Training for Change

Training for Change:

Moving from Theory to Practice in Adult Education for Empowerment

Elowyn Corby

Senior Honors Thesis

Professor Lee Smithey and Professor Diane Anderson

4/30/2013
 Training for Change

Table of Contents

CHAPTER TITLE: PAGE

Acknowledgements 2

Abstract 3

Introduction 4

Methodology 8

Chapter 1: The Promises and Dangers of Participation 22

Chapter 2: Adult Education for Empowerment 38

Chapter 3: Direct Education’s Theory, History, and Effects 59

Conclusion 116

Appendix A 123

Appendix B 125

Bibliography 126

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Acknowledgements

This work is not mine: It belongs to my family and my community. It’s composed of the ‘thesis
chocolate’ Hilary brought me on long writing days, and my mother’s patience and
encouragement over countless phone calls. It’s Rhiannon’s commiseration and excitement, my
father’s research advice, and Zena’s kindness. It owes its existence to those friends, especially
Jesse, who knew when to ask about the thesis and when not to, and who were patient when I
wouldn’t stop talking about theory.

Training for Change has shown enormous faith in me throughout this process, and I have been
repeatedly humbled by the generosity and openness of the trainers I worked with. Nico and
Daniel in particular have consistently offered their support and insight, without which this
project would have become a chore rather than a labor of love.

Finally, this thesis would have been a much stranger and sorrier beast (as would I, at the end of
senior year) without the constant patience, faith and guidance which my advisors have offered
along the way.

Thank you all. I am deeply grateful.

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Abstract

This research examines the possibility of using adult activism training to facilitate the
development of participatory skills. It considers the impacts and pedagogy of Training for
Change, a social action training collective in Philadelphia. As well as surveying the major
democratic theory on participation and the educational theory dealing with education for
empowerment, the research includes a qualitative and quantitative analysis of Training for
Change’s work. Based on a survey of past-participants, Training for Change tends to
increase participatory skills among trainees, as well as identification with social change
maker identities like ‘leader’ and ‘organizer’ and the frequency and intensity with which
trainees participate in social change work. These effects were disproportionately
pronounced among participants of color. This finding counteracts the effects of more
traditional skill-development institutions such as the workplace or non-political
organizations, which disproportionately increase participatory skills among the most
privileged members of society. At the same time, people of color were slightly less likely to
report that they felt the training was designed to be helpful for people like them, indicating
that TFC has a complex relationship with questions of cultural relevance in the training
space.

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Introduction

At its strongest moments, democracy hints at a radical equality built on general

empowerment and mutual concern. Yet this ideal must be understood as a social prerogative

rather than a promise. It can only be realized through struggle, and is perpetually contingent on

our ability to press and engage and argue for democracy’s farthest-reaching and most egalitarian

implications. The stakes in this struggle are high: the legitimacy of our democratic project rests

on its energy, and on the efficacy and diversity of the voices recognized within it.

The research presented in this thesis addresses the adhesive that connects democratic

theory with practice: each individual’s ability to campaign and to create, to influence the broader

community through a process of social and political participation. Often taken as a simple fact

of democracy, engagement should instead be understood as a resource much like any other: it

can be nurtured, it can be used to accelerate or suppress change, and it is often unequally

distributed, perpetuating existing systems of oppression.

History has demonstrated that struggle and engagement create power, and that power,

especially when unidirectional, reproduces itself. The driving question behind this research is

whether education can facilitate the democratically crucial development of social power, while

also advancing the cause of equality. To begin answering that question I have grounded my

analysis in the work of Training for Change, a group of adult activism trainers in West

Philadelphia whose mission is to help radical social activists develop the skills and tools

necessary for effective activism.

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Case studies are valuable to the pursuit of knowledge because they ground us in the realm

of the possible, while also identifying some of the constraints that make theory and reality

diverge. While this research will examine how TFC’s structure and work have developed over

the past 20 years, it will also provide a theoretical structure in which the group and its effects can

be better understood. Drawing on a rich body of democratic and educational theory, I will

demonstrate why a specific type of activism training – training that supports diverse and often

marginalized communities in developing activism and organizing skills – is important to a

democratic society. Throughout the piece, we will encounter a number of central recurring

questions, especially what kinds of participation and engagement should be encouraged, and how

activism training can be structured so as not to reproduce the inequality and disempowerment

that it attempts to combat.

Before discussing whether and how activism training can be effective, we must ask

ourselves why we think it should be. My first chapter will explore existing scholarship on

participation within the field of democratic theory. Drawing on the work of scholars such as

Robert Putnam, Carole Pateman, and classical theorists such as John Stuart Mill and Rousseau, I

will argue in favor of increased participation and specify the type of participation that should be

encouraged. In particular, the work of Mutz, Verba, and, Berman will guide our discussion of

how participation can weaken rather than support civil society when it is used to perpetuate

social cleavages and unequal power structures.

Beyond considering the type of participation we should encourage, this first chapter will

examine traditional demographic patterns in participation, as presented by Sidney Verba et al.

Verba et al. point out that white upper- and middle-class individuals tend to be

disproportionately participatory, with the result being that their voices are often magnified and

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their wishes expressed more forcefully than those to the rest of the population. In order to be

truly progressive, a training group such as TFC should be able to support people of color and

activists from working class backgrounds, whose voices have too-often been silenced throughout

the course of the United States’ history.

The second chapter will examine the existing literature on education for empowerment,

which lays the foundation for TFC’s work. This literature demonstrates the difficulty and

complexity of crafting a relationship between teacher and student that is mutually empowering

and culturally relevant. The section’s main focus will be on the works of Paulo Freire, as well as

the modifications that have been made to his popular education model in recent years so that it

can better accommodate cultural differences between Freire’s Brazil and the United States. This

chapter will also introduce a discussion of Culturally Relevant pedagogy (CRP) and how

educational inequality can be addressed by inclusively recognizing cultural differences in the

classroom.

The third and final section of this research will apply the theoretical frameworks that

have been explored in previous chapters to the work TFC is doing. I will explore the group’s

history, the changes it continues to undergo, and how it addresses the questions posed in earlier

sections. My primary question for this chapter is how TFC expresses and welcomes diversity,

both within the group of trainers and among training participants. This analysis will be built on a

series of interviews with TFC trainers, and quantitative survey data collected during the summer

of 2012. By looking at TFC’s accomplishments and areas for future growth, I will develop a

clearer conception of how activism training can support the development of participatory skills

and encourage social change.

