School of activism

As I said, I want to try and apply how we learn tango to activism. This was the initial outline:

There will be at least one class per week, preferably two. In these classes we will look at activism as an activity which includes various skills that one can and should continuously practice. We will explore leadership, teamwork, project planning and so on as skills, and we will use the projects of all the participants as examples, instead of relying on theoretical scenarios. Thus, everything learnt will be applied in the work they do every day and discussed in the next class.

While this sounded like a good outline to me, I actually didn’t really think through the teaching part in detail: I conducted it as an open discussion with my questions as guiding points, and the students would discover the answers themselves. From the feedback I got it went really well – but experience has taught me that what a person think he or she has learned is one thing, while actually applying it in real life is another thing entirely.

This just goes to show that I’ve gotten rusty with my own organizational skills. The last workshop I personally designed and conducted was almost a year ago, and without the constant practice, I did the best I could at the time, but now I realized how far away that is from what I’m capable of. It’s like the feeling of forgetting a language you haven’t used in a while – it’s something we find hard to imagine happening, like it will always be with us just because it’s a mental skill, but that’s just not the case.

So, it’s time to do some mental practice and design this whole thing at the highest level I’m capable of. All of a sudden I’m not half as sure what it will look like, the way I was sure a week ago, but something is telling me it will look a lot more like a school of tango than I expected. We’ll see.

to be continued