Rules For Radicals 4 - A Workshop Process

Creating a Community Action Session

Creating an interactive and high-energy session makes social change agents of all participants. The session title; Rules For Radicals; Waging Peace For Full Inclusion builds expectation even as potential participants consider their roles. The facilitator’s role is to develop and evolve a significant, citizen-centered innovation relating directly to full inclusion. The session format is based on the triangulation of three critical components (Alinsky’s tactics, Guidelines of inclusion and peaceful resolution) with a nucleus of participant affinity and need.

Purpose and Structure

1) The interweaving of guidelines for full inclusion and peaceful resolution with Alinsky’s tactics.

2) The connection of the session calls for action from participant experience, in order to create post-conference activity.

Agenda and Process

The history of equity, diversity, social justice and inclusion is replete with stories and example centered on people taking action that is within their experience. The session; Rules For Radicals; Waging Peace For Full Inclusion triangulates the methods of the pragmatic radical Saul Alinsky, guidelines for full inclusion, and elements of peace with the capacities of the workshop participants. The information is applied to those most at risk of exclusion, and people most vulnerable to segregation and isolation due to social devaluation. The tactics are founded on the principles of adult education / participatory action which result in high degrees of collaboration, shared learning and the creation of new knowledge. The narrative disseminated and generated throughout the event is targeted at creating post workshop participant action that breaks down institutional barriers to inclusion.

How the issue is presented and discussed

The interactive and participatory learning environment created by this workshop results in participants clarifying their own connection with inclusion and designing local action for change. The agenda and processes are:

1) Presentation and discussion of Alinsky’s 13 tactics. (15% of total time)

2) Presentation and discussion of Inclusion guidelines as they interact with

Alinsky’s work. (15% of total time)

3) Discovery process of group experience, local needs and participant definitions

of material presented. (35% of total time)

4) Creation of 2 or 3 individual actions to be taken at home. ( 35% of total time)

“The citizens concerned with quality learning and inclusive environments are numb, bewildered, and scared into silence. They don’t know what – if anything, they can do. This is a job for today’s radical – to fan the embers of hopelessness into the flame to fight.” (Alinsky p.194).

The workshop is designed for people who are concerned about the segregation and isolation of large groups of people within our society, and who want to take new and effective actions that place people who are most at risk on a trajectory of community, contribution and wholeness.

Facilitation

Facilitation is the sustaining of opportunities, resources, encouragement and support for the group to succeed in achieving its objectives through enabling the group to take control and responsibility. The facilitating leader is a facilitator with a vision. The use of facilitation finally answers the question of how to motivate people. The answer is not about motivation, but is rather about inspiration. To produce or arouse a strong feeling is the only direct path to quality, effectiveness, health, profitability and personal well-being.

General Facilitation Guidelines

Beegle, Gwen & Neuville, Thomas 2005.

1) Open with participant comments, input and questions. This clears the emotional way and opens up.

2) Lead specific assessment discussions with “what did you think? This starts from the spot the participants are at.

3) Publicly list responses. This allows for participants to develop to the next level of knowing by letting go. It also generates material for further analysis.

4) Set up seating for participant interaction and relationship building (e.g. circle). Among other advantages this form leaves spaces for the facilitator to enter.

5) Adopt a friendly and professionally familiar affect. This invites trust.

6) Make use of small groups.

a. Everyone will have an opportunity to teach and learn.

b. Productivity and work output increases.

c. Gives participants varied opportunities for hand-on experience with tools.

d. Guards against drift.

7) Create and re-create context, foundation, purpose and focus (this is a particularly

critical skill and pays attention to the moving target of developmental learning).

8) The facilitators must distribute themselves equitably about physically. Moving about with complete coverage allows relationship building and works best in u shapes or circles.

9) Make use of self-reflection relevant to the content as a public or private activity. This develops the ability to analyze, discover common ground and build steps toward practical generalization.

10) Refocus and restate with respect to participant language in order to build knowledge on focus area as well as enhance depth and meaning. Taking a persons statements and sometimes ramble and repeating it back in clear concise content specific terms builds individual and group understanding and offers to the person what they know.

Conclusion

The move towards inclusion and peace is blocked by false vision. The intent of the processes of inclusion, peace, and Alinsky’s tactics is to get a glimpse of what is most valuable about inclusive communities. With an increase in sight may come a positive institutional bias toward community, reformation and, perhaps, revolution evolves while creating space for citizens to gather and put together the steps they need for inclusion and peace. Whether systems change, people gain in belonging, or we simply get to know each other, the action of coming together is worthy.

References

Alinsky, Saul (1971). Rules For Radicals. Vintage Books, New York, NY.