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I will develop a detailed picture of TFC as an organization later in this work, but it is

important that the reader have a basic understanding of the organization’s form and mission in

order to contextualize the chapters to come. Below is a brief organizational summary, so that as

we immerse ourselves in the literature and theory that will inform our analysis, we hold a clear

image of our subject in mind.

Training for Change has been an important player in the sphere of activist training and

training-of-trainers since George Lakey first founded it in 1992. The group works with activists

in any area of progressive activism to develop critical skills and tools, but much of its focus is on

the training of activism trainers. Growing out of the Philadelphia-based Movement for a New

Society, TFC has developed a reputation for consistent excellence and rigor in the training space.

The group has run trainings in over seventeen countries ranging from Russia to Sierra Leone,

serving more than 12,000 participants. Its central training, the Super-T, is an annual three-week

intensive that attracts leading activists from around the globe.

Historically, conversations about TFC have centered around George Lakey. There is

good reason for this: while heavily inspired by Freire and other advocates of education for

empowerment, Lakey was truly the father of TFC and of the direct education methodology on

which it is built. Synthesizing his own experiences as a working class Quaker in the Civil Rights

movement, Movement for a New Society, and numerous diverse campaigns within the world of

social activism, Lakey developed a framework for teaching the skills he saw as necessarily for

the active creation of social change. Combined with the theoretical and pedagogical insights of

particular thinkers whom Lakey encountered through a long process of experimentation in the

field of adult education, these experiences developed into ‘direct education:’ a methodology

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designed to provide activists with the tools and resources – both practical and psychological –

they need in order to create meaningful and abiding social change.

Over the past twenty years, Training for Change’s form has evolved dramatically. From

essentially consisting of one trainer in 1992, TFC has developed into a fully-fledged organization

with multiple tiers of trainers, staff members, and a board of directors. The gradual process of

organizational growth culminated in 2007, at which point Lakey announced his intention to step

down from his position as executive director. He did not expect the organization to continue in

his absence.

This announcement prompted a period of intense internal dialogue and restructuring

within the group. As the outcome of a long process of deliberation, the remaining members of

the organization chose to – and received Lakey’s permission to – continue the organization

without his involvement. After a ‘fallow year’ or period of dormancy during which the group’s

work focused on internal development, TFC re-emerged. From an organization conceived of

and led by one highly experienced white man nearing retirement age, TFC transitioned directly

into a much more cooperative endeavor led jointly by two relatively young men of color.

Lakey’s legacy still guides and inspires the trainers – many of whom maintain close relationships

with him to this day – and he still occasionally serves as a trainer in the most advanced trainings

or offers his own home as the location for trainings in Philadelphia. Yet nearly six years after

the group began its restructuring process, its face and composition look very different than they

have in the past. The transition, which is now essentially complete, gives every sign of having

been successful. Participants overwhelmingly report that TFC is an effective and strong

community of trainers, while the trainers themselves express commitment to and excitement for

diverse yet complementary visions of the group’s future.

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Methodology

The data collection and analysis for this project was conducted over a period of

approximately six months, beginning in the summer of 2012. The data have two principle

components: eight qualitative interviews conducted with Training for Change trainers, and 276

surveys (containing both qualitative and quantitative sections) of past-participants in TFC

trainings. These were augmented with information from the group’s internal records and my

own observations and field-notes from working with the group as a logistical intern during the

summer of 2012.

The survey was sent to the entire TFC database of past participants, and combined long-

form and multiple-choice questions. This survey data made statistical analyses and comparisons

among subpopulations of past participants possible. The interviews, on the other hand, were

conducted almost exclusively with TFC trainers and staff members. The open-ended format of

the interviews was designed to capture some of the richness of the trainers’ relationships with the

organization, relationships which are far too complex to be meaningfully captured by a survey.

My research was designed to generate and test hypotheses, which is to say that I did not

begin my research with an idea of what I was hoping to find. In order to respect the diversity of

information and experiences I encountered over the course of my research, I started by simply

immersing myself in TFC’s work and asking questions about anything I thought might be helpful

in the future. My early interview questions were broad, and became more honed over time as I

noticed particular issues emerge in what I heard from my interviewees. I became particularly

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interested in questions of minority voice and representation in the organization, and as a result

the interviews and my informal discussions with trainers gradually became oriented toward this

theme. Since I designed the survey before I began my research, my approach was to ask as

many potentially meaningful questions as possible, with the hope that some would be helpful

when I eventually analyzed the data. The survey questions are reproduced in appendix A.

Critical Incident Technique

While the survey and interviews differ in many respects, they both at times make use of

the critical incident technique. First introduced in the early 1950s by John C. Flanagan, the

critical incident technique has grown in prominence due to its ability to quickly isolate important

moments or pieces of information, as well as its adaptability and respect for the experiences of

respondents (Flanagan, 1954). Originally used in studies designed to produce suggestions for

increased job performance, the critical incident technique generally entails asking respondents to

tell a story about an experience that they subjectively feel is important to a topic specified in the

prompt. This avoids the tedious work of presenting a potentially long list of possible broad

responses from which a respondent is asked to choose. The technique can also capture rare but

important pieces of information a researcher might not foresee, and often produces a rich dataset.

More importantly, it produces data that are reflective of respondents’ genuine experiences rather

than the rough approximations that can be expected from a prepared list of options.

The critical incident technique sidesteps some of the risk that any researcher runs of only

accessing the knowledge that he or she knows enough to specifically ask for. Many traditional

interviewing or surveying methods filter respondents’ wisdom through the interviewer’s

preconceived expectations: if, for instance, the interviewer asks a yes or no question about

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negative experiences around gender in the workplace, this eliminates the possibility of hearing a

more complex personal story that illuminates the intersectionality between gender, race, and

power, or a personal account of how gender can serve as a source of strength as well as a

limitation in professional settings.

