Introduction
From Learning Activities Using "The Yes Men Fix the World"
Contents |
1 Introduction
| “ | …in many youth programs today the instructive myopic focus is in looking good over doing good. Based on my work with youth populations in schools and community agencies, I find that what young learners require most aren’t new flashes of creative exercises or activities, but an innovative and comprehensive way of thinking which enables them to understand their role in the community affairs of their world. | ” |
| — Ashanti Pasha |
The Yes Men Fix the World explores why our world is broken, why those who broke it don’t see the shattered people and planet, why those of us who do see should not be silent, and what can we do other than scream. The movie gives examples of what The Yes Men think is broken, and how they were not silent.
These learning activities are guidelines to develop further the themes in the film, so that more and more people will figure out how to discover and fix parts of their communities that are broken. We are thinking of teachers in a very broad sense—teachers, not just in schools, but in community groups and youth groups and even groups of friends, teachers and community organizers intertwined. We are thinking of learners in a similarly broad sense, and thinking of teaching and learning as intertwined.
The first part of the guide has suggested learning activities to prepare students to understand the movie at a deeper level—thinking about satire and its uses in addressing various political issues; and, thinking about the different kinds of underlying political/economic frameworks—conservative, liberal, and left—people can use to make sense of what is going on in the world. The second part of the guide focuses on student reactions to the film, student reflections on some of the major themes in the film—media literacy; the real-world consequences of an unfettered free-market world-view; and, whose intellectual work ’counts’ as worth considering in fixing the world—and student involvement in a process of fixing some small piece of their world. The hope is that the culture jamming in the movie—and your leadership—will inspire interest and motivation to act.
The activities suggested in this guide can be used in a variety of learning situations. You can use a few of the ideas with the film as part of the goals of your existing curriculum. Or, you can develop a short group of lessons, picking the activities that you find most meaningful and relevant to your situation, and focusing on understanding the movie and imagining what actions people might do to tackle some of what the students think is broken in the world. Or, if your teaching schedule is flexible enough to allow more time, you can develop a longer series of lessons that involve deeper study about how people have gone about analyzing what is broken in the world and struggling to fix it, and conclude with on-going activities connecting your class or learning group and an existing community group. In all cases, the major goal of these learning activities is to engage groups of people in our common struggle to understand what is going on, to develop commitments, and then, to act to make our world more just.
This guide does not fit neatly with one particular academic discipline or subject, or learning setting. Rather, the learning is interdisciplinary. The Yes Men Fix the World connects to curricula in a wide range of topics—Media Literacy, Tactical Media, Economic Literacy, Global Climate Disruption, Social Justice Organizing, Satire, and Business Ethics are just some possibilities. Of course, it would also fit beautifully into curricula focused on Bhopal (or industrial "accidents"), or Katrina (or "natural" accidents[endnotes 1]). And, it could work well as part of student service learning curricula.
Although teaching an interdisciplinary curriculum can seem hard for teachers of particular subjects, and for learners who do not have a lot of background knowledge, you do not have to know all the answers to all the questions you will have after watching the film. Part of the learning experience can be looking together for the answers. The educational philosophy is that fixing the world requires knowledge from many different fields to understand the issues. The educational philosophy is that respecting intellectual diversity and bringing together people from all different knowledge backgrounds, including people who have very little school learning, is needed to design creative actions to address those issues.
This guide is not easy to use. The fix our world is in is not going to be easy to fix. And there is so much information, and so many broken pieces that need fixing, it can be overwhelming to figure out how to proceed[endnotes 2]. As teachers, I think one of the challenges for you in using this guide will be that you will need the time to figure out which resources and specific exercises will work best in your situation. This guide starts to narrow the possibilities, but leaves it up to you to make the final choices.[endnotes 3] A second challenge is that most of the learning activities are presented as resources; in most cases, I left it up to you to design the specific questions for each exercise you choose to use. You might want to use a few very open-ended questions, or create a specific list of many questions that explore the material. A third challenge will be to tailor your use of the exercises to your students’ background knowledge.
I have tried to respect your creativity, and your time. You are the best people to make the decisions of exactly what goes into your curriculum, and exactly how to phrase the questions and organize the discussions. I tried to save you time by presenting a wide range of possible exercises, including internet links when possible, and brief summaries so that you can more easily select which exercises you would like to use in your curriculum. A philosophy that underlines the value of a more open-ended and expansive view of teaching and learning comes from a Hmong saying that translates "to speak of all kinds of things."
It is often used at the beginning of an oral narrative as a way of reminding listeners that the world is full of things that may not seem to be connected but actually are; that no event occurs in isolation; that you can miss a lot by sticking to the point; and that the storyteller is likely to be rather long-winded.[1][endnotes 4]
In my own work teaching adults basic quantitative reasoning, media literacy, and economic literacy, I often find that student difficulties are the result of the material being too easy, not too hard. These exercises, and the film, are very thought-provoking and can inspire interesting debates. My suggestion is that spending more time on fewer exercises can be a valuable learning experience for students with little background knowledge and/or academic skills[endnotes 5]
At the beginning of every term I have students read and discuss the following excerpt from a literacy text[2] used in Sao Tome and Principe after these African nations won their freedom from the Portuguese. It contains a view of studying that connects all thoughtful work in our lives, and helps students learn to respect their own intellectual work, to understand that intellectual work is hard work, and to be motivated to persist and do it.
