Thinking Union

Remember. You must share this poem. It brings good luck. Send no money. Don't ignore it."'
Consciousness. being truly awake and alert. can only be developed by the careful application of cultural logic. It can't be pushed along like a donkey. it can't be prodded by shocks. electrical or emotional. and it can't be humiliated into action.
The job of the poet is to ring the bell. The job of the adult educator is to open the curtains and let the light. which has always been there, flow into the dark. (2)'
THINK TWICE
It's in the playground that we learned the difference. Certainly by the age of nine. The street smart and the book smart have different costumes and different languages.
In adult education courses, participants and teachers stare at one another across the same experiential gulfs we discovered as children. And whichever group we belonged to back then, it's clear that all adult basic educators start from the book-smart pole at the beginning of a course. Whether our "expertise'. derives from experience or from formal study, it has been recognized by naming us as educators. We should think twice about what this means.
Authentic adult basic education is a job for conscious romantics, (3) people who have a vision of social justice, and practical experience of the difficulties in bringing it about. We work with those adults who have been expelled earliest from formal education, who associate teaching. with negation and humiliation. And we ourselves are often over-extended by the multiple strains of our work - how many high school teachers have to hustle grants just to keep their classrooms open?
Yet when trade union and other adult basic educators gather, the raw, impolite facts of our work are often screened out of the conversation. Our communication patterns recall the properties of water, so carefully memorized as adolescents -colourless, odourless and tasteless.'.'
I suspect it's because we don't take seriously enough the tensions built into Our own learning process. The source of the tension is our status as go-betweens. Our challenge is to direct the flow of ideological traffic between the powerful and the powerless, without ourselves being run over.

103
Keeping track of these contradictions in our role means we have to think carefully. Think twice.
After all, my work has different imperatives than that of the union stewards in my courses.(5) The "engineered anxiety" of workers in the telephone system, members of my union, is different from my stress as a worker educator. For them, the issues are productivity pressure, electronic surveillance, income insecurity. For me, the porous wall between employment and voluntary social action, the disorientation of constant travel, the pressure on family life are anchored in a different work process. While we share a commitment to social unionism and a stake in the union's organizational life, no one is helped by the pretence that our work lives are identical.
As educators, our raw material is ideas, and our product is words and images. This product, I would argue, is intrinsically equally valuable to that of other workers. And since we have chosen this craft, even for a time, we shouldn't talk only to the walls, or only with the participants in our courses. We should take over our own stress factory.
This means developing some common language among literacy workers, teachers of English as a second language, vocational instructors and trade union educators. For us all, a critical popular education movement can evolve only speaking and listening carefully with on another. In that spirit, I will draw on my trade union experience in sketching some principles of popular education.
OTHER WORKERS
Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter
Out or black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids or rile, the candor or tar,
Out or creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden doilies,
They Lion grow.(6)
The living room walls were covered with certificates. High school graduation, welding courses, Augusta's university degree, lovingly packed when they immigrated from Nigeria.
But one small label stood out. It was a piece of masking tape starting to peel off the base of the table lamp, with a price of $20 marked on it in ballpoint pen.
Zeke and Augusta were selling the contents of their house, part of the stake they had built in five years of hard work. This small mining town in the interior of B.C. was just the first stop in the road to their dreams.
Now they were ready to move to an urban centre. The down payment on their new house had been mailed to London, Ontario, and Augusta's transcripts had been accepted at the university. Zeke was ready to take a pay cut, working as a welder at 30% less than his current rate at the coal mine. Selling their house and furnishings would give the nest egg needed to carry them through this next phase.
But then the strike started. It had been on for six weeks. Housing prices had dropped, because it was anyone's guess how long the strike would last. And they were in limbo.

They were solid union supporters. Zeke was sick of being treated like a
dummy by the company, and Augusta knew that the safety hazards in the mind had to be challenged. They hadn't flinched since the strike vote. But under- neath was the sense that their plans and hopes were being ground up in a conflict not of their making.
They were workers. As a worker educator, I could have dished out some abstract rhetoric of solidarity and struggle as my contribution. It would have made no sense to them at all. Their personal solidarity as a couple"', and their status as immigrants of colour were basis on which any real identification with the other workers in the strike would have to build.
Strike education for us meant bringing these realities to the surface. It meant articulating the individual needs and situations of each striker.
In automobile lore, this is called customizing. It's a luxury, for a small market. For a popular educator, this is a necessity. Not just as tactics but as ethics.
The time and place of this story was a strike in a small mining town. But the time for this couple was the eve of a move, and the place was their living room, with a price tag on all that they owned.
The educational job here was to synchronize Zeke and Augusta's watches with those of the other strikers. It was to unite, join, merge -to build collectivity by establishing shared meanings. If we are to anchor general ideas about popular movements in people's lived experience, this is first and central. It's a precondition to democratic educational leadership.(8)
Then we can begin to draw together the needs of young and old, of men and women, of native-born and immigrant, of employed and unemployed. We can legitimately talk about the educational moment in the process of building popular movements.
CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING ON A CROWDED STAGE
At a certain point you have to recognize (he work. of your own hand in your confinement.
Learn to untie the ropes by re-tracing the moves. Look. for clues you've left yourself on the way in.
Be aware of knots you've tied particularly tight -they're the hardest to undo because you meant it that way when you were doing it.
Only read books when you have to. (9)
To make sense of the adult basic education drama, we need to know who is on stage. There are three starring roles, those of participant, educator and sponsor.
For liberal or ?facilitating? adult education, the centre of attention is the participant. Usually, however, the learner is treated as an individual rather than situated in the dynamics of social power. (10)
In trade union education, the participants are members, already active in the ?union culture? (11) I have introduced Zeke and Augusta to remind us that union members in Canada are a very diverse group.
The conventional image of "unionist" is of a white man, middle aged, employed full-time in a stable, industrial job. But this image is already a generation behind the facts. Today, more and more, unionists are on the move, across regions and economic sectors.