Of course, there are disadvantages associated with exclusive use of the critical incident

technique. Most important among these is the fact that the critical incident technique is highly

dependent upon memory, and specifically memories that fit into easily recounted narratives. This

reliance on memory biases research toward more recent events, while older memories lose detail

and fade over time. To a certain extent all social research on human subjects falls prey to this

failing, but by placing such an emphasis on narrative, the critical incident technique may be

especially likely to encourage participants to adjust their recollections and responses in order to

produce what seems to fit a familiar story arch or to support what they believe the researcher

wants to hear. Consequently, I heavily offset my critical incident technique data with statistical

data and smaller pieces of information. In the interviews, I asked a number of specific questions

along with those that utilized the critical incident technique. While many of these are reproduced

in Appendix B1, some of the more important examples included what the interviewee viewed as

the group’s strengths or weaknesses, or how he or she thought about diversity in the group.

Interviews

I conducted seven out of my eight interviews with TFC’s staff and trainers (all staff are

also trainers, though not all trainers are staff). The final interview was with a past participant

1
Since each interview relied on specific questions that were particularly relevant to that
interviewee’s life and position in the group, not all interview questions can be recounted.
Instead, the appendix contains the template questions which I adjusted or added to when
necessary.

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and current Swarthmore College student. The trainers can be roughly divided into two cohorts:

those who have been with TFC for over a decade and became professional trainers between the

1970s and 1990s, and a younger generation whose foundational political experiences took place

during the 1990s or early 2000s. Most of the first cohort joined the organization after developing

substantial experience as trainers or educators through other means, while members of the

second cohort similarly tended to have extensive organizing experience outside of TFC, but had

not worked as trainers or educators before their experiences with the organization. There is some

overlap between the generations: Daniel Hunter is closer in age to the younger cohort, yet was

mentored by George Lakey starting at age 16 and has been an active member of the group since

2001. I interviewed three members of the first cohort and four members of the second. There is

a second distinction between the trainers, which correlates – but is not entirely coextensive –

with the age division. Trainers who have developed more experience and have chosen to take on

mentorship roles within the organization are designated as “trelders” or training elders. Using

this designation, I interviewed all five trelders. The final two interviewees were training

associates, the next step down in terms of experience and responsibility. Training associates are

generally younger, and have less experience with the group and working as a professional

trainer, though they are in the process of being mentored and may someday become training

elders themselves.

The interviews were semi-structured, each with a set of questions designed to fit the

individual’s experiences and provide continuity between interviews. While each interview was

slightly different, all interviewees were asked to respond to critical incident technique questions.

For a list of sample interview questions, see appendix B. Each interview lasted between 45 and

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90 minutes. Four of the interviews with trainers were recorded with a handheld recording

device, two were recorded over skype, and notes on a final skype interview were taken by hand.

In transcribing the interviews, I was concerned primarily with content, and not with

linguistic abnormalities or grammatical construction. At times, in order to remain loyal to the

content of an interviewee’s comments I made cosmetic adjustments to the statements I collected:

I deleted filler words such as “um” or “hm” when I deemed them irrelevant. My aim was always

to preserve the intended meaning of a statement, and with this in mind there were points where I

did not reproduce sentences that were begun and then rephrased before their completion, or –

much less frequently – where I corrected a grammatical anomaly that made sense in speech but

became unclear or distracting when translated onto paper.

Surveys

The quantitative data for this research were collected via an online survey comprising

twenty-seven questions that were sent out to the entire TFC database. The data collection itself

was run through LimeSurvey, with a license that was specially adapted for Swarthmore College

and re-titled SwatSurvey. The survey tool made provisions for ensuring participant anonymity,

including the use of identification numbers in place of respondents’ names. The only point of

possible compromised anonymity within the survey was an optional final question in which

participants were invited to provide their email in order to be entered into a raffle for a fifty-

dollar gift certificate, an incentive for participation.

Survey respondents were contacted once with the original survey, and those who did not

respond to the initial invitation were sent a follow-up email reminder two weeks later. The

survey produced a total of 276 analyzable responses, a combination of completed responses and

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incomplete responses that were recorded even if the participant decided not to complete the

entire survey. In order to respect participants’ control over which information they chose to

provide, no question was listed as mandatory. This means that for certain questions the response

rate was much higher than for others.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to know exactly what percentage of people who were

contacted with an invitation to participate in the survey in fact did so, due to the nature of the

database that was provided by the organization. The database was partially corrupted before the

research began in the summer of 2012. Consequently, the legitimate names and emails included

in the database were interspersed with meaningless lines of data and fake emails for nonentities.2

Presumably, the database had been hacked at some point in the past, so that while the survey was

sent out to the entire database, this corruption makes it impossible to determine the exact number

of individuals who received the survey: Approximately 15,000 invitations to participate in the

survey were sent, but since so many of the addresses were clearly inserted when the database

was hacked, an unknown number of those thousands never reached human inboxes. Another

complication with relying on this database is that it is biased in favor of recent participants: the

majority of respondents had their first contact with the group after 2008, which indicates either

that many of the group’s early participants have changed their contact information since they

interacted with the group, or that the database was less well-maintained before the transition to

new leadership.

This casts a degree of uncertainty on any conclusions drawn from the data. The primary

concern in any study where a sample is taken of a larger group is that there might be response

bias. For instance, if past participants whose experiences with the group had been

2
These took the form of “YourAddHere, YourAddHere@YourAddHere.com.”

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disproportionately negative did not respond to the survey based on a belief that those negative

experiences would be the primary focus of the survey, the sample would be biased. Without

knowing the viable size of our initial population, we are less able to know how large that

response bias might be.

Absolute certainty is beyond the scope of this study, but I have made reasonable

accommodations to account for the added uncertainty inherent in my initial pool of survey

respondents. The subject of the original email, which said that TFC was looking for negative

and positive feedback, prominently advertised the possibility of winning fifty dollars as a result

of filling out the survey (“Tell us about TFC and win a $50 gift certificate!”) an incentive which

I hoped would cut across most of the potential areas of bias. I also sent out a second reminder

email to those who did not fill out the survey within the first two weeks. The survey questions

were arranged to front-load factual questions and back-load qualitative questions about

individual satisfaction with the group, so as to avoid a situation in which those with negative

experiences with the group would withdraw from the survey before sharing less sensitive

information. I chose this organizational scheme so that even if participants decided not to

complete the survey after filling out the first few questions, the information that had already been

gathered would be statistically analyzable and would increase the validity of any statistical

claims based on the data. Partially complete survey responses were included in my later data

analysis. If I assume that some of the authors of ‘incomplete surveys’ – that is, survey

respondents who did not choose to complete the survey but did fill out the first few questions –

would have only filled out the first few questions regardless of their order, then this choice to

front-load statistically analyzable questions did sacrifice some of the long form responses in

hopes of more statistically robust findings.

