How often in the past few years have we heard educational "commandments" like "Respect the people you teach" or "Empower people through learning"? On the surface there's nothing wrong with these statements - they may seem everything we should strive for - except for one very important fact: in the hands of many educational practitioners such concepts work only to fudge the key matter of power.
When you stop to think about it, why should teachers have to be reminded "to respect" their students? Shouldn't this be a given? Why would learners have to be "empowered through learning"? Don't they have power already? These may appear to be elementary questions, but in much education today it seems that taking a position on power is avoided.
In Educating for a Change the issue of power is central. Running through the book are two important threads. The first is that education must empower all people to act for change. The second is that this education must be based on a democratic practise: by which we mean creating the conditions for full and equal participation in discussion, debate, and decision-making.
In the following pages we explore the political dimension of learning, and the learning dimension of politics. We hope that this book will help unmask - and not cover up - the power relations in our society.
In taking this stance we assume some shared social and political values with those of you who are reading from the vantage point of educators/activists challenging the status quo. As authors we are writing in Southern Ontario at the start of the 1990s, having like most people suffered through a lean and mean decade under the spell of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. These politicians may be gone but they've left their heavy mark on countries such as Canada, where business and political leaders continue to push a similar line while claiming things are now kinder and gentler.
The book emerges from a process, a set of requests, and a political responsibility. The process is the many meetings and workshops we have conducted over the years, each time promising ourselves and one another that one day our sketchy notes from the event would be drawn together in book form. The requests have been largely from participants in our workshops, who wanted us to demystify the steps in our own work. The political responsibility is to those colleagues and mentors who have helped us along the road, and who now can take back in organized form some of what they have given.
This book aims to build skills and confidence. It is our way of surviving and growing in influence against the grain of individualistic and conservative practices in education and politics. We offer it as a tool in the hands of those with whom we share a vision of transformed power relations - in our own lives and in the outside world.
So what's in Educating for a Change?
- Chapter one is about strategy: factors to consider before getting involved in an educational program. We discuss the importance of putting ourselves as educators into the picture - and the importance of analysing the broader social context in which our work takes place.
- Chapter two draws from our experience in designing educational events so they meet the objectives people bring to them.
- Chapter three focuses on educational activities with examples of some we have found useful in the past.
- Chapter four is about facing the challenges of facilitating a group, making the most of who we are and working through conflicting agendas.
- Chapter five looks back at some of the things we have learned from our past experiences.
- Chapter six looks forward to some of the challenges that we believe await us in the 1990s.
- The Postscript includes two conversations that would be quite out of place in a more formal, technical manual. The first is from a discussion that the five of us had as we neared the end of the writing process. The second is made up of comments from colleagues who read the manuscript along the way.
In doing the writing we've been constantly reminded of the clutch in the stomach: that moment when we first face a group of participants, in a workshop or a meeting, and wonder how we got into this and how we can possibly get through it. Moments of panic, of doubt and self-doubt, and a recurring nightmare for committed educators. But it is our belief that when we are properly prepared, and clear in our goals, those moments have the potential to generate our richest learning.
We hope that our experience, with its limits and particularities, will strengthen a network of educators engaged in social movements, in Canada and internationally, both inside and outside the formal education structures, in classrooms and in workshops.
We hope that this book, though firmly rooted in a Canadian context, will also be of value to a growing international network of people seeking social justice. Our experience has shown that the methodologies and practices we outline here have wide applicability. For instance, in an African National Congress workshop some of us did in Zambia, many of the participants took the work we did on how to design a workshop and applied it to meetings they were preparing on a variety of policy issues. In fact, we've found that social activists can use the educational approaches in this book for many different collective activities - research, evaluation, policy formulation - as well as for workshops and courses.
We know that learning is often worthwhile just for its own sake. To satisfy individual curiosity, to develop personal capacities, to explore varied and surprising experience: these are expressions of our freedom, our full humanity. In these learnings, comprehensive social strategy is not a central concern.
But education for social change is engaged politically. This is praxis, or theory in action. Those of us engaged in this praxis, whether in community groups, educational institutions, or broad-based social movements, must reflect daily on strategy. Our educational work must be located not so we can shape the grand sweep of history, but so we can exercise our right and obligation to an educated guess about the social impact of the learning we promote.
THE WRITERS
This book is an inside job. The five of us have worked, separately and together, in critical education for social change throughout the 1980s. So writing this book has provided an opportunity to look back on what we have learned and to compare notes on what lies ahead for the 1990s.