Covey, Stephen (1989). 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Simon & Schuster, New York, NY.

Henderson, William (2005). Personal communication. Patrick O’Hearn School, Boston, MA

Neuville, Thomas (2000). What are the Main Concerns Related to Students With Disabilities as They Transition From Secondary Schools to Adult Life? UMI Ann Arbor, MI.

Peterson, Michael & Hittie, Mishael Marie (2003). Inclusive Teaching; Creating Effective Schools For All Learners. Allyn & Bacon, Boston, MA.

Rogers, Will (2005). http://www.willrogers.org/

Samuel, Bill (2005). Friends (Quakers) and Peace http://www.quakerinfo.com/quak_pce.shtml

Henderson, William (2005). Personal communication. Patrick O’Hearn School, Boston, MA.

Rules For Radicals 3

Tactics from Rules For Radicals

“Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul…”

Thomas Paine

As quoted in Alinsky 1971

Saul Alinsky wrote the book Rules For Radicals (Alinsky, Saul, 1971). The time is right to remember and implement his tactics for social change. The dominant ideological strategy employed today for students who are most at risk of exclusion is a higher order and more complex system of exclusion than has ever existed before. This paper promotes the use of Saul Alinsky’s 13 tactics for success in implementing inclusion for vulnerable people in everyday life. Understanding and using Alinsky’s 13 rules with a view toward action and high-energy systemic change will cause positive change.

TACTICS

Rules For Radicals, Saul Alinsky

We will either find a way or make one. --Hannibal

1) Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks your have.

2) The second rule is: Never go out side the experience of your people.

3) The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy.

4) The forth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.

5) The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.

6) The sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

7) The seventh rule: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

8) The eighth rule: Keep the pressure on.

9) The ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

10) The tenth rule: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

11) The eleventh rule is: If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.

12) The twelfth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

13) The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Fundamental Assumptions

As Special Education is founded on the biological scientific model the assumptions carried by professionals are aligned with a biological / medical model of production. The doctors, who ran the institutions, defined the best procedures to serve (cure) the "patients". Following world war I & II the newly skilled doctors returned with a zeal to carry on what they learned curing the wounded. The result was a strong, assumption creating,  foundation for Special Education and rehabilitation. A minority force, social rehabilitationists, saw the environment as in need of repair and advocated for such improvements as public awareness and environmental accessibility (a robust component of this group are made up of conscientious objectors serving in institutions---watch for future blog). The resulting set of beliefs, assumptions and scientific ideals was a biological model with social agendas. This model is the core of the Special Education field today and represents the core of the problems. 

When PL 94-142 was passed in 1975 improvement was generated not toward new models and ways of knowing. Improvement was generated within the narrow confines of the biological model. In some ways the new law cemented a set of assumptions and beliefs that have become an unconscious battle cry for well educated and skilled practitioners. When these assumptions are articulated and challenged as assumptions and not personal identifiers (professionals may declare; "this is who I am") true progress will be available. Just what are these well established assumptions that are now held as truths?

What every educator must know is contained in this graphic. A trilogy is soon to be published that will explain the theories and processes.

Please do not copy or reprint this graphic or it's contents.

Positivism

While preparing for a course scheduled for the fall of 2009 I reintroduced myself to the concept of positivism. In so doing I found great understanding of the tensions I live with.  Positivism is (according to dictionary.com) a doctrine contending that sense perceptions are the only admissible basis of human knowledge and precise thought and that the application of this doctrine in logic, epistemology, and ethics supersedes theology and metaphysics and depending on a hierarchy of the sciences, beginning with mathematics and culminating in sociology. It is the culminating in sociology that impacts the field of education and particularly special education.  All of this came about sometime between 1900 and 1950 and promoted attention to actual practice over consideration of what is ideal. Further the practice must be based on what is knowable from a strictly quantitative perspective.

Positivism elements are considers of lessor import knowing through relationship, experience or observation of the environment. Unless one is counting things relevant to those areas they are of little concern to the educator trying to improve the target (student).

No wonder I have difficulty communicating with some of my peers as they are sure that what I offer and the theories of practice I teach have no basis in reality or knowledge. Tom Srtic is the man to speak with or read if you are looking for substantial insight into this (http://soe.ku.edu/Tom-Skrtic/). 

Sadness washes over me as I see clearly that I am speaking a foreign language and inviting people into a strange culture when I give evidence that suggests the source of teaching is to be found in relationships, environment, cultures and the mix of all of those. This is good news however as I now have been reminded of a plethora of resources that can be offered to teacher candidates and injected into the academy at multiple points of entry.