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Once the survey-data was collected, I analyzed it with Atlas.ti (a qualitative analysis tool)

and SPSS (a statistical analysis program). Atlas.ti allowed me to code the qualitative responses

and thus identify and more easily access recurring themes. In order to continue making use of

the benefits of the critical incident technique, I did not prepare a list of codes beforehand and

instead inductively generated codes based on the contents of the survey responses I received.

The SPSS data analysis software performed the necessary statistical manipulations on my

quantitative data.

The SPSS data were divided into dependent and independent variables, with the

independent variables including age, race, gender, level of education, type of work, and the first

year the participant interacted with TFC. The dependent variables were more numerous, and

included questions on participants’ identification with select social change maker identities

(including activist, educator, advocate, and organizer) before and after their experience with

TFC, a series of Likert scale question about how strongly the respondent agrees with a given

statement about TFC, and a series of binary questions on basic satisfaction with the group.

These variables were crosstabulated with one-another, in order to identify any statistically

significant differences between sub-populations.

My measure of significance across all questions was established at a p-value of 0.05.

Depending on the variables under analysis, determinations of significance were based on either a

Chi-Square test, a Fishers Exact Test, or in rare instances, a Somers’ D test. Somers’ D tests are

designed for comparing ordinal variables with other ordinal variables: simply put, this test can

only be used when the data for each component of the test is ordered, for instance when

comparing participant age to participant’s level of satisfaction with the training. Chi-Square tests

are commonly used in evaluating crosstabulations of variables, but they require that a set of

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assumptions about the distribution of responses be met, and these assumptions can be violated

with small data-sets that result in small cell counts within crosstabulations. Specifically, the Chi-

Square relies on the law of large numbers, assuming that the mean of the data being used is near

the mean of the entire sample. This is much less likely to be true when the sample is relatively

small.

My data generally did not satisfy the Chi-Square test’s assumptions, in which case I used

Fishers Exact test. This test produces analogous results to those from a Chi-Square test, but

bases its calculations on the existing data and makes no assumptions about the larger population.

However, Fishers Exact Test may only be calculated on 2 by x tables. I used an online

calculator3 provided by Simple Interactive Statistical Analysis to run the test on crosstabulations

in which at least one variable contained no more than two responses. In some cases this required

collapsing response categories, but only when doing so could be understood to reflect a logical

and reasonable, if less diverse, set of categories. I report in a footnote on instances in which

Fishers Test was run on variables with collapsed categories.

The default test in the following pages is the Fishers Exact test. When one of the other

two, either Somers’ D or Chi-Square, is used, this fact is noted in a footnote. Each of the tests

used in the following analysis is appropriate under certain precise conditions and was used only

when those conditions were met, yet the 0.05 threshold for significance is equally rigorous across

all three.

3
The SISA calculator is located at http://www.quantitativeskills.com/sisa/statistics/fiveby2.htm

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Observations and Additional Data

While most of my analysis will be based on the data I collected through the means

explained above, there are a few other ways in which I developed my knowledge of the group. I

spent roughly ten weeks on call as a TFC intern in the summer of 2012, and while some of my

duties included work with the group’s internal files and database, the majority of my time was

spent helping with the logistical and technical elements of the summer trainings. This work gave

me direct insights into the process of training, and allowed me to examine files that were

generally only shared with members of the group. This access was critical for my ability to

collect detailed explanations of the group’s internal organization and trainers’ responsibilities,

and access historical documents tracing the group’s evolution over time. While most of this

information is not directly referenced in the thesis itself, it contributes to my background

knowledge of the group.

While running logistics for a number of multi-week trainings over the summer, I was able

to further deepen my understanding of TFC. During meals, I socialized and had informal

conversations with participants and trainers about the training, how they were reacting to the

material, and how they interpreted the developing group dynamics. I was also graciously

allowed to sit in on the trainers’ debrief at the end of a particularly challenging multi-week

training. These experiences gave me a more complex understanding of how direct education

methodology is applied within a training space, and allowed me to develop trust and familiarity

within the group.

A natural concern surrounding this particular research methodology is that by immersing

myself within the group I was attempting to study, I compromised some of my objectivity and

detachment as a researcher. Yet the closeness to – and genuine interest in – my research topic is

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what initially allowed me to develop meaningful relationships with members of the group, and is

therefore an integral part of this study. My methodological approach seeks to embrace the

complexity inherent in the researcher’s positionality, goals, and perceptions. In Researching

Language, Deborah Cameron et al. emphasize the importance of recognizing power relations

between the researcher and the population being researched and advocate for a research

paradigm in which individuals are not viewed as objects and research is conducted “on, for, and

with” its subjects. By becoming a peripheral member of the TFC community as part of my

research, I sacrificed some of my objectivity in favor of what I viewed as the more valuable goal

of sharing power between the researcher and the researched. Instead of simply being an

impersonal observer who harvested knowledge and insight from the group and gave nothing in

return, I was also one of the people who made coffee in the mornings, set up tables, and brought

trainers food at home when they got sick and surprise cakes on their birthday.

Although this way of thinking about research is most important when observing

communities that have been traditionally disadvantaged, it looses only its urgency and not its

insight when working among the more empowered individuals who tend to associate with TFC.

After all, TFC participants generally attend trainings because they already feel at least some

degree of agency in their own communities. In conducting my research I placed a central

emphasis on being clear about my position and ensuring that I left as much power as possible in

the hands of those I researched, recognizing that they affected me while I likewise affected them.

I used what Peter Clough and Cathy Nutbrown term “radical looking,” or “the means by which

research process makes the familiar strange, and gaps in knowledge are revealed” (Clough &

Nutbrown, 2012). When members of the group performed actions I believed I already

understood, I attempted to suspend the knowledge or beliefs I brought into the research

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environment and instead focused on the possibility of interpretations or reactions other than my

own.

