School of Activism: Two Summer Workshops

Thursday August 26 and Friday August 27

Location: Family Services Toronto - 355 Church St., Toronto (just south of Carlton - closest subway: College at Yonge)

Facilitators: chris cavanagh & Deborah Konecny

Make good use of the slower pace of summer programming and lighter network schedules to build your skills for the coming year.

Take part in two-days of intensive training to hone your planning and facilitation skills. You can Register for either or both.

The recommended fee for each workshop is $150 or Pay What You Can (and you can read about our fee policy below - we're serious about the PWYC - we accept all offers - assuming that enough is collectively offered to make the workshop viable).

TO REGISTER: Please e-mail us courses@catalystcentre.ca or phone 416-516-9546 and tell us your name, e-mail, phone number and what you would like to pay.

Thursday, August 26, - 9:30-4:30

DEMOCRATIC FACILITATION BY DESIGN

This popular day-long workshop will explore some of the principles and practices of good workshop design and facilitation. While it’s tempting to think that many group problems can be solved through better facilitation, many are better dealt with first through effective meeting design. Design is way to ensure that group processes are just, inclusive and effective while facilitation is learning to follow a design with flexibility and imagination. Through participatory activities you will learn new tools for design and facilitation, share issues and experiences - and have fun in the process!

Friday, August 27, 2010 - 9:30-4:30

Not Just a Bag ‘o Tricks – SMORGASBORD

popular education tools, techniques and thoughts

The popular educator Myles Horton said that education should percolate, not drip down. Popular education is a democratic practice of education rooted in social and economic justice struggle and intended to make social change. “Pop-ed” is sometimes thought of as simply a “bag of tricks” that promote conversation and reflection in a more “fun” way than conventional means – it’s not seen as being serious and purposeful. However, popular education (both the tools and the theory) is a radical means of analyzing power, oppression and resistance and collectively learning and acting in the context of community organizing.

From timelines, to energizers, to image theatre, to a political weather report, we will explore (and try out) a range of these tools and discuss how they can be used in different contexts. We will also talk a bit about facilitation and design and how they interact. Please come prepared to participate, to share your ideas, to listen and, hopefully, to have some fun.

OUR COURSES FEE POLICY - a different kind of economics

At the Catalyst Centre we strive to make all of our events affordable and accessible to everyone. Our fees reflect our costs and when we have grants to support our work, we can offer even more support to the community. However, the Catalyst Centre is currently supported only through our workshops and facilitation work.

All workshops are based on an optimum of 20 participants.

Our workshops are all offered with a recommended fee and include the option of Pay What You Can (PWYC). And we strongly recommend that as many people and organizations as possible pay the recommended fee which, of course, supports those individuals, organizations and communities who cannot afford the recommended fee. And, of course, anyone is welcome to pay more than the recommended if they wish. However, we sincerely hope that people will take seriously the spirit of “pay what you can” and honour their means whether this is limited or not.

PLEASE NOTE: each workshop must meet its revenue target in order to proceed and each workshop will be confirmed in advance based on registrations received or promised. (Any revenue in excess of targets will go towards other events.) If workshop registration does not meet a minimum revenue target, it will be canceled. However, a facilitator/presenter always has the option to confirm and proceed with an event regardless of low revenue by waving some or all of their fee.

Image courtesy of Eric Drooker

Resource: Mural making

Mural making can be a vital tool in an activist’s toolkit. Murals have the great advantage for doing group work of being LARGE – lots of space to cover and, therefore, much labour that can be shared. There are many types of mural work that can be used for popular education, protest, street theatre and more. Collective murals are also good opportunities to practice both individual and collective work. This document provides guidelines for facilitators in using Contour Guided Murals, Grid Murals, Earthblankets, Moveable Murals, Banners, and Bankelsang/Cantastoria, for facilitating dialog and critical thinking.

Resource: Precarious Employment Popular Education Curriculum

This popular education manual for workshops on precarious employment contains a dozen basic activities plus a handful more in the appendices. You can use some of the activities as workshops unto themselves (e.g. jobology, precarious work wheel) or use them in combination to support workshops of between three and six hours. Produced for the Immigrants and Precarious Employment Project, which:

examines the opportunities and challenges faced by immigrants in the new, knowledge-based economy. We interviewed 300 workers from Latin Am

erican and the Caribbean who arrived in the GTA between 1990 and 2004. In our research, we asked:

• How are newcomers affected by broader trends towards precarious employment?
• What strategies do they implement on the job and as families in order to meet these challenges?
• What patterns of contact (or lack of contact) with social institutions and community organizations mediate immigrants’ early settlement process?

Public Outreach and Education

Our Public Outreach Project is designed to draw on the research project findings to generate and distribute knowledge of immigrant employment trajectories and early settlement strategies beyond academia. Our two main products will be:

• A policy report based on our findings
• A popular education manual on immigrants and precarious work for frontline workers at immigrant service agencies (Produced with the consulting support of The Catalyst Centre).

There are two files: The complete manual at 168 pages (3MB) and the 30-page Participant Kit (700K - and which you will find in the complete manual as Appendix A.

