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Re: Models of leadership and Freire
Martin Lucas
Feb 25, 2004 14:17 PST
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Dear Andrea, The area of leadership is somehow the dirty secret of collective production. My current experience both in the University and in public access remind me of just how difficult it is. The EVC experience had a lot of specifics in terms of methodology. The teachers made a contract with the students and explored some very specific problems that they had. Dewey was as important as Freire. The methodology is explored in founder Steve Goodman1s recent book, Teaching Youth Media: A Critical Guide to Literacy, Video Production, and Social Change (Teachers College Press, 2003.) The Freire book I used myself the most was Education for a Critical Consiousness, and for me the key was always ‘critical thinking1 and sharing that critical dialog while exploring a predicament based on the student1s experience in an active way, e.g creating media. For more on that note, there is bell hooks essay 3Paolo Freire2 in her book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (Routledge, 1994.) I search for a good model for teacher. I feel I flounder, sometimes lecturing too much in the classic pouring-elixir-of-knowledge-into-little-pitchers model, and sometimes too much laying back and hoping students will come forward and define the situation. I see among students that if I am too ‘hands-off1, a tendency of mine, a couple of strong speakers will dominate. I also remember this from my own collective work. My sense is the best collective work I did at Paper Tiger TV was with people I1d worked with for a couple of years and knew well. We were able to just jump in and work because we shared both a methodology of production and a loose approach to radical politics. There1s a bit of this in the discussion ‘Making Outrage Contagious2 at http:pttv.org under Tools then under Articles. The other thing Paper Tiger had was a lot of trust in the public access and peace communities. In fact, I remember being surprised at one meeting where main factions, all anti-war, were not able to come together on a shared platform. It was some of my Paper Tiger collegues who were able to remind groups of the need for unity. Even with the shared sensibility the leadership issues can sink the ship. My sense is that when it works it can be like good jazz, there may be a leader, but everybody takes a turn. In a very practical sense I am using, or trying to use simple consensus-building tools to make sure that everyone in a group weighs in, and that people don1t simply override each other. Having said that, the troubles are always there. In the recent project with Manhattan Neighborhood Network around the New Hampshire primary we worked together using a non-profit conference call network where people from three different groups and three parts of the country could all check in at around 3pm or whatever and carry on at length. You could have both elaborate tech discussions and significant political ones, for instance talk in a nuanced way about whether voting is or isn1t a significant option for young Americans. [We were encouraging youth to vote in the program.] This was very helpful. The other part of it was that after the program we had a series of separate internal ‘post-mortems1 and then a shared one. This was important because the collaboration had suffered from fairly serious technical and interpersonal problems. Expecting those problems seems to be the only route. In a heirarchical context the differences are stifled. All the best Marty L. On 2/23/04 5:46 PM, "Andrea Polli" <apo-*at*hunter.cuny.edu>; wrote:
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