All researchers bring biases to their work. These biases affect the questions researchers

ask and where they look for answers, as well as how they interpret what they find. It is also

probable that my appearance and identity in the group affected the ways in which interviewees

and participants were willing to engage with me, which might affect the conclusions I drew. In

the interest of transparency and to help the reader assess the analysis that follows, I will detail

my background and some of my own biases here. It is my intention to keep these biases from

compromising the validity of my work, while also drawing on my own personal experience to

enrich it. I leave it to my reader to determine to what extent I have succeeded.

Before coming to Swarthmore, I spent four years at a community college between the

ages of 14 and 18, instead of attending high school. While there, I met and befriended

individuals whose backgrounds were dramatically different than my own, along lines of race,

class (I come from a privileged class background), age, and belief. During this period I

developed a deep respect for education as a matter of social justice: I spent two years working

with a driven group of students and administrators to make textbooks more affordable on

campus, and as part of my community college’s student government my peers and I constantly

navigated the intersections between identity, privilege, and what education should mean.

Through my work on textbook access and anti-war activism on campus, I became increasingly

interested in how education has the potential to extend outside the classroom and pull students

into deeper engagement with the broader world.

At Swarthmore, I have studied education, peace and conflict, and political science.

Outside the classroom I have participated in student organizing around labor rights, healthcare,

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and U.S. policy toward Latin America. In my interactions with TFC trainers and participants,

my identity as a queer student activist has given me a particular insight into some of the

populations I observed, and I suspect it has also helped to open up a number of lines of

communication, especially with other queer individuals. At the same time, this identity may

predispose me to adopt the perspectives of those I feel automatically connected to by virtue of a

common identity. In particular, my whiteness, class privilege, and relative inexperience

organizing outside of campus settings have almost certainly made it difficult for me to

understand a number of the more complex dynamics that arise within the training space. My

interest in social empowerment through education may make my instinctive interpretation of the

group’s work disproportionately charitable, in the worst case obscuring a conflict between what I

am inclined to believe and the reality of the situation.

The biases that limit my interpretation of the group and my place within it also provide

the foundation for this research. Namely, this is the belief that engagement must be fostered in

order for its full and substantial value to society to be realized, and that activist communities

have the power to increase the efficacy and precision of their participatory skills through

consciously practicing and honing abilities. My biases are mirrored in how I have chosen to

approach my work, and the questions I hope to have it answer. Yet while my own hope is to find

support for activism training through the course of this study, I also believe in the importance of

critical thinking and conscious improvement: it would be a disservice to the field and to Training

for Change to weaken my research by failing to present the facts as I find them. I hope that by

allowing myself to be guided by my own passion in this work, my added concern for the topic

has led me to seek closer approximations of the truth, instead of confirmations of the virtue I

hope to find.

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Part 1: The Promises and Dangers of Participation

"If men are to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and
improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased."
Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America Chapter 5

At no point in its mission does TFC explicitly mention increased participation as one of

its aims, yet by helping activists hone their engagement, TFC is clearly not neutral to the concept

of participation. Its efforts to help individuals become more effectively engaged affirm the

importance of participation as a social good. This understanding of participation is echoed in a

vast existing body of scholarship, but the topic is complex enough to merit a detailed

examination of the importance – as well as the dangers – of participation.

Theorists as far back as Rousseau and Tocqueville have applauded the salutary properties

of engaging with the world around us as active citizens, a practice which has dramatic effects on

society and on us as individuals. While the concept of participation as a social good lost some

popularity during the early twentieth century, Robert Putnam and his contemporaries have

revived it over the past decades by detailing the far-ranging dangers of atomized society and

diverse benefits of social connection and engagement. Many theorists have returned to the

classical picture of an ideal participatory society, where engagement is a necessary and nearly

sufficient requisite for healthy democracy. This section will examine the points in favor of

increased participation, the cautions against its misuse, and the ways in which we might hope to

reconcile the two moving forward.

Civic republicanism as a philosophy argues that human life is dramatically enriched when

citizens embrace a strong sense of community membership and habitual participation as a way of

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life. Civic republicans argue that the value of engagement goes beyond its instrumental ability to

further other social goods, and as a result is both an end and a means. Participation is a

necessary property of a healthy government and society, and is fundamentally tied – through its

process as well as its tangible achievements – with social goods such as increased democratic

legitimacy, individuals’ sense of personal efficacy, respect for divergent views, and the ability to

productively handle social conflict. For a civic republican, the ideal level of participation

requires the inclusion of democratic voices and debate in every possible sphere of life.

For Benjamin Barber, a prominent civic republican and author of Strong Democracy;

Participatory Politics for a New Age, our society has been overly saturated with liberal ideals of

individualism. Barber claims that in the modern United States, individuals are not asked to

perform the duties of an active citizen, an oversight which undermines public institutions and

increases alienation. Increasing participation can strengthen “weak democracy,” even if this is

only achievable through coercive means. Barber endorses mandatory public service (Barber,

2003), while Arend Lijphart, another prominent civic republican, is one of the primary advocates

of mandatory voting.

Civic republicans argue that, for the same reasons we are willing to force children to

attend school – because we believe the benefits of an educated populace outweigh the harm that

comes from the coercion of children – the benefits of mandatory participation would outweigh

the abridgment of an individual’s liberty to choose whether to participate in self government.

This strain of democratic theory is distinctly at odds with liberalism, which affirms an

individual’s right to participate in society or decline to do so, based on personal determinations

and interests. It is not important for the purposes of this work to side with either civic

republicans or liberals. The point to take away is that the stakes in this debate are high: whether

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rightly or not, some respected theorists value participation at least as highly as they do individual

freedom, and are willing to compromise the individual’s negative liberty (or right not to be

imposed upon by outside actors) in order to advance the cause of engagement.

