Practical

What does this look like on the ground, and what are people doing about it now?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

In this theme, the practical lens is unusually literal: it is the how-to for running this very school. The materials here are the facilitation guides, popular-education methods, and Theatre of the Oppressed exercises that turn the theory of the other lenses into a session that actually works, plus the living examples of liberatory education in practice, from Highlander to abolitionist teaching to the Tucson ethnic studies fight. A facilitator preparing to lead any theme in this project can start here.

Anchor questions

• What makes a discussion open people up rather than shut them down?
• How do you draw out what a quiet room already knows?
• What is the difference between a facilitator and a lecturer? When do you need each?
• How do you handle a person who dominates, or a silence that hides fear?
• How can a group study a hard text together without anyone pretending to understand?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. These are the working tools of the school; the facilitator guide draws on many of them.

Facilitation and popular-education handbooks

• Highlander Popular Education methodologies (Highlander Research and Education Center, 2021). A short, illustrated free guide to Highlander’s core process of surfacing lived experience and building collective knowledge for action. The method this school descends from, in a few pages. Free PDF: highlandercenter.org
• Training for Change, Tools library (since 1992). Over seventy free, field-tested facilitation and direct-education tools, most in English and Spanish, each with step-by-step instructions. Pull a single exercise or build a whole agenda. Free: trainingforchange.org
• Seeds for Change, facilitation and consensus guides. Free, anti-copyright guides on facilitating meetings, active listening, group agreements, running workshops, and consensus decision-making. Shared with Anarchism, Mutual Aid, and Prefiguration. Free: seedsforchange.org.uk
• Augusto Boal (1931 to 2009), Games for Actors and Non-Actors (1992). The founding handbook of Theatre of the Oppressed, with more than two hundred physical games and forum-theatre exercises for surfacing lived experience and analyzing power without relying on text alone. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: routledge.com. Boal explains the method himself in a free Democracy Now! interview with a transcript: democracynow.org
• Study Circles (Everyday Democracy, formerly the Study Circles Resource Center). A free guide to organizing and facilitating community study circles, the small-group, dialogue-to-change method at the heart of this project’s format. Free PDF: civicus.org

Living examples on film

• You Got to Move (Lucy Massie Phenix and Veronica Selver, 1985). The key documentary on Highlander’s method, following ordinary Southerners who learned to organize, including the Citizenship School literacy work. The full film is paywalled (Criterion, DVD), but a free teaching guide and short clips are at this page. zinnedproject.org
• Precious Knowledge (Ari Luis Palos and Eren Isabel McGinnis, 2011, 70 min). Documents the Tucson High Mexican American Studies program, a working model of liberatory ethnic studies, and the state fight to shut it down. Free via library Kanopy, with a free clip on PBS. pbs.org
• We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching (Bettina Love, City Club of Cleveland, 2019). The originator of “abolitionist teaching” lays out what it means as classroom practice and a way of life. Free video and audio: cityclub.org

Teaching resources and journalism

• Zinn Education Project (Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change). Hundreds of free, downloadable people’s-history lessons using role play, mixer, and inquiry formats, adaptable for adult study circles across every theme in this school. Free: zinnedproject.org
• Rethinking Schools (since 1986). The leading grassroots social-justice teaching magazine, with many free articles on classroom organizing and justice pedagogy by practicing teachers. Free: rethinkingschools.org

Podcasts

• Movement Memos (Kelly Hayes, Truthout, 2020 to present). The Menominee organizer and educator Kelly Hayes interviews organizers on political education, facilitation, and how movements teach. Comes with transcripts. Free: truthout.org
• Have You Heard (Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, 2016 to present). A journalist and an education scholar break down public-school policy fights from the left. Useful for the political terrain around schooling. Free: haveyouheardpodcast.com
• Teaching Hard History (Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Learning for Justice, 2018 to 2022). A historian and classroom teachers model how to teach slavery, Reconstruction, and the civil rights movement honestly. Every episode has a resource page. Free: splcenter.org

Video

• “Augusto Boal Exercises” (Organic Acting, 2016). Roughly 6 minutes, about 25,000 views, a niche pick. A short demonstration of Theatre of the Oppressed games a facilitator can try in a session. youtube.com/watch?v=l4cZ8pa0v-Y

Further reading

For resources behind a paywall, see the note on access.

• Inside-Out Center, Temple University, Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. A model in which incarcerated and campus students study together as peers inside the prison, now running in hundreds of sites. The clearest existing answer to what dialogic education looks like where the walls are literal. Free: insideoutcenter.org
• Freedom Reads, Freedom Reads. Builds micro-libraries inside prisons, founded by a poet who served sixteen years. Included here because access to books is the precondition of every method in this lens, and in prison it is the whole fight. Free: freedomreads.org
• Bard College, Bard Prison Initiative. A full liberal arts degree program inside New York prisons, and the most documented case of what serious education inside does. Institutional rather than movement-run, which is itself worth discussing. Free: bpi.bard.edu
• Beautiful Trouble, The Toolbox. A searchable toolbox of tactics, principles, and case studies from creative activism, cross-referenced so one tactic leads to the theory behind it. Movement-media in standpoint, and built to be raided rather than read through. Free: beautifultrouble.org
• Center for Story-based Strategy, Tools and Resources. Downloadable games and guides for analyzing whose story frames a fight and how to change it, which is the narrative half of the work this school does. Movement-training organization, committed to its own method. Free: storybasedstrategy.org
• Catalyst Project, Multi-session study curricula. Multi-session curricula from a project doing anti-racist political education with white organizers. Useful both as content and as a worked example of a school with an explicit theory of who it is teaching and why. Free: collectiveliberation.org
• National Center for Farmworker Health, Popular Education Manual. A popular education manual written for health promotores working with farmworkers, which makes it one of the few free Freirean guides built for a specific working community rather than for educators in general. Practical and unpretentious. Free: ncfh.org
• Augusto Boal, Boal’s Arsenal of Games. The games and exercises from Theatre of the Oppressed as a standalone free PDF, for a facilitator who wants to run one tomorrow without reading the book first. Free: organizingforpower.wordpress.com
• Freire Institute, About Paulo Freire. A short institutional introduction to Freire’s life and key concepts, useful as a one-page orientation before the room meets Pedagogy of the Oppressed itself. Written by the institute that carries his name, so it is warm rather than critical. Free: freire.org

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially facilitation guides for conflict and power dynamics in the room, trauma-informed practice, and multilingual and low-literacy popular education.