" i. Uo noA an ~p,S q~,qM" U~.e ~~Uo Pa!J~I~ S, l' pu. '~'11w.(01 J,~q1 j~'I~J dJel{s
Increasingly, women are working Outside the home, in unionized informa- tion/service jobs. Their involvement is part of the reason why unionization in Canada has'risen from 30 per cent of the workforce to 40 per cent in the las( generation. And their energy has propelled a woman to the national presidency
of Canada's labour movement.
An adult educator with an outdated image of "unionist" could no( be effective in Canada today. Workers may lack book.smarts, but they know which way the wind is blowing.
Reflecting on the education drama also means casting the educator. Most good mystery novels centre on the question of agency -whodunit? In adult basic education, it's usually a woman. After all, work in this field is relatively low in pay and prestige, precisely the areas of the economy where women rend to be ghettoized.
Recognition by the labour movement of the working conditions among adult basic educators has been rather belated and cautious. Yet the recent policy statement by the Ontario Federation of Labour indicates the Possible coalition around literacy:
All over Ontario, groups of People are working to provide literacy training. These People work hard under grossly under financed conditions because they are strongly committed to improving the lives of People. All of us in the trade union movement know People in our own organizations who have struggled with the enormous disadvantage of being, unable to fully use printed materials. ..We should seek to launch a literacy drive which operates in the work. place, during working, hours. This drive should take on the chaner of a major campaign and must follow the fundamental principles of adult education -
democratic control by the participants over methods. approaches and the materials to be used. (20)
As we engage in dialogue around an area of common interest, such as literacy. the differences in institutional stake will also emerge. Some of us are better paid than others. Some of us are identified directly with the participants in a social movement -union. women's group, community organization. etc. Our sympathies. friendships and incomes are intimately tied to the fate of that movement. Often, as in the labour movement, the educator has come into an educational staff Position by rising, through the ranks.
Others are professional education, for whom Popular organizations are allies rather than employers. Seeing, Participants as a constituency or clientele rather than a universe confers on these People a very different stake in discussions. At times their critical distance raises the level of debate. At others. the division of labour becomes a dialogue of the deaf.
Another factor to consider in the Position of the educator in the institutional hierarchy. One of the paradoxes of or..nizational life is that the best popular educators are all too often ..promoted" into categories such as researchers, policy-maker or administrators.(13), While they may thereby become invaluable strategic allies for the adult basic educator, they also lose direct contact with the central educational encounter. Gradually, their educational views rend to drift into nostalgia and paternalism, until institutional debate brings into sharp relief their loyalties, and it is clarified once again ?which side are you on??

For critical adult education, then, it is necessary to think in stereo -to locate both participants and educators in social context. Only then can authentic dialogue take place. And only then does a shared praxis become Possible.
Once we have clarity on the social identity of the learners and the educators, the third actor appears -the sponsor. For those who think in terms of academic freedom, this may be a distasteful matter to raise, but such people would be ineffective as adult basic educators in any case.

In practice, it takes a sponsor to bring educators and learners together. This is not to negate the value of self-directed and individual learning. But programs of adult basic education invariably are conditioned by the educational, political and economic contradictions of a sponsor.
This may mean navigating through the internal political rivalries of a union, or challenging the constraints imposed on a vocational training agency by its dependence on government funding, or debating with community college staff about their condescending stance towards workers. Whatever the disciplines involved, failure to reflect critically on the sponsor of adult basic education is naive. It can also lead to heartbreaking surprises. ..a Waterloo of illusions. (14)
In practice, then, adult basic education requires a cast of three characters - the participants, the educator and the sponsor. In theatre terms, it is a ?three hander". Inevitably, there will be some tensions among these three actors.
Consensus models of education, which associate tension with negativity, will tend to suppress this fact. Dialectical models, which associate tension with energy, will yield more insight and inspiration for practitioners of adult basic education.
Indeed, the momentum and dynamism of any adult learning program is generated by the interplay among these three roles. A responsible actor in popular education is constantly dealing with the kaleidoscopic shifts in personal and social relations which result. By ruling out any of the three ?who's" in the cast, the richness and transformative potential of the educational drama would be lost.
KNOWING, FEELING AND DOING
I wanted to swim in the most ample lives,
The widest estuaries,
And when, little by little, man came denying, me
Closing his paths and doors so that J could not touch his wounded existence
with my divining, fingers
I came by other ways. (15)
In adult education, we need to conduct ourselves by knowing, feeling and doing. This means breaking the tyranny of the cognitive, situating information as only one level of the educational encounter. The levels of emotion and skill must be dealt into critical popular education with equal force.
In the silicone age, the most discounted of the three is feeling.(16) Yet it is the key to generating any popular resistance to dominant ideas.
When an educator says .'free trade" or ?abortion" or ?pollution", each of us hits a different level in our emotional thermometer. It would take some discussion to reach a consensus on ranking their priority as content for adult basic education.
--

The challenge is for us to do in our reality what Paulo Freire and other popular educators have been doing in the intricacy of Latin American
society -act upon generative themes (17). This means first identifying a part of collective experience which participants acknowledge as important, be it bingo or grievances or alcoholism. Educational leadership means moving perceptions of the theme from naive to critical understanding, and then to transformative action, by a process of conscious dialogue.
In addressing each theme, the process of naming will be central. As with the "naming of cats" in T.S. Eliot, there will be different layers involved.
Further, we need to develop the courage to propose, to assert possible ways that they could reflect on the issue and incorporate their conclusions into shaping their own lives. While currently fashionable, it is misleading and irresponsible to suggest that a dream of change, and the commitment to act upon it, is without value. (18)
Many of the "communications difficulties" experienced by adult basic educators, in unions as well as formal educational institutions, can be traced to the separation of knowing from feeling from doing. Let us consider how each is distorted when cut off from the others.