Civic republicans’ focus on participation’s intrinsic virtue is not universally shared: an

instrumental view is far more common, as is some combination of the two. Proponents of

participation’s instrumental value argue that engagement protects us from many of society’s

greatest dangers, instead of being valuable primarily for its own sake. Alexis De Toqueville

argues that citizens who are fully attached to their local communities and feel genuine

democratic ownership over their surroundings are more capable of addressing local problems as

they arise than are more atomized individuals. Tocqueville’s concept of “self interest rightly

understood” encapsulates the instrumental defense of engagement: Toqueville witnessed

inhabitants of small New England towns participating actively in community life; when

questioned about their participatory habits, they explained that they were engaging with the rest

of their community for their own future benefit. He says of Americans that:

When they have hit upon some point on which private interest and public interest
meet and amalgamate, they are eager to bring it into notice. […]In the United States
hardly anybody talks of the beauty of virtue, but they maintain that virtue is useful
and prove it every day. […] Montaigne said long ago: ‘Were I not to follow the
straight road for its straightness, I should follow it for having found by experience
that in the end it is commonly the happiest and most useful track’ (Tocqueville, 1969
translation).

Toqueville offers numerous examples of the positive secondary benefits of participation,

including that through a life spent practicing the skills that are required for participation citizens

develop dense associational networks that increase their efficacy when they wish to make

change, and by developing a sense of personal investment in their political communities they

become more willing and able to protect themselves from the rise of despotism. In essence, we

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are stronger and safer if we develop habits of participation.

Toqueville was among the first in a long tradition of encouraging participation for its

effects on society as well as the individual. More recently, Carole Pateman has played a central

role in the debate about participation’s value and appropriate role in a democracy. She argues

emphatically against what she calls the “contemporary theory of democracy,” in which citizens

may vote if they wish but should leave more serious acts of governance to experts. This model,

which draws on the works of Schumpeter, Eckstein, Dahl, and Sartori, “can be seen as one where

the majority (non-élites) gain maximum output (policy decisions) from leaders with the

minimum input (participation) on their part” (Pateman, 1976). This casts participation as a chore;

the price citizens pay for desirable policy outcomes. Importantly, since this system does provide

citizens with some – often binary – choice between competing sets of leaders, the contemporary

theory of democracy “implies that we – or, at least, Anglo-Saxon Westerners – are living in the

‘ideal’ democratic system” (Pateman, 1976).

For Pateman, this is dramatically insufficient. Instead, she builds on the classical

understandings of democracy put forward in the works of John Stuart Mill and Rousseau to

illuminate a participatory model for democracy in which the individual benefits on a personal

level from his or her participation in addition to the positive impacts it has on society. Mill and

Rousseau also emphasize the educative function of participation. Participation strengthens an

individual’s freedom by increasing the degree to which he or she has power over the surrounding

environment, deepens citizens’ attachment to society, and develops the deliberative habits that

accustom an individual to grapple meaningfully with complex moral questions (Pateman, 1976).

Pateman, Tocqueville, Mill and Rousseau are among the most well known of the political

theorists who base their conceptions of a healthy democracy on the importance of participation,

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yet none of them offer a compelling and factually-based analysis of what happens in the real

world when democracy fails to encourage high levels of participation in its citizens. Luckily,

such an analysis exists in the form of Robert Putnam’s groundbreaking 2000 book Bowling

Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.

Building on the article “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital” published

in 1995, Putnam’s book offers a compelling account of the decline of civic engagement in the

United States over the past fifty years. Americans today are much less likely be involved in local

or national organizations, to be politically engaged, or even to spend time socializing with

friends than our parents or grandparents were at our age (Putnam, 2000).

Though one of Putnam’s central questions is what might be causing this decrease, within

the field of democratic theory and especially participatory democratic theory the effects of

disengagement are more important and less ambiguous than the causes. With an enormous body

of evidence, Putnam supports the thesis that those who are more engaged in their society accrue

a diverse range of benefits: “an impressive and growing body of research suggests that civic

connections help make us healthy, wealthy, and wise” (Putnam, 2000). Among these benefits

are:

• The conflict-resolving power of social capital. Social capital can help individuals deal

with social cooperation problems such as the prisoner’s dilemma, in which cooperation

would benefit each party if sustained, but without some incentive for cooperation each

individual would receive a higher payoff from acting in a way that harms others. When

individuals are accustomed to working together and are tied by strong social bonds, these

incentives for cooperation are more often present.

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• The social efficiency of trust. As Putnam explains, “where people are trusting and

trustworthy, and where they are subject to repeated interactions with fellow citizens,

everyday business and social transactions are less costly” (Putnam, 2000). When you believe

that agreements will be honored without the need for time-consuming and often costly

precautions, you can get more done and make more such agreements. By disengaging with

society, we make ourselves less likely to trust our fellow citizens and more likely to avoid

collaboration when possible.

• Social capital’s positive effects on empathy and tolerance. By meaningfully interacting

with individuals who are different than ourselves, we as citizens develop deeper

understandings of our own position within a diverse polis.

• Finally, the physiological benefits of engagement. Putnam cites a series of studies that

lend persuasive support to the idea that actively engaging with society instead of limiting our

interactions to the strictly necessary helps with many of the apparently non-social issues that

arise in life. Putnam showcases evidence indicating that “people whose lives are rich in

social capital cope better with traumas and fight illness [including psychological maladies

such as depression] more effectively” (Putnam, 2000).

Putnam’s choice of terms – social capital, social engagement – has been questioned based

on its lack of clarity, but I believe it is still applicable to this analysis. As pointed out by

Benjamin Berger in his book Attention Deficit Democracy: The Paradox of Civic Engagement,

the terms civic engagement and social capital each subsume what Berger prefers to view as three

separate phenomena: moral engagement or moral capital, political engagement or political

capital, and social engagement or social capital (Berger, 2011). This study is most interested in

political engagement and political capital, which should bring us to question the transferability of

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data that rely on an umbrella term that also includes social and moral aspects. I believe that

Putnam’s data is meaningful despite his use of an aggregate term, due to the high correlation

between acts that fall into each of the categories: As Putnam explains, “people who work on

community projects are likely to be churchgoers, newspaper readers to be volunteers, club-goers

to be interested in politics, and blood givers to attend meetings” (Putnam, 2000). This

interrelation makes our considerations easier, although it is important to remember that while the

concepts are tied, they remain distinct. In talking of social capital and engagement, we are

discussing a number of covariant concepts, while we are in fact much more interested in what

Berger would term political participation (engagement with the aim of creating a certain social

change) than with moral or social engagement.

