As the director of an intensive, two-year, activist training program, I start from the assumption that activist learning, education, and training improves the chances of our social movements actually winning victories. This assumption has been well documented by researchers like Griff Foley and Michael Newman, but for me this core conviction grows mostly out of my own experience. In the early 1970s, I helped organize an activist study circle designed by a popular education group called the Philadelphia Macro-Analysis Collective. My particular "macro" group involved close to two-dozen local activists in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Each week, about twenty of us would settle in for two hours of reports and discussions based on our readings and experiences. The learning process was participatory and lively. Topics included the global environmental crisis, ecological limits to growth, North-South relations, U.S. history, militarism, political economy, social oppression, strategic nonviolent action, and other grassroots strategies for change. The result of these searching dialogues, which we always related to the concrete challenges in our own activist work, was not a group adherence to any single political line, but a dramatic deepening in our understandings of the world, the constraints and opportunities we each faced, and the programmatic and strategic options that might help us realize our goals. It was one of my most powerful learning experiences as an activist and has shaped my activities over the last three decades.
Happily, over thirty years later, a group of popular educators is now working to update and revise the old 24-week "macro-analysis" seminar, and they are even developing information on how to adapt the new format to shorter, democratically-run, political education classes within colleges and universities. This is a project to keep an eye on. If you would like more information about this and other study group efforts, please check out: Blog: THE WELL-TRAINED ACTIVIST Post: The Power of Activist Study Groups Link: http://eaop-blog.blogspot.com/2006/08/power-of-activist-study-groups.html All my best, Steve Chase Director, Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program Department of Environmental Studies @ Antioch University New England 603-357-3122 ext. 298; 603-357-0618 (fax); [EMAIL PROTECTED] EAOP's Basic Website is at: http://www.antiochne.edu/es/eao/default.cfm EAOP's Blog -- "The Well-Trained Activist" -- is at: http://eaop-blog.blogspot.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ greenyouth mailinglist is the activist support mailinglist for kerala run by Global Alternate Information Applications (GAIA) To post to this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
