Let's Play Co-op!
Last updated
Last updated
Let's Play is a new for people who want to be more inviting and motivating. At regular meetings, members test new experiences and critique their teaching methods. To join our group, start here!
Co-op training must not re-create the same power imbalances that cooperative movements are trying to upend. We all share a powerful disgust with conventional education - a knower lecturing passive learners, "objective" testing prioritized over our subjective life experiences, and a refusal to acknowledge that all learning affects our opinions on public policy.
Flipping it all upside down is not hard. Many co-op educators have been doing it for decades. For example, a study group focused on a book like Collective Courage uses critical pedagogy by focusing on personal reflection and systems change. A fun board game designed by the Tesa Collective can offer experiential learning that most people could never access otherwise.
As an experiment made possible by the Cooperative Education Fund, we conducted a 90-minute, crash course on co-op 101 with a group of adults. But there was a twist! The group had no instructor, just a time limit and smartphone-friendly instructions to guide the group through a series of exercises.
The workshop was a hit with participants and professors alike. One participant shared that she had never viewed herself as a leader, but with the scaffolding provided during the workshop she set an intention afterwards to explore leadership roles. Others were surprised how easy it was to begin imagining a business model that might meet their clients’ needs.
This experiential curriculum is easy to copy and adapt. Give it a try.
This network was seeded by a small experimental project funded by the Cooperative Development Foundation and led by Stephen Shelato. While drinking bad coffee together at the YMCA Stephen and experiential education guru, David Funderburk, spent their mornings talking about co-ops when they should have been working out. They quickly decided that "gamifying" education, buying extractive education technology and dipping a toe into critical theory wasn't enough.
They tested some of their ideas in a Co-op 101 workshop with the help of social work students at the University of South Carolina. After this pilot program it was immediately clear that structural/environmental barriers for instructors wanting to use these techniques were significant. The Let's Play project shifted to focus on train-the-trainer resources and peer support for cooperative educators.
