We all know how it goes. You show up at a conference, follow a set agenda, listen to keynote speakers and panelists talk to you. Maybe, if you’re lucky, there will be 10 minutes of Q&A at the end, and time and time again you leave feeling like the networking over beers at night was the most productive time spent.
If you’ve already been to an Alliance Leadership Retreat, you know that it is not the average conference. If you haven’t been yet, prepare to teach, learn, and interact in a different way.
The Alliance for Biking & Walking facilitates spaces for you, as a biking or walking advocate, to learn from your peers and share best practices. If you’re a member of the Alliance, you already know that you participate in a new kind of organizing – and relating with your advocate peers across the country is massively important to learning how to best push for the changes that our neighborhoods need.
The Leadership Retreat takes this type of learning to the nth degree with 3 days of popular education programming.
(The Alliance Leadership Retreat will be on September 5 - 8. Register here.)
What is popular education?
Popular education is education as a practice of freedom.
It is an approach to education where participants engage each other and the educator as co-learners to critically reflect on the issues in their community and then take action to change them.
This theory of education is rooted in the socio-economic and political conditions critically challenged by Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and an educator from Brazil.
In popular education, participants:
- Make space for the diversity of backgrounds that everyone comes with;
- Respect each unique perspective;
- Take the time to find shared problems and imagine the future of the issue;
- Use multiple creative means to explore the issues more deeply; and
- Build capacity so that the expertise is within the movement.
Popular education is a collective effort in which a high degree of participation is expected from everybody. Teachers and learners aren't two distinct groups; rather, everyone teaches and everyone learns.
Learners should be able to make decisions about what they are learning, and how the learning process takes place.
A facilitator is needed to make sure that new ideas arise, progress, and don't get repetitive, but this isn't at all the same thing as a teacher.
In popular education, then, we can't teach another person, but we can facilitate another's learning and help each other as we learn.
(Email Brighid to submit a proposal for the 2014 Leadership Retreat.)
Popular education at the Alliance Leadership Retreat
Every element of the 2014 Alliance Leadership Retreat will involve popular education.
Tracks and topic sessions will be facilitated discussions and learning activities, rather than the standard talking-at-you presentations you’re used to at most conferences. Knowledge will be shared among participants, with full participation.
We’ll identify issues and share knowledge as questions and areas of interest come up – so that you can work through your most pressing issues and learn your peers’ best practices.
Large group discussions will focus on how advocacy leaders imagine the future of the movement, the path to get there, and the potential barriers keeping new leaders from that path.
We’ll zero in on the issues that our movement needs to confront in order to move forward – and we’ll identify the next steps for progress.
Unconference sessions will have no agenda. Traditional conference rules are thrown to the wind. Participants will declare topic ideas on-site. We’ll cover essential topics that cannot be anticipated months in advance.
What are you waiting for? Join us.
If you haven’t already, register for the Leadership Retreat today.
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