The first approach, heavy on knowing, we might term "research-driven". Its central commitment is to the content of a social issue, whether racism, sexism or class bias. Its energy and skill go to studying the matter and confronting people with findings.

The reaction of participants and sponsors to this stance is usually to plead overload and hence justify paralysis. In one workshop on technology where I myself erred on this side, a participant commented, "I came looking for a glass of water, and found I was dealing with a fire hydrant? The resulting confusion contradicts the stated goa1 of the educator, to achieve collective clarity on the issue.

The second approach, heavy on the affective level, we might term "feeling - driven". Its central commitment is to group process and psychic empowerment. Here, the educator's energy and skill goes into listening, and into shepherding the group towards an intuitive consensus based on information already present among the participants. If one seeks a glass of water here, a hug may be the only result.

The reaction of unionists and participants in other popular movements to this approach is to wonder "where's the beef" Often participants will retreat to the safe ground. to the cognitive level, by pressing, for accurate data. for statistics and specifics. And they regard with suspicion the claims of the leader that there are no externally-set, hidden agendas. Their withdrawal contradicts the stated goal of the educator, to build a common set of feelings.
The third approach, heavy on the skills and action developed by participants. may be termed ?output-driven?. In its dichotomized form. it seeks a public outcome, whatever the price is cognitive accuracy or affective cohesion. Behavioural standards are set, and quantifiable results are then fed to the educational and political sponsors of the educational encounter. This is an instrumental approach to popular education, analogous to those who assess the value of a theatre production by computing the number of "bums on seats ".

Educationally, it is clear that each of these approaches withers in isolation. Politically, the separation serves to push away the real fear?informed and effective social action by learner in popular social movements.

Most administrators in the adult basic education system claim social neutrality. Among many adult educators, there is a strong, if misguided, sense that "professionalism " means withdrawal from the learning process at the point where people begin to test their knowledge and feelings in action. Rather than an integrated educational praxis, this results in sterile discourse, sensed and treated as such by participants.
Certainly, workers like Zeke and Augusta were not seeking "neutral" education when they came to a course in the middle of a strike. They wanted support and shared risk, and had a right to find it. But the willingness to stake a social and ethical ground, to take a stand, can emerge in much less dramatic and polarized situations. And the educator who dodges at this point based on a professional self-image triggers the same silent sneer that the street smart, the powerless, have always reserved for the spineless among their social "superiors".

.A socially engaged and responsible educational strategy means working in three dimensions at once - developing a solid grounding in the content of issues; charting the emotional snakes and ladders along the route; and setting an internal compass of skill which can culminate in effective individual and collective action.
This synthesis is in fact a synergy. One alone yields addition; with two in combination, we can achieve multiplication; only with all three operating simultaneously can we generate the educational algebra of authentic social transformation.
EXIT, STAGE LEFT
...you can't escape, there's nowhere to go.
They have made this star unsafe, and this ale Primitive;
though your mind is somewhere else,
Your ass ain't. (19)
Among adult basic educators in Canada, it is time to compare dreams. We should stop settling for less. When we start, then, we need to make peace rather than war among ourselves.
We also need to get specific. In trade union life, people are constantly forced to say what they want. Proposals (or "demands", as the media usually say) are the starting point of all collective bargaining. And in grievance handling. stewards know that no arbitrator is empowered to award a remedy which has not been requested. In these very immediate ways, setting specific objectives is an integral pan of the union culture.
The most concise and progressive statement so far of labour's educational agenda is the policy paper of the Ontario Federation of Labour, "Life-long Learning". It proposes a six-point program of action, based on this premise:

As the representatives of working people and their families, the labour movement must take a highly activist approach to the process of life-long learning and its institutions. We must argue that all of our society, all working people, have a fundamental right to participate in and shape the programs and institutions which make life-long learning possible.'.
In the process of shaping together the programs of adult basic education, a sense of proportion is also needed. We all operate within institutional and
historical limits. We know that the primary educator for adults is experience, perhaps followed by the mass media. Only in the third instance do structured sessions enter the politics of perception. That's why a popular educator who doesn't intervene in these first two levels is conceding the centre of the room to the establishment, and conducting the battle for hearts and minds in the corners only.
Critical popular education does not only look at the surfaces of a room. It goes beneath the furnishings and colouring. It encourages learners to understand the principles of construction. Only in that way are people empowered, equipped both individually and collectively, to renovate, to demolish, to construct according to their own objectives. (21)
In the education program of the Communications and Electrical Workers of Canada, four objectives have been established to guide our practice - dignity on the job, democracy in the union, responsibility in the society and building on the grassroots. (22) In coming years, our educational practice will refine and develop this statement. But in its current form, it still provides some charts by which we can plan the educational journey. And it ensures that each participant in a union course has the power, the mandate, the obligation to speak their knowledge to express their social passion, to apply their skills to the task of building a better world.
As conscious romantics in adult basic education. we address the learning needs of the most oppressed sectors in society. Of course, there are substantial forces lined up to ensure that romantics of any sort do not challenge the status quo. Our work, then, will have to take Particular shape in each educational site. Our energy will have to be applied in a focused, customized way.
That our vision is not precise and detailed at this point need not stop us from proceeding. (23) But critical popular educators need to mobilize energies around a shared vision. not merely divide up tasks. In other words. objectives should be driving tactics, rather than the other way around.
As a concluding statement of objective. from a conscious romantic who has pioneered in her own generation of adult educators. we might listen to Doris Marshall:
I want to see ordinary people feeling their own worth as human beings and recognizing the same worth in other ordinary people, so that the resources of the world can be used together. This cannot be brought about from the top down, but only by ordinary people imbued with their own power. (24)