The theorists above lend substantial support to a common and I believe correct intuition:

society operates more smoothly and individuals’ lives are improved when citizens view

participation in their communities as a major part of life. Yet while the past few decades have

produced strong voices in favor of participation, the cheerleaders have been accompanied by a

host of detractors. Elite democratic theorists such as Joseph Schumpeter argue that participation

has no place in our government, and that we should instead embrace an ‘elite democracy’ in

which only the most educated and bureaucratically inclined have the ability to influence the flow

of events (Schumpeter, 1950). This perspective has had positive effects on academic discourse,

thanks in large part to its ability to catalyze important debate. While it has enjoyed periods of

popularity as academics and society at large tire of the requirements imposed upon us by

participatory democracy, I believe this approach is fundamentally unsustainable. As Michael

Walzer points out, “only a democratic civil society can sustain a democratic state. The civility

that makes democratic politics possible can only be learned in the associational networks”

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(Walzer, 1995). If we give up on participation we are in fact turning away from democracy.

What those like Schumpeter advocate is not democracy, but instead approaches something closer

to oligarchy or meritocracy. Real democracy – or to use Benjamin Barber’s term, strong

democracy – relies on the engagement of the people, whose attention and voice are critical for

the perpetuation of popular sovereignty.

More interesting counterpoints come from engagement’s more measured detractors: those

who claim that while participation often facilitates various social goods, it can also be dangerous

under certain circumstances and when used in the wrong ways. To introduce the critique of

participation, I will begin with Verba et al.’s Voice and Equality (1995). While Verba et al. could

scarcely be called democratic detractors, they show us that, while praising participation, it is

important to consider what that participation looks like in practice. Verba et al. offer a

complementary account to Putnam’s of the importance of participation, while also showing how

participation can distort democracy when its benefits are concentrated in a small segment of

society.

The central point in Voice and Equality is simple, though the arguments surrounding it

are numerous and complex: In a democracy, the government responds most readily to individuals

who engage with it and are able to pressure it to act on their desires. Yet since government

primarily responds to constituents who are able to fully and accurately represent their interests,

there is reason to be concerned about any systematic differences in how and how effectively

different groups communicate with government. These differences are referred to as

participatory distortion, defined as “when any group of activists – such as protesters, voters, or

contributors – is unrepresentative of the public with respect to some politically relevant

characteristic” (Verba et al., 1995). There can be participatory distortion in any direction, but

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Verba et al. find that more privileged groups in society are much more likely to participate in

political activism, and that when they do so their voices are heard more clearly than those of less

privileged members of society. This is true especially along lines of education, but is also

apparent along lines of race and gender.

Inequality in representation comes from a number of different sources. The first is that

certain individuals seem socially primed for political engagement: as Verba et al. explain, “The

initial conditions that lead to the accretion of political resources – in particular, well-educated

parents and a high level of educational attainment – also lead to psychological engagement with

politics and to being in a position such that requests for political activity are likely” (Verba et al.,

1995). Additionally, different types of communication carry different weight: Verba et al.

categorize political acts based on whether they are “information rich” or “information poor.”

Information poor acts such as voting convey little specific information about an individual’s

preferences on a given issue, since voters endorse or reject a candidate’s entire platform without

having the option of sending additional information regarding what influenced their decision.

More expressive acts that make individuals’ preferences on a given issue clear, such as

protesting, writing a letter to a representative, or helping to fund a candidate’s campaign because

of his or her position on a favorite issue, are information rich and more effective in

communicating a policy stance and affecting governmental behavior.4

4
A weakness in Verba et al.’s analysis is that they only examine acts that are directly intended to
affect some governmental decision-maker. On page 38, they define political activity as “activity
that has the intent or effect of influencing government action – either directly by affecting the
making or implementation of public policy or indirectly by influencing the selection of people
who make those policies.” This at first appears to exclude activities like organizing a community
food cooperative, which do not have an explicitly political aim but that still might qualify as they
type of participation we and groups like TFC would potentially be interested in.

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The distinction between information rich and information poor acts allows us to look

more closely at participatory distortion. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a substantial

discrepancy in both the number and type of communications the government receives from

citizens of different socioeconomic statuses. Those with more time and money are more likely to

engage in any political activity, but they are especially dominant within the context of

information rich acts. This is discouraging news to those who believe that more affluent

members of society have less immediate need to engage in the types of activism that attract

government attention and convey clear preferences. Based on their analysis of a large body of

survey data, Verba et al. reveal that “those in the lowest level of income average one act (usually

voting) while those at the top of the income scale average more than three acts. […] Voting is the

only act for which the affluent are not at least twice as likely to be active” (Verba et al., 1995)..

Although Verba et al.’s focus in Voice and E quality is primarily on income, the same type of

discrepancy is apparent between members of different races. In a 1993 article by the same

authors – joined by Norman Nie – Verba et al. show that “African-Americans are slightly, and

Latinos are substantially, less active than Anglo-Whites” (Verba et al., 1993). Yet, it is

important to note that this entire effect has to do with differential access between races to the

resources that generally facilitate participation. The researchers go on to say that “after

accounting for differences in politically relevant resources, there is no significant difference

among the three groups [African-Americans, Latinos, and Anglo-Whites, to use their terms] in

political participation” (Verba et al., 1993).

The affluent and white are more engaged over all, and most information-rich acts (such

as campaign donations or meeting with a senator) tend to require substantial resource

expenditure. Each of these represents its own participatory threat to representative democracy:

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even if it were possible for levels of participation to be equalized across all income levels, the

affluent and white would still be more clearly heard (and numerous studies affirm that they are

more consistently represented) by government because of the types of activism they engage in.

At the same time, if there were no bias in terms of each group’s preferred type of speech

(information rich or information poor) there would still be a substantial bias toward the affluent

due to their high levels of participation. While Verba et al. do not advocate for less engagement

as some other democratic theorists do, they show that participation should not be interpreted as

categorically beneficial for the cause of equality in democratic systems. The modern United

States is a clear example of how unequal participation can pose a substantial danger to the

equality we often take to be central to democracy.