The Act of Studying I
It had rained all night. There were enormous pools of water in the lowest parts of the land. In certain places, the earth was so soaked that it had turned into mud. At times, one’s feet slid on it. At times, rather than sliding, one’s feet became stuck in the mud up to the ankles. It was difficult to walk. Pedro and Antonio were transporting baskets full of cocoa beans in a truck to the place when they were to be dried. At a certain point the truck could not cross a mudhole in front of them. They stopped. They got out of the truck. They looked at the mudhole; it was a problem for them. They crossed two metres of mud, protected by their high-legged boots. They felt the thickness of the mud. They thought about it. They discussed how to resolve the problem. Then, with the help of some rocks and dry tree branches, they established the minimal consistency in the dirt for the wheels of the truck to pass over it without getting stuck.
Pedro and Antonio studied. They tried to understand the problem they had to resolve and, immediately, they found an answer. One does not study only in school. Pedro and Antonio studied while they worked. To study is to assume a serious and curious attitude in the face of a problem.
The Act of Studying II
This curious and serious attitude in the search to understand things and facts characterizes the act of studying. It doesn’t matter that study is done at the time and in the place of our work, as in the case of Pedro and Antonio, which we just saw. It doesn’t matter that study is done in another place and another time, like the study that we did in the Culture Circle. Study always demands a serious and curious attitude in the search to understand the things and facts we observe.
A text to be read is a text to be studied. A text to be studied is a text to be interpreted. We cannot interpret a text if we read it without paying attention, without curiosity; if we stop reading at the first difficulty. What would have become of the crop of cocoa beans on that farm if Pedro and Antonio had stopped carrying on the work because of a mudhole? If a text is difficult, you insist on understanding it. You work with it as Antonio and Pedro did in relation to the problem of the mudhole. To study demands discipline. To study is not easy, because to study is to create and re-create and not to repeat what others say. To study is a revolutionary duty!
Finally, Howard Zinn argues that a key part of an education for social justice is to talk about the promises that are made in documents such as The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and "the gap between that promise and what’s going on. And therefore suggest in varying degrees of persuasion that that gap should be filled."[3] What I have tried to do in this teacher’s guide is clearly not neutral. Rather, it is to suggest a conceptual framework for understanding the gap Zinn names and why it exists, using The Yes Men Fix the World as the central learning experience, and the philosophy of my dear friend, Ashanti Pasha, as the central goal of the learning experience: to "re-claim the construct of Service, and return it to it’s rightful social purpose of helping people correct wrongs, and not abate them."
Of course, this initial guide is only the beginning of this work. We hope to have an interactive platform for you to communicate with each other about learning resources and activities you have designed, to post photos and videos of your actions, and to jointly plan for larger actions. I will also be adding more suggestions for learning activities from time to time.
1.1 Endnotes
- ↑ Remember the Indian reporter The Yes Men interview, who tried endlessly to get people to pay attention to the problems he uncovered at Bhopal? How can the catastrophe at Bhopal be called an accident when it was predicted? How can Katrina be called a “natural” disaster, when people (and institutions) are responsible for the climate disruption and the neglect of the levees which caused the severity of the impact? And is it chance or poverty which could predict who are the people most effected by these disasters? Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America, Theodore Steinberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) explores these questions with a number of case studies of so-called “natural” disasters.
- ↑ Did you know 3.0? is the latest version of a numerical look at our knowledge explosion.
- ↑ Bill Lowe, one of the great trombonists of our time, and my teacher years ago in a student jazz band, often said that teaching is like jazz improvisation—jazz musicians study a ton of stuff, from all musical and other disciplines, and then bring it all to the performance, choosing what is right for the moment, at the moment.
- ↑ As you have discovered already, endnotes, as endnotes, are a significant part of my writing, both in terms of recognizing the connections and complexities among issues, trying to capture the richness of interdisciplinary teaching, and in terms of strengthening our struggles by (when relevant) referring to each other’s work so that our individual work becomes understood as part of collective work to move our connected, common struggles for justice forward. Teaching in an interdisciplinary way means there are a lot of endnotes and a lot of parentheses, not all of which get closed…that is part of doing this kind of teaching, without having to know everything, and without needing a zillion years to research and teach one lesson.
- ↑ One of my students recognized the challenge of getting people interested in education, in this case to improve their own individual lives. She also found a way to motivate general interest in learning.
Watching the documentary The Devil’s Miner in [your] class and reading the articles about the Landless People’s Movement in Brazil, and a few articles about the sweatshop workers’ movement in South America that I read on the internet, makes me wonder why do the clients I’ve been working with for the past few years not have an awareness of how important education is? …Is it because drugs and alcohol have been part of their systems [even though they have been cleaned and sober for years] that some of their perceptions have been altered? There are many GED classes, free computer classes, trade and technical skill trainings that require minimal fees, and only a few have grabbed the opportunity. There are times I get frustrated by the clients’ indifferent attitude toward their future.
Two weeks ago during [a group session with my clients]…I put on The Devil’s Miner movie that I had purchased. When the movie ended, I asked what they had thought. All of them were horrified and upset that there was no law regarding child labor [in Bolivia]. One of the clients said, it doesn’t matter if the law existed or not, look at us, we have a law against child pornography, but does it stop the pervert?
I was amazed the clients became passionate about the subject. I was wrong about the detachment. I think they need more provocative topics to discuss.(Sitiaisha Salim, student reflection, Economic Distribution class, May 2009).
