Thinking Union

F. MY REFLECTIONS

At the beginning of a dance, some people have to risk appearing absurd or presumptuous, by standing up and starting to express themselves. After a while others can join, each in their own way. I hope that, by circulating this study among unionists and educators, others will be encouraged to record their experience as well.

The issue of voice is hot today, in the academy, in the society and in the labour movement. A politics of location is developing, which situates more carefully than in the past who speaks about which social experiences. The universalist, master narratives are being challenged, and as one who has certain privileges I need to check the habits which slide back into it. Certainly many educators in Canada's labour movement differ from me in class background, gender, region, economic sector, union role, racial and ethnic identity and political perspective.143 In speaking for myself, I hope to encourage rather than silence them.

While I have made every effort for accuracy in evoking situations and framing arguments, I will not claim that this account of my learning is personally neutral nor politically indifferent. My effort has been to name as many of the external forces at work as I can see, so that my account remains personal without being idiosyncratic. This is particularly important because of the subtle ways that dominant thinking are absorbed by each of us.

Writing as a learner requires awareness, not only of my current biases, but of their evolution during these years.144 Since 1978, I have been moved by the writing of John Berger and Adrienne Rich; the films of Barbara Kopple and Denis Arcand; the music of Mercedes Sosa and Leonard Cohen; the friendship of Rita Kwok and Jorge Garcia-Orgales; the presence of my daughters Danielle and Nyranne. From all of these influences, I see the world differently today than I did during my early years in the labour movement. For all these reasons, my "voice" too has evolved:

"A movement for change lives in feelings, actions and words. Whatever circumscribes or mutilates our feelings makes it more difficult to act, keeps our actions reactive, repetitive: abstract thinking, narrow tribal loyalties, every kind of self-righteousness, the arrogance of believing ourselves at the center. It's hard to look back on the limits of my understanding a year, five years ago -- how did I look without seeing, hear without listening? It can be difficult to be generous to earlier selves... yet how, except through ourselves, do we discover what moves other people to change?"145

The dominant culture, the Social Unconscious,146 is refracted in this study through one person's biography, present in the way I have selected some incidents over others, the weight I have attached to some parts of educational practice over others. And it runs through each of the four major influences on my learning as an adult.147

First, there was my interest in the practice of popular education in the Third World. This was initially developed in Latin America, particularly as I studied the ideas and practices of Paulo Freire and his associates. It was sustained through twenty years of association with the Development Education Centre, first as a founding staff member and then as a board member. Later, the educational theory and practice of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua inspired me. In recent years, largely through associates in the Doris Marshall Institute, I have maintained connections with popular educators in Central America, southern Africa and east Asia. The faith in the wisdom of the oppressed, the capacity to innovate with limited resources, and the linking of education to organizing for change are among the profound lessons from these experiences on which I and other progressive educators in Canada can draw.148

Secondly, there is my continuing dialogue with educational theorists since I first entered the adult education field in the late 1960's. I was initially drawn to the field through the late Roby Kidd,149 and shared his passionate interest in international development issues. As a graduate student in a protracted M.A., and then a protracted Ed.D., I have had more than twenty years of contact with the Adult Education Department of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Through this link, I have been exposed to some of the sociological writing in critical pedagogy and feminist theory which have strongly influenced the conceptual framework of this study. As an extension of these interests, I have been involved with the International Council for Adult Education, and more recently the Canadian Association for Adult Education. As a balance to the rhythms and concerns of union education, these networks have been enormously helpful to me. Third, there is my experience as a practicing trade unionist, assigned to educational work. The situation of a high responsibility and low authority which accompanies such positions is a classic stress factory.150 The over-extension of energy and resources leads to a rather obsessive work rhythm, which discourages innovative thought and insulates practitioners from constructive interaction with others who aren't on union staff.

Fourth, there is my ongoing participation in the politics of southern Ontario.151 By conducting workshops with school principals, trustees, parents or students, I am engaged in the debates around formal education in my community. In the Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts and the Ontario Workers' Arts and Heritage Centre, I have helped to create platforms through which workers and their allies can express our creative visions. Through the Doris Marshall Institute, I have had access to anti-racist education, community animation and government policy making. And I have maintained an active involvement in the educational and labour policy processes of the New Democratic Party. In this direct political activism, I fight as a socialist humanist against the top-down processes which dominate among those with whom I am strategically allied.

In all four of these channels, there has been a linkage of politics, work and learning. When this study presents "my reflections", then, these influences crowd into my thinking, and elbow one another for space on the page.

In all four dimensions, I have remained marginal. The currents of power and status run elsewhere. Part of my learning process has been to address and embrace this marginality:

"Those with the ability to issue the definitions - through the broadcast media, the newspapers and magazines, the schools and universities - control the criteria of centrality. They live there.

As for those of us who heartily abominate these criteria, we cannot deny that we are marginal. There is no point, our marginality is real. We can however reject the evaluation which those at the centre make, and which our society largely accepts, about our marginality. We can deny that marginality is negative. We can claim it as a strength."152

My experience of marginality is conditioned greatly by my social origins. After all, the lump of clay upon which these four influences have worked had some internal characteristics. My upbringing was in a "red Tory" professional family in the industrial city of Hamilton, with a strong tradition of community service. My schooling was in well-run private boys schools, which instilled a strong achievement drive. My undergraduate involvement in the student movement of the late 60's anchored a personal conviction that education can and should be part of a broad popular movement for social and political change. And my exposure to the politics and culture of Latin America, through travel there and through work with refugees here, has helped to situate the particular privilege and pain of being Canadian.