Resource: Ending Poverty Popular Education Curriculum

You can find this curriculum on-line and freely available on the Income Security Advocacy Centre's (ISAC) website. The 120-manual is available as one not-so-large PDF (980K) and as separate MSWord files. The curriculum supports a basic three-hour workshop that ISAC and Campaign 2000 are delivering across Ontario (in 7 different communities). The objective of this workshop is to involve low income people in a critical dialogue about poverty and a process to support the voices of low-income people on what will end poverty. The curriculum contains over a dozen popular education activity descriptions as well as detailed model workshop designs for the basic three-hour version as well as one and two hour versions and one day-long version. This curriculum was developed in partnership with Dana Milne of ISAC, chris cavanagh of The Catalyst Centre and Jacquie Maund of Campaign 2000. If you find this curriculum useful in any way please contact chris cavanagh to share your experiences.

Resource: Jobology

This activity can be used to develop some awareness in a group on the history of work i.e., how has work changed historically for different classes of people and the role of unpaid work in sustaining capitalism. These can be used for activist work against poverty, develop awareness of class, gender and hierarchy in society. Download the activity description here (1 MB PDF).

Resource: Naming the Moment Manual

Naming the Moment is a popular education methodology for doing collective analysis of conditions in the world and that are significant for the participants and communities who choose to apply this method. As a popular education method it systematically draws out people’s experience in order to create new knowledge, connecting this to existing relevant knowledge and creating action plans that, implemented, can better resist oppression and achieve positive social change. It grew from connections between Canadian interest in Latin American popular education practices and, in particular, conjunctural analysis. This blog post by chris cavanagh describes Naming the Moment in community development terms and includes links to a selection of documents about the process. Download the manual here (4 MB PDF).

Resource: Essays

Look Out! Pitfalls in Popular Education by Matthew Adams

An essay on popular and labour education in Canada.

Do You See What I Mean by chris cavanagh

An essay on community art.

Resource: Families Are Important Resources (FAIR) Project

This was a three year project that aimed to look at ways to increase community participation and civic engagement of parents and children. The project used a popular education approach to demystify how systems work and how change happens by capturing the creativity and passion of staff, parents, and children to work on issues such as poverty, housing, and living wage. By following this link to the FAIR project you will gain access to the following:

1. Just the beginning: A short video that introduces you to parents and staff who were a part of the FAIR project and allows you to hear from them about their experiences and learning.
2. FAIR manual: This 98 page document describes some of the learning and activities that were a part of this project including information on how to engage children, parents, and staff to be vital parts of change and hopefully provides insights for us to transform the way we see community participation.
3. Appendices: The 6 appendices include dozens of tools that will help us to benefit from rich experiences of the FAIR project and continue to transform communities to being citizen focused.

Deborah Konecny, a Catalyst worker coop member, was the coordinator of this project and wrote the manual and appendices. All of these tools are free for use as long as the source is acknowledged.

Catalytic Conversations

reposted from May 21, 2010
A common cry we hear from friends & colleagues is that we could all use more opportunities to learn with & from each other. Catalytic conversations are our solution. Here is how it works...

✓Read an article a month;

✓Join other lifelong learners & explore thoughts

& questions related to the article;

✓Choose the next article or topic at the end of the meeting;

✓Start all over again.

The first article we will be reading is “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century”by Bernice Johnson Reagon. You can retrieve the article online at http://shewhostumbles.wordpress.com/ 2008/01/12/bernice-johnson-reagon-coalition-politics-turning-the-century/

Please join us for the inaugural session will be Monday, May 31 from 3:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. at OISE on the 7th floor in the Peace Lounge.

For further details about Catalytic Conversations email Deborah at deborah.konecny@gmail.com or leave your info & questions at 416 - 516 - 9546 & someone will contact you.

Sharing Resources

reposted from Thursday, February 18, 2010

The Catalyst Centre has extensive popular education resources that we share as best we can. We have produced many ‘zines, curricula and activity descriptions over the years and we are now adding them systematically to our on-line resource centre for easy download. We hope what we offer is of use and we urge you to check out our resources (you can subscribe to our RSS feed on the Resource Centre page linked above). And if you know of popular education (and related) resources that you think we should be promoting, please let us know.

Chugging Along & Building Speed - Slowly

reposted from Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Enthusiastic good wishes have been coming in for the past few weeks as people notice that the Catalyst Centre is becoming active once again. People around the world have heard the news (or received one of our e-mails) and are sending us lots of good cheer. And compared to ten years ago when Catalyst started it seems that interest in popular education has grown steadily. We hope to connect some of this interest and do our part to contribute to the sharing of resources and praxis.

However, as the headline to this post implies, response to our course offerings has been slow. While we’ve been receiving a few registrations each week, we haven’t yet reached critical mass to start workshops as quickly as we’d hoped. It turns out that managing e-mail lists is slow work. Alas. We are thus postponing the some events. Specifically, Not Just a Bag ‘o Tricks this Saturday, February 6th is now rescheduled to Saturday, February 27. Enough to Go Around: An Introduction to Popular Economics will begin on Tuesday, February 23. And the first round of Here and Now (Thursdays, February 11, 18 & 25) is cancelled; this series will begin with the March round (Thursdays, March 11, 18 & 25).

Please help spread the word.

A New Membership, A New Moment

(reposted from Monday, January 11, 2010)

After a several year hiatus during which we have continued to research and develop popular education praxis, we have expanded our membership and are quickly developing plans to launch new popular education programming. This page features a list of our members (see the left-hand column) and will carry updates as we once again become an active part of social justice work.