Notes & References
(1)Daniel David Moses, ?The Chain?, unpublished poem based on the format of a chain letter, 1996.
(2)Catherine Macleod, ?cultural logic?, in A Working Class Girl?s Album of Adventure (Charlottetown, PEI: Ragweed Press, forthcoming).
(3)This phrase was introduced to me by Richard Swift of the New Internationalist magazine.
(4)This reference was made by Rosa Paredes of Venezuela, at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the International Council for Adult Education, In Sri Lanka, October 1966.
(5)The most comprehensive steward course now available is the week-long program designed by Barbara Thomas, Dan Mallette and myself for the Canadian Labour Congress (Ottawa: C.L.C., 1986).
(6)Philip Levine, ?They Feed The Lion?, Selected Poems (New York: Atheneum, 196-40, p.81.
(7)For a challenging sociology, and an often lyrical defence of the couple, (?the smallest social unit capable of resistance?), see Francesco Alberoni, Falling in Love (New York: Random House, 1983).
(8)?The coordinator is not just a participant and the process of the program is not spontaneous. The coordinator?s role is to ensure that the process – what happens and how it happens – encourages learning and the development of leadership in the group.? Rick Arnold and Bev Burke, A Popular Education Handbook (Toronto: CUSO and OISE, 1983).
(9)Catherine Macleod, ?Freedom Exercise?, in op. cit.
(10)See Alan Thomas?s article and my critique, both published in my article Learning in Society (Ottawa: Canadian Commission for UNESCO, 1984)
(11)The concept of union culture is developed in my article ?Public Policy Debate: A view from the ?union culture??, in the magazine Optimum (Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1965).
(12)Jo Surich, Glenn Pattinson et. al., ?Life-Long Learning?, policy document 3 at the 30th annual convention of the Ontario Federation of Labour. (Toronto: O.F.L., November 24-27, 1986), p.4.
(13)In union life, we have the parallel experience of fine activists being ?promoted: into management. This pattern is consistent with the pathologies described in Michael D. Cohen and James G. March, ?Leadership in an Organized Anarchy?, Leadership in Ambiguity (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974
(14)This phrase, from the Brazilian sociologist Fernande Henrique Carlese, is cited by Isabel Hernandez in her evaluation of the World Assembly of Adult Education, held in Argentina in November, 1985.
(15)Pable Neruda, ?Heights of Maccha Plechu?, part IV (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972, p.22)
(16)The fear of passion exhibited by modern institutions is well captured by Alberoni: ?Confronted by the nascoat state, even in its most minute form, the institution is shaken in its certainties. Reproducing the event in which the institution is shaken in its certainties. Reproducing the event in which the institution is born revealing the forces that nourish it in their fundamental purity, the nascent state creates a situation of mortal risk. All social mechanisms, all the wisdom of tradition, now have only one aim: to try to suppress it, to reader it impossible?. Op. cit., p.82
(17)The program content of the problem-posing method – dialogical par excellence – is constituted and organized by the students? view of the world, where their own generative themes are found. The content this constantly expands and renews itself.? Paulo Freire, Podagogy of the oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971). p.181
(18)Everyone knows that this element of goodness exists, that it can grow, or that it can die, and there?s something particularly disingenuous and cheap about extricating oneself from the human struggle with the whispered excuse that it?s already over?. Wallace Shawn, ?Reflections after writing a play in the age of Reagan?, American Theatre, September, 1996, p. 49.
(19)Imamu Amiri Baraka, cited in Ellesa Melamed, ?Reclaiming the Power to Act?, Therapy New, Summer 1984, p.8
(20)Jo Surich, Glenn Patterson et al., op. clt., p.1.
(21)This image is paraphrased from the Nicaraguan adult basic educator Eduardo Baaz, in a presentation to the ICAE conference in Sri Lanka (see above, note #4)
(22)The full text of the statement is as follows:
?Dignity on the job – as union activists, we need to feel confidence in ourselves and our backup team. We need skills to educate, organize and represent fellow workers effectively And we have the right to accurate information?s about the economic, technological and political forces which affect the security and equality of our jobs.

?Democracy in the union – We equip workers to raise their voices on the job, and we do not silence them in the union. Our education program is participatory. It builds on the creativity and experience of the members. To be a healthy and effective organization, new ideas from the rank and file must be supported and refined. That?s part of our educational process.

?Responsibility in the society – Ours is more than a business union. It is part of the best movement for the social progress in Canada. When we study contract language and grievous procedure. It is within this context. The issues of the day, such as free trade and pay equity, are an integral part of our education agenda. And the skills to debate them in public, in the media, and central to modern unionism.?

?The grassroots, something to build on – information is power. Our program aims to empower ??? and file union members. By developing confidence and skills they can defend and extend the rights of all workers.?

?Thinking Union Bulletin #1?, (Toronto: Communications and Electrical Workers of Canada, September, 1986.)
(23)In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground which overlooks a swamp. On the high ground, manageable problems lend themselves to solution through the use of research-based theory and technique. In the irony of this situation is that the problems of the high ground tend to be relatively unimportant to individuals or to society at large, however great their technical interest may be while in the swamp lie the problems of greatest human concern.? Donald A. ????? ?Toward a New Epistemology of Practice: A Response to the Crisis of Professional knowledge?, ????? presented to the Global Learning Symposium, Toronto, April 28 – May 1, 1985. It has since been published in Alan Thomas and Edward Ploman ads., Learning and Development: A Global Perspective (Toronto: OISE. 1996).?
(24)Doris Marshall, speaking to the core team of the Doris Marshall Institute for Education and Action. Toronto, November 17, 1986.