My social identity as a union educator wasn't just ascribed. Increasingly, I assumed it and asserted it. Hence this study is the work of what Michael Walzer calls a "connected critic".153 I am involved rather than "objective"; my critique, then, is not an abstract expose but rather a proposal for change in which I personally will be engaged. Walzer's image of the connected critic is as one of the crew, who will go down with the ship. This cord of loyalty is captured in the classic remark by Camus: "I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice".154 It is not merely love for teaching, but love for the people with whom I have taught and learned which continues to motivate my work. In that double sense, this study is a labour of love.

The reflections generated from my particular social identity, as a radical and a connected critic, deal with both sides of the learning process. I have dealt above with my role as a teacher. Throughout this study, I will attempt to trace my progress as a learner, to identify my own learning processes.155

A central element of my learning process has been an evolution in the way I perceive educational leadership. Here a useful starting point is Paulo Freire's writing about the fallacies in educational practice.156 Freire identifies first the "autocratic" fallacy, which assumes that important knowledge is in the hands of the educator, and that knowledge itself is a commodity which can be packaged and transmitted. This is a teacher-centred philosophy, with which many trade union educators identify because of their commitment to building the movement as an instrument of popular mobilization. In fact, there is a point of unity between conservative union leaders and their Leninist opponents here, because both share a faith in hierarchical practices, while contending over who should control the hierarchy.

For those like myself who seek a dialectical and process-oriented epistemology, the fallacy in this approach is clear enough. Under the mask of "building the movement" and "maintaining internal unity", educators can reproduce in their courses the most authoritarian impulses of traditional union practice.

According to Freire, the counterpart of the autocratic fallacy is the liberalist fallacy. According to this model, so strong in North American "facilitation" circles, the students' knowledge and goals should be accepted as the starting point, and the role of the educator is to assist in clarifying and collectivizing it. Applied in a social movement like labour, this approach is "innocent" in regard to internal power dynamics, and hence indifferent to the results of learning.

Tactically, this may be the safest approach for union educators to adopt, especially if the elected leaders to whom they report are insecure. Nonetheless, while it may make some union leaders nervous to think that their education staff work from a strategy different from their own, in fact, I suggest that this should be the case. The bias of the educator should be that of a "radical democrat", constantly seeking to develop and draw upon insights from the rank and file. The bias of the political leader needs to be "strategic negotiator", judging the times when unity is required for effectiveness with employers and governments, and exercising political discipline at those points.

In this and other ways, educational leadership will remain distinct from political leadership, while the values of the union culture are shared. Both are required for a healthy and effective social movement. Each needs to understand and respect the role of the other, if the labour movement and other social movements are to make the best use of the Learning Domain. The contribution of good educational leadership to social movements is to maintain and share self-knowledge among the members, and to keep the political leadership open to new learning from participants. Protecting the time and space needed for such dialogue with the political leadership is a delicate challenge for the educator, and requires a clear commitment to the principles of the movement.

For me, the breakthrough occurred in the second year of my work at the Steelworkers. I had just returned from leading a course in northern Ontario where there were serious tensions with the incumbent district director. Then a letter arrived at the director's office, with detailed complaints and a formal request for action on them according to the rights of those locals under the constitution. The director's assistant called me on the carpet, furiously accusing me of planting the trouble in that area. I replied that the trouble had already been there, and that I had crystallized and channelled it during the course because that was my job.

After a pause, the director's assistant looked at me, and said sarcastically: "So you want a division of labour, where it's your job to set fires and my job to put them out?" I gulped, nodded and added: "Then I'm responsible to warn you when a fire has been set." We shook hands, and never had another argument on that topic.157

My tension with this political leader was structural, not personal. We needed to negotiate an appropriate relation of the course leaders to the union which sponsors the course, and to its elected leadership. Both of us saw the value of a shared stance between learner and teacher which can de-mystify the sponsor without undermining the incumbent leadership.

To the extent that true dialogue is established within a course, a shared commitment will emerge. The majority of the time will probably be taken up by the learners sharing experience, drawing conclusions from it, respecting one another's expertise and producing new popular knowledge. Yet concretely, in my experience, the person who makes the initial and decisive move on problem-posing around the learning contract is the course leader.

To make this move properly requires careful judgment and considerable self-knowledge. On the one side lies the risk of autocracy, of the kind of teacher-centred "banking education" to which this study is explicitly opposed. On the other side lies the risk of indifference, the kind of "neutral" facilitation which claims no commitment to outcomes and no loyalty to the goals of the movement within which learning is occurring. Yet it demonstrates no sensitivity to the learners to silence oneself, and no consistency with the vocation of the educator to sacrifice learning to keep things nice. To exercise educational leadership and to accept the need for political discipline is the most consistent stance for a practicing union educator.158

The energy which drives educational leadership is the interaction of different knowledge, the knowledge of participants and educators. The tension between those types of knowledge is a motor for the learning process on both sides. This means that, unlike facilitators, educational leaders do not hold back the knowledge gathered in their work, often at significant cost to them personally. The dialogue engages people in a common social project, the establishment of a cultural democracy in Canada through the hegemony of critical popular movements.

Autocratic and liberalist approaches to learning imply their own political objectives. The questions of method and content which face the union educator cannot be settled without defining the political project to which that educator is committed. In this respect, the education manifesto of the CWC, reproduced above, is a political agenda, which had to be negotiated with the political leadership of the union.

This means accepting some of the responsibility and risk which goes with leadership. Unlike the autocratic and liberalist models, the stance of the radical educational democrat implies a necessary and healthy tension with elected leaders at all levels of the movement. To live with this tension, serenely and assertively, has been one of the most difficult lessons for me to learn.