The text is written in the first-person plural. All five of us have written other publications, we all have one or more postgraduate academic degrees, and we all are now based in southern Ontario. Yet each of us has brought diverse social identities, view, and habits into our work together.
- Bev Burke, who co-ordinated the writing of this book, was born in Ontario and taught secondary school in Canada and Tanzania. She worked in development education at the Cross-Cultural Learner Centre in London, Ontario, with CUSO, and with the Canadian Council for International Co-operation (CCIC). After working for three years in Central America, she has remained engaged in solidarity work through the Latin American Working Group.
- Rick Arnold was born in Caracas and educated formally in Venezuela, Canada, and the United States. He was a founding member of the Cross Cultural Communication Centre in Toronto and was later on the staff of the Development Education Centre, also in Toronto. After working with Bev Burke in Central America he led several tours, particularly of Canadian trade unionists, to that region. He participates in the public education work of Tools for Peace and the Latin American Working Group.
- Carl James was born in the Caribbean and did post-secondary education in Toronto. Active in community work, he has a special interest in youth issues and anti-racist education. He has taught at a number of post-secondary institutions in Toronto, including York University and Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. He teaches at Sheridan College. Where he also co-ordinates an international development project that takes him to Tanzania each year.
- D'Arcy Martin was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and studied at the University of Toronto. He was a founding member of the Development Education Centre in Toronto and has participated in international work through the International Council for Adult Education. He has worked in trade union education for over a decade, first with the Steelworkers and then with the Communications and Electrical Workers.
- Barb Thomas was born in England, grew up in Ottawa, and studied in Kingston and Toronto. She worked for a decade as program co-ordinator of the Cross Cultural Communication Centre and was a founding member of the Centre for Caribbean Dialogue in Toronto. She has worked as an anti-racist educator, writer, and facilitator with boards of education, trade unions, and community organizations. Her primary work now is in educational leadership development.
Because this book is a reflection of our experience, some of the patterns in that experience should be clear from these brief biographies. Broadly, Bev and Rick have worked mostly with international solidarity groups. Barb and Carl with anti-racist educators, and D'Arcy with the trade union movement.
Since 1986 we have all been engaged in the work of Doris Marshall Institute. Rick, Bev, and Barb work as full-time staff with the DMI, wile Carl and D'Arcy are employed elsewhere and volunteer as part of the core group.
Each of us took primary responsibility for a section of the book, which means there is a variety of styles and perspectives in the writing. Yet the process we've followed - collective suggestions, exchange, and feedback - means that each of us is present in all chapters.
The DMI is named for Doris Marshall, a Canadian pioneer of adult education for justice who lives in Toronto. Her convictions about women's rights, international solidarity, and the creative strength of senior adults have influenced her family, her community, and the Institute team. We provide training and skill development in the following areas:
- Popular education theory and methodology
- Solidarity education
- Anti-racist education
- Facilitator training
- Participatory research and evaluation
- Materials production
- Network and organization building
- Process consultation
We try to select our projects based on their potential for building and supporting a broad-based popular movement for social justice in Canada. We have experience in working with - and a strategic commitment to continuing working with certain constituencies:
- International development and solidarity organizations
- Trade unions
- Grassroots organizations and community groups
- Social service workers
- Cross-sector coalitions
Writing this book, though, highlighted the gaps in our experience. There is little discussion here of work in the churches or of the variety of religious social action organizations. We have only limited direct involvement with the environmental movement, our understanding of Canadian issues and experiences outside southern Ontario is uneven, and our age range from the mid-thirties to mid-forties implies some biases.
We're working from what we know, trying to learn more about what we don't know, and using this book as a vehicle for dialogue with others whose experience and insights will be different from our own. In particular, we have drawn on four workshops conducted in the late 1980s. after we began working together as a team. One workshop was with Education Wife Assault, the second with immigrant community service organizations, the third with anti-racist activists in the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, and the fourth in Southern Africa with the African National Congress.
In the end we have chosen not to "iron out" the different tones and voices of our writing into an authoritative, uniform style. And we haven't "filled in" the gaps - those places where the dynamics are better understood by others - with second - hand experience. We hope that the personal diversity of our writing, and its anchor in our practice, will encourage other educators for social change to reflect, personally and in print, on experiences different from our own, and to develop the appropriate tools and perspectives.