We Make the Road By Walking (and a note about pattern language)
P&D #6 - taking stock
I have come across this well-known phrase several times a year in a variety of contexts for decades now. One of its most famous uses is as the title of a marvellous "dialogue" book We Make the Road By Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change by Myles Horton and Paulo Freire. A must-read!
While my headline for this post is using, as with Horton's and Freire's book, the obvious meaning of 'making it up as we go along' (or, perhaps self-organizing), this phrase comes to us from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado who intended something much more complex (you can read my musings in this old blog post i wrote about it). Meanwhile, here I am pointing to getting this popular education newsletter moving along that road, even getting it off the ground (and, possibly, giving it wings).
Amongst my many flaws and foibles is being an over-thinker. Which, in this context, means that the moment I sit down to write something meaningful and intelligible about popular education, my brain returns to first principles and begins to reinvent popular education from scratch. I find myself at a nexus of countless branching paths each of which is a different way of describing popular education and all of them equally interesting to me. I suppose I feel like Cadmus who, in searching for his children, wrestled the old sea-god Proteus. Proteus was able to change his shape but if one could hold on to Proteus through all his transformations, he would, in the end, take his true shape and then would have to answer a question truthfully. I'm not sure my question of "What is popular education?" would be a good candidate for Protean wisdom, but i have been thinking that it is a good question for a dialogue. And that is my epiphany of the moment. I began this newsletter in the spring as a way to share some of the many resources and thoughts I have about popular education given my current context of pursuing a PhD. But as soon as i set foot on the journey, there I am at that nexus of paths where I feel very much like Winnie the Pooh: “When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”
This leads me to realize that the wisdom of Winnie the Pooh is precisely about the "other people looking at it." Which brings me to this update about my newsletter. While I want (and need) to share resources and point the way to the enormous treasure trove of stories and techniques and ideas and methodologies for doing popular education (and any form of emancipatory education), what i most value is dialogue. Being able to connect with others so that we can learn together. For, as Paulo Freire writes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, "no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each other, mediated by the world..." (p.80).
Thus this newsletter is a chance to connect. So, my plan now is to post some thoughts on Mondays and some brief descriptions of techniques/methods/exercises/what-have-you on Wednesdays. I am also launching a Patreon site through which I will share more detailed and thorough descriptions of popular education methods as well as drafts of articles and chapters for a book about popular education. But, most importantly, i'm hoping that you readers will engage with me on these ideas as well as let me know what you would like me to address and/or share with you. And, while I am always open to suggestion, I will also create polls from time to time to offer you choices about what I can address from month to month. Which brings me to pattern language.
Architect Christopher Alexander, who passed away earlier this year, created, along some colleagues, the notion of a pattern language which is something like a lexicon of terms within a particular field of practice. Alexander et al identified 253 patterns (of design) which they document in the book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. The notion of a pattern language was quickly taken up by software engineers. And it's been applied in a variety of fields. Some time ago i created a typology of popular education/participatory group methods. And eventually i realized that it forms the basis for what could be a pattern language for popular education. I've got a lot of work to do on this. But for now, below is the list I have used for many years and which represents the hundreds (if not thousands) of activities, methods, techniques, and ideas relevant to popular education (as well as other kindred practices). This list may help you identify particular needs you have in your work which and this newsletter can address.
Beginnings/Openings
Warm-ups
Energizers
Ice-breakers
Introductions
Group building
Group dynamics/process
Communication
Personal Development
Information Sharing
Research Methods
Storytelling
Reflection/Analysis
Decision-making
Conflict Resolution
Program Planning
Feedback
Evaluation
Debriefing
Endings/Closings
Celebration