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	Academic Education Writing

Conscious Romantics: A Trade Unionist's Reflections on the Politics of Learning D 'Arcy Martin
	Remember. You must share this poem. It brings good luck. Send no money. Don't ignore it."' Consciousness. being truly awake and alert. can only be developed by the careful application of cultural logic. It can't be pushed along like a donkey. it can't be prodded by shocks. electrical or emotional. and it can't be humiliated into action. The job of the poet is to ring the bell. The job of the adult educator is to open the curtains and let the light. which has always been there, flow into the dark. (2)' THINK TWICE It's in the playground that we learned the difference. Certainly by the age of nine. The street smart and the book smart have different costumes and different languages. In adult education courses, participants and teachers stare at one another across the same experiential gulfs we discovered as children. And whichever group we belonged to back then, it's clear that all adult basic educators start from the book-smart pole at the beginning of a course. Whether our "expertise'. derives from experience or from formal study, it has been recognized by naming us as educators. We should think twice about what this means. Authentic adult basic education is a job for conscious romantics, (3) people who have a vision of social justice, and practical experience of the difficulties in bringing it about. We work with those adults who have been expelled earliest from formal education, who associate teaching. with negation and humiliation. And we ourselves are often over-extended by the multiple strains of our work - how many high school teachers have to hustle grants just to keep their classrooms open? Yet when trade union and other adult basic educators gather, the raw, impolite facts of our work are often screened out of the conversation. Our communication patterns recall the properties of water, so carefully memorized as adolescents -colourless, odourless and tasteless.'.' I suspect it's because we don't take seriously enough the tensions built into Our own learning process. The source of the tension is our status as go-betweens. Our challenge is to direct the flow of ideological traffic between the powerful and the powerless, without ourselves being run over. 103 Keeping track of these contradictions in our role means we have to think carefully. Think twice. After all, my work has different imperatives than that of the union stewards in my courses.(5) The "engineered anxiety" of workers in the telephone system, members of my union, is different from my stress as a worker educator. For them, the issues are productivity pressure, electronic surveillance, income insecurity. For me, the porous wall between employment and voluntary social action, the disorientation of constant travel, the pressure on family life are anchored in a different work process. While we share a commitment to social unionism and a stake in the union's organizational life, no one is helped by the pretence that our work lives are identical. As educators, our raw material is ideas, and our product is words and images. This product, I would argue, is intrinsically equally valuable to that of other workers. And since we have chosen this craft, even for a time, we shouldn't talk only to the walls, or only with the participants in our courses. We should take over our own stress factory. This means developing some common language among literacy workers, teachers of English as a second language, vocational instructors and trade union educators. For us all, a critical popular education movement can evolve only speaking and listening carefully with on another. In that spirit, I will draw on my trade union experience in sketching some principles of popular education. OTHER WORKERS Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter Out or black bean and wet slate bread, Out of the acids or rile, the candor or tar, Out or creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden doilies, They Lion grow.(6) The living room walls were covered with certificates. High school graduation, welding courses, Augusta's university degree, lovingly packed when they immigrated from Nigeria. But one small label stood out. It was a piece of masking tape starting to peel off the base of the table lamp, with a price of $20 marked on it in ballpoint pen. Zeke and Augusta were selling the contents of their house, part of the stake they had built in five years of hard work. This small mining town in the interior of B.C. was just the first stop in the road to their dreams. Now they were ready to move to an urban centre. The down payment on their new house had been mailed to London, Ontario, and Augusta's transcripts had been accepted at the university. Zeke was ready to take a pay cut, working as a welder at 30% less than his current rate at the coal mine. Selling their house and furnishings would give the nest egg needed to carry them through this next phase. But then the strike started. It had been on for six weeks. Housing prices had dropped, because it was anyone's guess how long the strike would last. And they were in limbo. They were solid union supporters. Zeke was sick of being treated like a dummy by the company, and Augusta knew that the safety hazards in the mind had to be challenged. They hadn't flinched since the strike vote. But under- neath was the sense that their plans and hopes were being ground up in a conflict not of their making. They were workers. As a worker educator, I could have dished out some abstract rhetoric of solidarity and struggle as my contribution. It would have made no sense to them at all. Their personal solidarity as a couple"', and their status as immigrants of colour were basis on which any real identification with the other workers in the strike would have to build. Strike education for us meant bringing these realities to the surface. It meant articulating the individual needs and situations of each striker. In automobile lore, this is called customizing. It's a luxury, for a small market. For a popular educator, this is a necessity. Not just as tactics but as ethics. The time and place of this story was a strike in a small mining town. But the time for this couple was the eve of a move, and the place was their living room, with a price tag on all that they owned. The educational job here was to synchronize Zeke and Augusta's watches with those of the other strikers. It was to unite, join, merge -to build collectivity by establishing shared meanings. If we are to anchor general ideas about popular movements in people's lived experience, this is first and central. It's a precondition to democratic educational leadership.(8) Then we can begin to draw together the needs of young and old, of men and women, of native-born and immigrant, of employed and unemployed. We can legitimately talk about the educational moment in the process of building popular movements. CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING ON A CROWDED STAGE At a certain point you have to recognize (he work. of your own hand in your confinement. Learn to untie the ropes by re-tracing the moves. Look. for clues you've left yourself on the way in. Be aware of knots you've tied particularly tight -they're the hardest to undo because you meant it that way when you were doing it. Only read books when you have to. (9) To make sense of the adult basic education drama, we need to know who is on stage. There are three starring roles, those of participant, educator and sponsor. For liberal or ?facilitating? adult education, the centre of attention is the participant. Usually, however, the learner is treated as an individual rather than situated in the dynamics of social power. (10) In trade union education, the participants are members, already active in the ?union culture? (11) I have introduced Zeke and Augusta to remind us that union members in Canada are a very diverse group. The conventional image of "unionist" is of a white man, middle aged, employed full-time in a stable, industrial job. But this image is already a generation behind the facts. Today, more and more, unionists are on the move, across regions and economic sectors. " i. Uo noA an ~p,S q~,qM" U~.e ~~Uo Pa!J~I~ S, l' pu. '~'11w.