Almost end of week one!
12/Jan/2007 13:28
The first
week of the program is almost over. I can't wait for
the long weekend coming up. Monday is Martin Luther
King day, a statutory holiday in the United States.
It will give me a chance to catch up with the
reading; we are assigned to read about four articles
or book chapters every night. It is far too early to
offer any assessment of the program. But here are a
few “noticings” (as George Lakey, Director of
Training for Change, might say).
The students:
There are 40 of us – a big class when it comes to
discussions. Surprisingly, only ten of us are women.
The group includes four Canadians, two Australians,
one British, one Chinese, one Puerto Rican; the
others are from the US. There is good racial
diversity. There is a mix of public and private
sector unions: operating engineers, boilermakers,
municipal and county employees, longshoremen, police,
professional engineers, transit, journalists,
firefighters, teachers, nurses, steelworkers, and
others. No one here from the Change to Win coalition(
the unions that recently broke away from the
AFL-CIO). There is a mix of union staff and elected
officers. Most hold senior positions at a local,
district or state level. A few of us hold senior
positions at a national level.
The course: So far, the program has consisted of four sessions a day, most consisting of a lecture followed by a question/discussion period. The format does not involve much back and forth between students but there is a lot of interaction and good discussion in smaller groups outside of class time. The program covers a lot of topics. Some are addressed in a single session, others are revisited several times over the six weeks. Several topics, such as strategic choices for unions and organizational development, are covered through the “case method.” We are assigned a case to read and prepare, and in class we engage in an analysis of the situation: what happened, what decisions were made, why did things go the way they went, could there have been a different outcome, and so forth. This week we dealt with the case of the PATCO strike, when the U.S. air traffic controllers struck and were consequently fired in 1981 by Ronald Reagan and his administration.
It has been thirty years since I’ve been in this kind of classroom environment. I am doing my best to stay with it even though the approach goes against the popular union education model that I support.
More on the speciics of what I am learning to come in my next posting. And stay tuned for an account of our student life in Cambridge.
The course: So far, the program has consisted of four sessions a day, most consisting of a lecture followed by a question/discussion period. The format does not involve much back and forth between students but there is a lot of interaction and good discussion in smaller groups outside of class time. The program covers a lot of topics. Some are addressed in a single session, others are revisited several times over the six weeks. Several topics, such as strategic choices for unions and organizational development, are covered through the “case method.” We are assigned a case to read and prepare, and in class we engage in an analysis of the situation: what happened, what decisions were made, why did things go the way they went, could there have been a different outcome, and so forth. This week we dealt with the case of the PATCO strike, when the U.S. air traffic controllers struck and were consequently fired in 1981 by Ronald Reagan and his administration.
It has been thirty years since I’ve been in this kind of classroom environment. I am doing my best to stay with it even though the approach goes against the popular union education model that I support.
More on the speciics of what I am learning to come in my next posting. And stay tuned for an account of our student life in Cambridge.
|