I was flipping through notebooks, bookmarks and my mind this morning thinking about today's homework and I re-encountered this page. I have found it to be a great resource for my own 'peace journey' as well as having drawn from the articles for workshops I've facilitated.
It is such a good resource, I sort of felt like I ran into an old friend.
I've never sysmatically worked down through the readings though, and I wonder would anyone out there be interested in complementing our TTT training by reading a lesson each each month, and sticking around for an hour afterward to discuss them? Or perhaps a different set-up, another night, another channel?
5 comments:
cool!
This is fantastic, makes great reading. I'd support Denise's idea to go through the readings, although I think they'd need some selection.
They read like a series of education resources, and I am interested in education. Raises the question of how far/to what extent/in what way we are being 'educated' at turning the tide. What does anyone think?
Zaria.
Hi Zaria and other Tide Turners,
Yes, agree: it would be a good idea to select from the articles collected. Perhaps in a way that complements the TTT theme?
Being educated? I experience TTT more as the trainers creating conditions under which we feel safe exploring and 'discovering' ideas for ourselves. They present us information and then we decide what to do with it. Is that being educated, in a mug and jug, or to use Freire's analogy -- in a banking system way? Or are we being asked to take responsibility for our own learning? For me, it's a case of the latter. Though it clearly also could be argued that I've been indoctrinated into that way of 'learning'.
Having worked as a formal classroom teacher, and a teacher using pop ed methods (wearing the hat of trainer/facilitator), I believe there can be very distinct lines between those, though not always. Certainly over the last 20, 30 years there has been a shift towards learner-centred participatory classrooms that mimics what you see in experiential life-learning.
Carl Rogers wrote " ... the only learning which significantly influences behaviour is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning. Such self-discovery learning cannot be communicated to another. As soon as the individual tries to communicate such experiences directly, often with quite natural enthusiasm, it becomes teaching, and its results are inconsequential."
This way of thinking has influenced me quite a lot as an educator/trainer and learner/participant.
Zaria, do you feel you are being 'educated'?
I think that Denise is right when she says that what sticks is what we have processed ourselves. I also think that TTT training creates a framework which we then explore and learning emerges from that; but we need a frame.
So I think I'm being educated and am educating myself - both in terms of what I reflect upon in the context of my own understanding of the world and ideas, and as a result of being in a group situation.
I also learn about my responses to others; noticing how my buttons are pressed, how I behave in groups, how others behave towards me and so on. All of this I find useful in the context of being non-violent, but also because at some point I see myself working in or on an action with some of the TTT people.
Interesting debate that links into conversations I have been having with PBI in Aceh this week. PBI does 'peace education' workshops with local facilitators, but I am increasingly feeling that the word 'education' gets in the way of us (and others) understanding what we are really trying to do: elicitive workshops that are not an intervention but which facilitate local people's recognition and valuing of what they already know and do. Link to this is the point that you can't make someone understand something.
The difference between 'elicitive' and 'participatory' keeps coming up. In regard to TTT, what we doing is clearly participatory, but it is far less elicitive, in that we are being given resources, models and theories to work with. That's not a bad thing - might be a very good thing. But it is not the same as drawing the models from our own experience. In that sense, yes, I think we are being 'educated'.
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