(01 J,~q1 j~'I~J dJel{s Increasingly, women are working Outside the home, in unionized informa- tion/service jobs. Their involvement is part of the reason why unionization in Canada has'risen from 30 per cent of the workforce to 40 per cent in the las( generation. And their energy has propelled a woman to the national presidency of Canada's labour movement. An adult educator with an outdated image of "unionist" could no( be effective in Canada today. Workers may lack book.smarts, but they know which way the wind is blowing. Reflecting on the education drama also means casting the educator. Most good mystery novels centre on the question of agency -whodunit? In adult basic education, it's usually a woman. After all, work in this field is relatively low in pay and prestige, precisely the areas of the economy where women rend to be ghettoized. Recognition by the labour movement of the working conditions among adult basic educators has been rather belated and cautious. Yet the recent policy statement by the Ontario Federation of Labour indicates the Possible coalition around literacy: All over Ontario, groups of People are working to provide literacy training. These People work hard under grossly under financed conditions because they are strongly committed to improving the lives of People. All of us in the trade union movement know People in our own organizations who have struggled with the enormous disadvantage of being, unable to fully use printed materials. ..We should seek to launch a literacy drive which operates in the work. place, during working, hours. This drive should take on the chaner of a major campaign and must follow the fundamental principles of adult education - democratic control by the participants over methods. approaches and the materials to be used. (20) As we engage in dialogue around an area of common interest, such as literacy. the differences in institutional stake will also emerge. Some of us are better paid than others. Some of us are identified directly with the participants in a social movement -union. women's group, community organization. etc. Our sympathies. friendships and incomes are intimately tied to the fate of that movement. Often, as in the labour movement, the educator has come into an educational staff Position by rising, through the ranks. Others are professional education, for whom Popular organizations are allies rather than employers. Seeing, Participants as a constituency or clientele rather than a universe confers on these People a very different stake in discussions. At times their critical distance raises the level of debate. At others. the division of labour becomes a dialogue of the deaf. Another factor to consider in the Position of the educator in the institutional hierarchy. One of the paradoxes of or..nizational life is that the best popular educators are all too often ..promoted" into categories such as researchers, policy-maker or administrators.(13), While they may thereby become invaluable strategic allies for the adult basic educator, they also lose direct contact with the central educational encounter. Gradually, their educational views rend to drift into nostalgia and paternalism, until institutional debate brings into sharp relief their loyalties, and it is clarified once again ?which side are you on?? For critical adult education, then, it is necessary to think in stereo -to locate both participants and educators in social context. Only then can authentic dialogue take place. And only then does a shared praxis become Possible. Once we have clarity on the social identity of the learners and the educators, the third actor appears -the sponsor. For those who think in terms of academic freedom, this may be a distasteful matter to raise, but such people would be ineffective as adult basic educators in any case. In practice, it takes a sponsor to bring educators and learners together. This is not to negate the value of self-directed and individual learning. But programs of adult basic education invariably are conditioned by the educational, political and economic contradictions of a sponsor. This may mean navigating through the internal political rivalries of a union, or challenging the constraints imposed on a vocational training agency by its dependence on government funding, or debating with community college staff about their condescending stance towards workers. Whatever the disciplines involved, failure to reflect critically on the sponsor of adult basic education is naive. It can also lead to heartbreaking surprises. ..a Waterloo of illusions. (14) In practice, then, adult basic education requires a cast of three characters - the participants, the educator and the sponsor. In theatre terms, it is a ?three hander". Inevitably, there will be some tensions among these three actors. Consensus models of education, which associate tension with negativity, will tend to suppress this fact. Dialectical models, which associate tension with energy, will yield more insight and inspiration for practitioners of adult basic education. Indeed, the momentum and dynamism of any adult learning program is generated by the interplay among these three roles. A responsible actor in popular education is constantly dealing with the kaleidoscopic shifts in personal and social relations which result. By ruling out any of the three ?who's" in the cast, the richness and transformative potential of the educational drama would be lost. KNOWING, FEELING AND DOING I wanted to swim in the most ample lives, The widest estuaries, And when, little by little, man came denying, me Closing his paths and doors so that J could not touch his wounded existence with my divining, fingers I came by other ways. (15) In adult education, we need to conduct ourselves by knowing, feeling and doing. This means breaking the tyranny of the cognitive, situating information as only one level of the educational encounter. The levels of emotion and skill must be dealt into critical popular education with equal force. In the silicone age, the most discounted of the three is feeling.