "What do you think of it?" and "What do you make of it?"

Some education handbooks, especially those written for classroom teachers, add a "Time it takes" item to their descriptions of activities. I had initially planned to do this, because it is so important as a facilitator to have a realistic sense of how long any given activity might take, or, put otherwise, how much time to give it. No one wants to run out of time just when things get interesting, or find herself standing there with twenty minutes left and nothing to do.

This is not an activity -- it is more of a comment.

One of the biggest obstacles to popular education as it is typically practiced in the US labor movement, and one of the biggest distortions of the method, is the limitation of popular education one-off workshops or conferences, with no continuity. The most famous models of popular education -- from the Sea Islands of South Carolina to the base community organizations in Brazil -- would be inconceivable on such a foundation. Those projects lasted years, not hours.

CUE