Current mood:	hopeful
Current music:	Mawglee - "Sienna"
Entry tags:	anarchism, anarchism101, pedagogy

Anarchism 101: Introduction to New School
A few years ago I started teaching a class (more correctly, "facilitating a learning band") at Dawson CEGEP in their New School program. I've now facilitated four classes, three on the topic of "anarchism". Dawson's New School is a small subdepartment, an experiment in alternative pedagogy. About 35 years ago, Dawson students were asked to come up with ideas to improve college education. One way or another (I don't know the details), what emerged was the idea of a small class with an emphasis on discussion and participation on all levels—students having control over their class, selecting topics and the tools for evaluation. The founders dubbed this approach to pedagogy "critical humanism".

The teacher in New School is replaced by a "facilitator"; this role varies slightly according to the class, but it is essentially being a guide to discussion, both in the senses of presenting material to discuss and of facilitating the discussion itself. In some classes, I essentially lecture for half the time, and in others I merely participate in a discussion. I am officially, according to Dawson, a "teacher in training", though I'm not paid more than a $100 honorarium per semester. However the administration has recently decided that even unpaid facilitators need Master's Degrees, but I have essentially been grandfathered in with help from the fact that I'm taking courses in philosophy at Concordia, ostensibly with the goal of obtaining some sort of graduate degree in something or other someday in the future.

A very interesting facet of New School is the concept of a "band". Up to a few years ago, New School had a class, which all were encouraged (and earlier forced) to take, just called "Band". The class was of a standard New-School size, usually no more than 13 or 14 and often less, and met twice a week for 3 hours each time. There was mostly no other work, and the grade was 100% participation. The class would be spent in discussion on a variety of topics, usually suggested by the students themselves. The goal of the class was to improve communication skills in many ways, to learn how to relate to a number of other people, presumably most of whom you didn't really know before the class. As in all New School classes, everything said was confidential, and students would admit surprising things after the group had formed an "identity", as they say in New School.

Dawson's administration of late has been, well, shall way say hostile to the ideas and activities of New School. Apparently New School has always had its ups and downs over its 30-plus-year life, but I would be surprised if this wasn't one of the worst. Not only have Bands been entirely eliminated, but learning bands (originally called learning groups, when Band was a separate class) have had their maximum participation grade reduced from 50% to 30% and now to 20%. I think the classes are functioning essentially the same for now, but with the reduced participation mark it's conceivable that the priority, and thus the quality, of discussions will deteriorate.

But not to be too negative, if New School classes continue to function well (as all of mine have), it would be heartening to see that participation would still be valued despite its lack of enforceability. Perhaps that's closer to the heart of New School anyway, that people can come together and have intelligent conversations about a variety of topics without being forced to.

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I don't know of any good anarchist "textbooks" out there, although there are a number of decent but limited surveys, and the curriculum of New School is supposed to be at least somewhat fluid, so I find and sometimes edit readings each week. I have a few "standards", but I change many of the readings from semester to semester. Sometimes I do this for clarity, if I've had a chance to study a topic more on my own and find a better piece, but also because the class has input on what specifically they want to study.

So I figured that, hey, not everybody can be in a New School class, so why not put the readings up on the web? Obviously this is not a real substitute, since the discussions are irreplaceable, but I plan to write a short commentary on each one, essentially what I would be presenting in the "lecture" part of the class.

We'll go through anarchist ideas, thinkers, events, and activists from the 19th century to today. The fact that anarchism is about as far from orthodoxy as possible means several things however. It is impossible to represent the entire spectrum of anarchistic ideas, since they range from the sociological to the economic and even to the aesthetic. Furthermore, I have my own biases, although I do not agree with all aspects of the chosen topics; in fact, many of the ideas are contradictory. But I've tried to give a fairly faithful survey of some of the important aspects of the theory and practice of anarchism.

Next time: Introduction to anarchism