(16) Yet it is the key to generating any popular resistance to dominant ideas. When an educator says .'free trade" or ?abortion" or ?pollution", each of us hits a different level in our emotional thermometer. It would take some discussion to reach a consensus on ranking their priority as content for adult basic education. -- The challenge is for us to do in our reality what Paulo Freire and other popular educators have been doing in the intricacy of Latin American society -act upon generative themes (17). This means first identifying a part of collective experience which participants acknowledge as important, be it bingo or grievances or alcoholism. Educational leadership means moving perceptions of the theme from naive to critical understanding, and then to transformative action, by a process of conscious dialogue. In addressing each theme, the process of naming will be central. As with the "naming of cats" in T.S. Eliot, there will be different layers involved. Further, we need to develop the courage to propose, to assert possible ways that they could reflect on the issue and incorporate their conclusions into shaping their own lives. While currently fashionable, it is misleading and irresponsible to suggest that a dream of change, and the commitment to act upon it, is without value. (18) Many of the "communications difficulties" experienced by adult basic educators, in unions as well as formal educational institutions, can be traced to the separation of knowing from feeling from doing. Let us consider how each is distorted when cut off from the others. The first approach, heavy on knowing, we might term "research-driven". Its central commitment is to the content of a social issue, whether racism, sexism or class bias. Its energy and skill go to studying the matter and confronting people with findings. The reaction of participants and sponsors to this stance is usually to plead overload and hence justify paralysis. In one workshop on technology where I myself erred on this side, a participant commented, "I came looking for a glass of water, and found I was dealing with a fire hydrant? The resulting confusion contradicts the stated goa1 of the educator, to achieve collective clarity on the issue. The second approach, heavy on the affective level, we might term "feeling - driven". Its central commitment is to group process and psychic empowerment. Here, the educator's energy and skill goes into listening, and into shepherding the group towards an intuitive consensus based on information already present among the participants. If one seeks a glass of water here, a hug may be the only result. The reaction of unionists and participants in other popular movements to this approach is to wonder "where's the beef" Often participants will retreat to the safe ground. to the cognitive level, by pressing, for accurate data. for statistics and specifics. And they regard with suspicion the claims of the leader that there are no externally-set, hidden agendas. Their withdrawal contradicts the stated goal of the educator, to build a common set of feelings. The third approach, heavy on the skills and action developed by participants. may be termed ?output-driven?. In its dichotomized form. it seeks a public outcome, whatever the price is cognitive accuracy or affective cohesion. Behavioural standards are set, and quantifiable results are then fed to the educational and political sponsors of the educational encounter. This is an instrumental approach to popular education, analogous to those who assess the value of a theatre production by computing the number of "bums on seats ". Educationally, it is clear that each of these approaches withers in isolation. Politically, the separation serves to push away the real fear?informed and effective social action by learner in popular social movements. Most administrators in the adult basic education system claim social neutrality. Among many adult educators, there is a strong, if misguided, sense that "professionalism " means withdrawal from the learning process at the point where people begin to test their knowledge and feelings in action. Rather than an integrated educational praxis, this results in sterile discourse, sensed and treated as such by participants. Certainly, workers like Zeke and Augusta were not seeking "neutral" education when they came to a course in the middle of a strike. They wanted support and shared risk, and had a right to find it. But the willingness to stake a social and ethical ground, to take a stand, can emerge in much less dramatic and polarized situations. And the educator who dodges at this point based on a professional self-image triggers the same silent sneer that the street smart, the powerless, have always reserved for the spineless among their social "superiors". .A socially engaged and responsible educational strategy means working in three dimensions at once - developing a solid grounding in the content of issues; charting the emotional snakes and ladders along the route; and setting an internal compass of skill which can culminate in effective individual and collective action. This synthesis is in fact a synergy. One alone yields addition; with two in combination, we can achieve multiplication; only with all three operating simultaneously can we generate the educational algebra of authentic social transformation. EXIT, STAGE LEFT ...you can't escape, there's nowhere to go. They have made this star unsafe, and this ale Primitive; though your mind is somewhere else, Your ass ain't. (19) Among adult basic educators in Canada, it is time to compare dreams. We should stop settling for less. When we start, then, we need to make peace rather than war among ourselves. We also need to get specific. In trade union life, people are constantly forced to say what they want. Proposals (or "demands", as the media usually say) are the starting point of all collective bargaining. And in grievance handling. stewards know that no arbitrator is empowered to award a remedy which has not been requested. In these very immediate ways, setting specific objectives is an integral pan of the union culture. The most concise and progressive statement so far of labour's educational agenda is the policy paper of the Ontario Federation of Labour, "Life-long Learning". It proposes a six-point program of action, based on this premise: As the representatives of working people and their families, the labour movement must take a highly activist approach to the process of life-long learning and its institutions. We must argue that all of our society, all working people, have a fundamental right to participate in and shape the programs and institutions which make life-long learning possible.'. In the process of shaping together the programs of adult basic education, a sense of proportion is also needed. We all operate within institutional and historical limits. We know that the primary educator for adults is experience, perhaps followed by the mass media. Only in the third instance do structured sessions enter the politics of perception. That's why a popular educator who doesn't intervene in these first two levels is conceding the centre of the room to the establishment, and conducting the battle for hearts and minds in the corners only. Critical popular education does not only look at the surfaces of a room. It goes beneath the furnishings and colouring. It encourages learners to understand the principles of construction. Only in that way are people empowered, equipped both individually and collectively, to renovate, to demolish, to construct according to their own objectives. (21) In the education program of the Communications and Electrical Workers of Canada, four objectives have been established to guide our practice - dignity on the job, democracy in the union, responsibility in the society and building on the grassroots. (22) In coming years, our educational practice will refine and develop this statement. But in its current form, it still provides some charts by which we can plan the educational journey. And it ensures that each participant in a union course has the power, the mandate, the obligation to speak their knowledge to express their social passion, to apply their skills to the task of building a better world. As conscious romantics in adult basic education. we address the learning needs of the most oppressed sectors in