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Workshop B
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Workshop A |
Workshop B |
Workshop C |
Workshop D
Workshop B - Session 3
EuroWEA is the regional organisation of the International Federation for Workers Education Associations. It is an organisation like the Workers Education Association in Britain and its counterparts in Denmark, France and elsewhere. We also have national and international trade unions as part of the organisation. We have foundations and institutions, often part of the social democratic or democratic socialist political parties in different parts of the world. And we have NGOs (non-governmental organisations) from all over. It is an extremely diverse organisation - it is important to understand this. We have in our federation everything from organisations, like the one in Denmark, which are multi-million pound operations with hundreds of staff and thousands of tutors, through to the other end of the spectrum where we have little NGOs working out of a small office with two people and one telephone. We are also very diverse in terms of the sort of work we do, including for example both vocational and non-vocational, cultural and general education. Commitment to Workers Education There are however two things that bind us all together. One is an absolute commitment to the workers education tradition, which is about participatory education and democratic education. Whether you call them study circles (as, for example, in the Nordic countries), or student-centred learning models (as in the TUC, for example, in Britain or elsewhere), it is still basically the same idea of participation and democracy in the learning process, both at the point of delivery and in the management of the organisation. The other thing that we have in common is economic globalisation and the need for workers education to be able to address properly through education the issue of globalisation which affects all workers, all trade unions, throughout the world. The trouble is, how do you study globalisation using the sort of methods of democracy in the classroom? It is extremely difficult to understand for example what it is like to be a South African trade unionist for a group of people sitting in Manchester saying 'From our own experience how do we think it feels to be a South African trade unionist'. It does not work. We had to find a way of approaching globalisation which in itself is global. So we came up with the concept of international study circles. International Study Circles Basically we are looking at the use of technology for transnational learning. We want it to be global both in form and in content, so we are studying international issues but we are studying it in an international way. Yet we are trying to make it rooted in the local community so that it is real and understandable. We want to apply the technology to our tradition of workers education. Firstly, we are groups of people meeting together, discussing things and then working out how they want their education to develop. So how can you apply the technology to that? Secondly, we wanted to ensure that the quality of the learning, how the learner perceives the whole process, is at the very core of how we use the technology. In other words, if we asked the question, 'Does this enhance the quality of learning, this application of technology? If not, we won't use it.' Simple as that. Thirdly, it had to be global. So what we did in setting up this international study circles proposal was first of all to decide amongst ourselves what were the main themes that we wanted to study. They were in and around the agenda for globalisation. In fact the first one we did, which we did last year, was around how transnational corporations and investment by transnational corporation has an impact on the local community where that investment is going in - whether it be as a consumer, whether it be as a worker, whether it be as somebody watching television. Themes So, we decided on the themes. We selected about 12 countries to take part in the pilot programme. Then we pulled together local tutors, part-time tutors or tutor organisers, teachers or trade union officers, representatives from each of the participating organisations round the world and brought them physically together in Spain. We sat them in a room, locked the door for a week and told them they could not go away until they had come up with a course on transnational corporations in the local community that was directly relevant to each and every one of them in their different national contexts, and that it had to work. So we literally piled the table full of materials and methods and ideas about how they might do it, but they then had to go and design that course and take ownership of the programme. Then they went back to their respective countries and ran the course. They met afterwards to evaluate it. The actual delivery is very, very simple. You have a course we would all understand, such as a trade union or workers education course. For example, in Britain it was mostly done with trade union members of the Transport & General Workers Union from the Vauxhall Car Plant over in Ellesmere Port. In Kenya it was the Kenyan Women Workers Organisation, mostly plantation workers, who gathered together at their union office. They met maybe once a week/once a fortnight. Or they met for an evening class, where they would sit down and say 'Well, how do we think transnational corporations is affecting our local community?' Somebody took notes of that and then after the session had ended, posted it on to the Worldwide Website, which happens to be in Finland, to explain the results of their discussion. The Finnish colleagues then add all sort of links into that site, so you can follow it through, find out more, produce more ideas in terms of discussion. Then the next time the course meets, wherever it might be in the locality, they have in front of them the results of all the discussions that have taken place around the world. So in other words you are sitting there in Ellesmere Port and then one week later you have from Peru, from Taiwan, from Barbados, or wherever it might be, the perspectives of other people at a local level feeding their discussion and feeding their education programme. It Works and It is Cheap It worked, it really does work. You can do this relatively very cheaply indeed. We had 160-170 participants from around the world taking part in one global course using the technology. The key issue that emerged was not really a technological one - it was about what I would call transcultural mediation. There were questions of language of course, which we fudged. Basically everyone worked in their local language, whatever they preferred, but all the communications were in English, so we had to provide support in terms of translation to certain countries round the world. Secondly, there were major differences in educational approach. You had the incredibly didactic traditions of the South African trade union movement for example, meeting head-on the very precise study circle traditions of Sweden, and then incredible clashes about the actual organisation of the education. Thirdly, there is the emergence of the politics of the Internet, the technology culture, with major debates about whether or not the education process that we are in should be open or closed. The technology gives the ability to throw the whole thing open, and anybody, anywhere in the world, can take part in that process. However, that is incredibly chaotic. We wanted to try and make sure that we maintained a good and disciplined structure to the discussion, rather than people dipping in and out or surfing, if you like, through the middle of our international study circle. On the other hand, by closing it down you are actually closing down some of the potential for mass involvement in an educational process. So that is a real and difficult tension. Also, when I say appropriate and accessible technology, we always have to work at the lowest common denominator. We found all the problems to be in Western Europe where there are complex bureaucratic organisations, whereas the small little NGOs sitting in Kenya have no problems - 'Fine, get a modem, we'll plug it into the back of our computer.' So it was really interesting about where technology is appropriate, and it is surprising how often it is upside down. Transferability Finally, there is the issue of transferability. We have used it in a global sense. However, the more we think about it, it is providing the model for us in the WEA in Britain about how you work across the country, let alone across the world. We have been talking to the people here in Manchester who run these projects called electronic village halls. We have been talking about how learning can be run between groups of people across one city, using this sort of model. The important thing is the fact that there are groups of people who are doing it rather than individuals. To give you an idea of the resources involved, each course that we run now costs about £15,000 to run and given that it is global and that there are a hundred or so participants, that is actually quite cheap for what we are achieving. We are now well into developing this programme into whole other areas of issues around globalisation. So from the Autumn we are running a women's only programme for women workers on the global food industry. We are doing work with the ILO and a number of other people on migrant labour, the world on the move. The idea is to have people from the Philippines and Central and Eastern Europe and Mexico and California, to bring together on-line groups of workers who are both migrant workers themselves and workers in countries which are receiving migrant workers, and looking at issues around racism, and so on. We are looking at structural adjustment programmes. The participation is from rank and file trade union members, not for trade union leaders. One of the things that came out of the pilot programme was that working-class communities want to discuss serious issues. We are also looking at issues around child labour. We are doing work at a regional level. In January, we launched a Latin American programme and a South East Asia programme - not global, just within those world regions. Most interestingly perhaps, we are looking also at working within specific companies. We are beginning to look at setting up education programmes for trade union representatives within specific transnational corporations. We have one in mind to be launched next year. It will involve plantation workers, food processing workers and refinery workers within one company. The objective there is to end up through a sophisticated education programme with an international collective bargaining strategy for the trade unions concerned, which might cause some interesting debate.
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