society. Of course, there are substantial forces lined up to ensure that romantics of any sort do not challenge the status quo. Our work, then, will have to take Particular shape in each educational site. Our energy will have to be applied in a focused, customized way. That our vision is not precise and detailed at this point need not stop us from proceeding. (23) But critical popular educators need to mobilize energies around a shared vision. not merely divide up tasks. In other words. objectives should be driving tactics, rather than the other way around. As a concluding statement of objective. from a conscious romantic who has pioneered in her own generation of adult educators. we might listen to Doris Marshall: I want to see ordinary people feeling their own worth as human beings and recognizing the same worth in other ordinary people, so that the resources of the world can be used together. This cannot be brought about from the top down, but only by ordinary people imbued with their own power. (24) Notes & References (1)Daniel David Moses, ?The Chain?, unpublished poem based on the format of a chain letter, 1996. (2)Catherine Macleod, ?cultural logic?, in A Working Class Girl?s Album of Adventure (Charlottetown, PEI: Ragweed Press, forthcoming). (3)This phrase was introduced to me by Richard Swift of the New Internationalist magazine. (4)This reference was made by Rosa Paredes of Venezuela, at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the International Council for Adult Education, In Sri Lanka, October 1966. (5)The most comprehensive steward course now available is the week-long program designed by Barbara Thomas, Dan Mallette and myself for the Canadian Labour Congress (Ottawa: C.L.C., 1986). (6)Philip Levine, ?They Feed The Lion?, Selected Poems (New York: Atheneum, 196-40, p.81. (7)For a challenging sociology, and an often lyrical defence of the couple, (?the smallest social unit capable of resistance?), see Francesco Alberoni, Falling in Love (New York: Random House, 1983). (8)?The coordinator is not just a participant and the process of the program is not spontaneous. The coordinator?s role is to ensure that the process – what happens and how it happens – encourages learning and the development of leadership in the group.? Rick Arnold and Bev Burke, A Popular Education Handbook (Toronto: CUSO and OISE, 1983). (9)Catherine Macleod, ?Freedom Exercise?, in op. cit. (10)See Alan Thomas?s article and my critique, both published in my article Learning in Society (Ottawa: Canadian Commission for UNESCO, 1984) (11)The concept of union culture is developed in my article ?Public Policy Debate: A view from the ?union culture??, in the magazine Optimum (Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1965). (12)Jo Surich, Glenn Pattinson et. al., ?Life-Long Learning?, policy document 3 at the 30th annual convention of the Ontario Federation of Labour. (Toronto: O.F.L., November 24-27, 1986), p.4. (13)In union life, we have the parallel experience of fine activists being ?promoted: into management. This pattern is consistent with the pathologies described in Michael D. Cohen and James G. March, ?Leadership in an Organized Anarchy?, Leadership in Ambiguity (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974 (14)This phrase, from the Brazilian sociologist Fernande Henrique Carlese, is cited by Isabel Hernandez in her evaluation of the World Assembly of Adult Education, held in Argentina in November, 1985. (15)Pable Neruda, ?Heights of Maccha Plechu?, part IV (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972, p.22) (16)The fear of passion exhibited by modern institutions is well captured by Alberoni: ?Confronted by the nascoat state, even in its most minute form, the institution is shaken in its certainties. Reproducing the event in which the institution is shaken in its certainties. Reproducing the event in which the institution is born revealing the forces that nourish it in their fundamental purity, the nascent state creates a situation of mortal risk. All social mechanisms, all the wisdom of tradition, now have only one aim: to try to suppress it, to reader it impossible?. Op. cit., p.82 (17)The program content of the problem-posing method – dialogical par excellence – is constituted and organized by the students? view of the world, where their own generative themes are found. The content this constantly expands and renews itself.? Paulo Freire, Podagogy of the oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971). p.181 (18)Everyone knows that this element of goodness exists, that it can grow, or that it can die, and there?s something particularly disingenuous and cheap about extricating oneself from the human struggle with the whispered excuse that it?s already over?. Wallace Shawn, ?Reflections after writing a play in the age of Reagan?, American Theatre, September, 1996, p. 49. (19)Imamu Amiri Baraka, cited in Ellesa Melamed, ?Reclaiming the Power to Act?, Therapy New, Summer 1984, p.8 (20)Jo Surich, Glenn Patterson et al., op. clt., p.1. (21)This image is paraphrased from the Nicaraguan adult basic educator Eduardo Baaz, in a presentation to the ICAE conference in Sri Lanka (see above, note #4) (22)The full text of the statement is as follows: ?Dignity on the job – as union activists, we need to feel confidence in ourselves and our backup team. We need skills to educate, organize and represent fellow workers effectively And we have the right to accurate information?s about the economic, technological and political forces which affect the security and equality of our jobs. ?Democracy in the union – We equip workers to raise their voices on the job, and we do not silence them in the union. Our education program is participatory. It builds on the creativity and experience of the members. To be a healthy and effective organization, new ideas from the rank and file must be supported and refined. That?s part of our educational process. ?Responsibility in the society – Ours is more than a business union. It is part of the best movement for the social progress in Canada. When we study contract language and grievous procedure. It is within this context. The issues of the day, such as free trade and pay equity, are an integral part of our education agenda. And the skills to debate them in public, in the media, and central to modern unionism.? ?The grassroots, something to build on – information is power. Our program aims to empower ??? and file union members. By developing confidence and skills they can defend and extend the rights of all workers.? ?Thinking Union Bulletin #1?, (Toronto: Communications and Electrical Workers of Canada, September, 1986.) (23)In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground which overlooks a swamp. On the high ground, manageable problems lend themselves to solution through the use of research-based theory and technique. In the irony of this situation is that the problems of the high ground tend to be relatively unimportant to individuals or to society at large, however great their technical interest may be while in the swamp lie the problems of greatest human concern.? Donald A. ????? ?Toward a New Epistemology of Practice: A Response to the Crisis of Professional knowledge?, ????? presented to the Global Learning Symposium, Toronto, April 28 – May 1, 1985. It has since been published in Alan Thomas and Edward Ploman ads., Learning and Development: A Global Perspective (Toronto: OISE. 1996).? (24)Doris Marshall, speaking to the core team of the Doris Marshall Institute for Education and Action. Toronto, November 17, 1986.