The most chilling account of participation’s potential is Sheri Berman’s piece “Civil

Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic.” Based on Berman’s analysis, the high levels

of participation that existed in the Weimar republic in the early 1900s facilitated the rise of

Nazism. After decades of non-responsiveness and ineffectuality on the part of the German

government, disillusioned Germans found community within tight social networks and

associations built along class and professional lines. These groups were highly homogenous in

their membership and made no major attempts to influence government or reach out to similar

groups. When the Nazi party appeared, it was able to capitalize on the complex, insular, and

politically disillusioned social networks that had already been established in order to spread its

own message. As Berman explains, “had German civil society been weaker, the Nazis would

never have been able to capture so many citizens for their cause or eviscerate their opponents so

swiftly.” Berman gives us a clear concept of why we should be careful about the type of

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engagement we encourage, and how insular groups that have given up on participatory

government can in fact represent a danger to democracy.

Diana Mutz of the University of Pennsylvania echoes Berman’s concerns about

participation, yet frames her critique in terms of tolerance and its relationship with participation

in the Unites States. Based on extensive survey data, Mutz makes a number of concerning

deductions: The more associations one belongs to, the less diversity of opinion there tends to be

within one’s personal network, and the less diversity of political opinion an individual is exposed

to, the less tolerant he or she is likely to be of those opposing viewpoints.

More agreement within a network tends to lead to more political participation on

aggregate, creating an activist echo chamber: those who are most politically active in their

communities are the least able to accommodate opposing views. Generally, when surrounded by

those of opposing viewpoints, Americans also tend to become much more politically ambivalent,

presumably in order to remain in social favor. This trend does not hold true for a subgroup that

Mutz labels “non conflict avoidant:” those who enjoy conflict and debate. The data support what

we might expect, which is that those who flourish in conflict situations are much less likely to be

politically ambivalent (Mutz, 2006). This supports Morris Fiorina’s point that those who get

involved in politics tend to belong to either political extreme.

This might seem like little more than an observation about the tendency toward

polarization among self-reinforcing activist communities, but Mutz warns that “plenty of

evidence points to the potential for negative outcomes as a result of communication across lines

of political difference” (Mutz, 2006). Mutz’s examines what she terms a “perspective-taking

ability” variable, which allows her to isolate a difference between those with and without high

levels of empathy. When exposed to the rationales behind perspectives unlike their own,

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individuals with high perspective taking abilities became more tolerant, yet among those with

low perspective taking abilities tolerance actually fell when exposed to the rationales behind

conflicting opinions. Those who tend to have strong opinions on political topics and to be

actively engaged in political activity (consider the most participatory members of our society

discussed above) are less tolerant of divergent opinions, more isolated within their own

networks, and likely to become even less tolerant when they are exposed to contrary opinions.

Often, Mutz shows, participation is concentrated among the most radicalized and intolerant

branches of society. These citizens’ membership in activist information bubbles decreases their

ability to empathize with difference, increasing our society’s polarization and intolerance.

Together, Mutz, Berman, and the rest of political theory’s democratic detractors make an

important point: in discussing participation, we cannot afford to assume that all participation will

be productive or that even when participation is itself benign its effects on society will be as

well. Yet should we take from this that increasing participation is not a noble cause? Based on

the works of Putnam, Tocqueville, Pateman, and Barber, such a conclusion seems regressive and

contrary to the democratic effort.

Those who advocate caution in considering the effects of participation themselves point

us in what I believe to be the appropriate direction. The primary message that can be taken from

their combined writings is that participation is a necessary factor in democracy, but one that must

be considered in measured terms and carefully designed to improve instead of weaken our social

fabric. We need participation, but of a certain kind. Walzer eloquently voices this point,

beginning to paint a picture of the participatory society we should seek; in asserting that

participatory democracy should be evaluated based on its ability to use participation well and

civilly, he states that “civil society is tested by its capacity to produce citizens whose interests, at

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least sometimes, reach further than themselves and their comrades, who look after the political

community that fosters and protects the associational networks (Walzer, 1995).

This is no full-throated defense of participation. It is a subtle recognition that the type of

participation a society produces reflects its ability to sustain respectful debate and struggle for an

inclusive communal good. Walzer acknowledges that participation is one value, but that it must

be weighed against others that are also held dearly by members of society and which can be

compromised by uncivil participation. These competing values include but are not limited to a

respect for diversity, empathy, recognition of communal history, or a sense of efficacy. A

society in which individuals are unable to look beyond their own narrow interests and instead fall

to petty battles with alienating and marginalizing effects, where the other values listed above are

marginalized in favor or a nominally participatory society, participation is far from the rallying

cry we would have it be.

In light of this, groups such as TFC that aim to develop the skills necessary for effective

participation should be judged against a more demanding rubric. Not only should they ideally

increase participation and train activists in effective tactics, but they should also foster a certain

kind of participation and participatory mindset. This will be one of our considerations when we

later begin to assess the effects of TFC, and whether it meets its own goals and the ones I outline

for it here.

Of course, in some ways it is unfair to impose these goals on a group that exists for its

own reasons. Remember that the TFC mission statement says nothing about participation and

instead focuses on developing activist capacity and skills. We will consider those skills more

carefully in sections to follow, yet while recognizing that participation and the training that

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supports it already exist, we can and should attempt to move forward consciously by asking

ourselves what type of participation we are looking for.

Based on what we have learned from the authors above, we should ask whether groups

like TFC are able to encourage participation that:

• Increases individuals’ sense of political efficacy. Sheri Berman’s study of Weimar

Germany shows us that when members of a society feel ignored by the state and lose interest

in engaging to shape the world they live in, they do not automatically disengage. Instead,

they may react by joining groups that effectively break down instead of strengthen the ties

that hold society together.

• Brings different groups together. Another of Berman’s central observations is that those

groups that did exist in Weimar Germany had little to no interaction with one another. When

groups, even progressive activist groups, work in isolation from one another they not only

fail to develop meaningful personal ties, but they also limit their interactions with those who

are unlike them. It is plausible that this was a contributing factor in the fall of Weimar

Germany, though it is unlikely to have been a major one. As Mutz reminds us, there is a

tendency among activist group members to become isolated within a bubble of peers who

agree on major issues, limiting the diversity of opinion within individual activists’ personal

networks. Those who are surrounded by similarly minded people tend to be less tolerant,

which Berman is able to identify as a causal relationship for most subsets of the population.

Exposure to others who are unlike them tends to make most people more tolerant, and

therefore maximizing this exposure should be a goal of activism training groups. While it is

true that most activism groups like TFC will cater primarily to either end of the political

spectrum, we can ask whether within that sample they bring together individuals with

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different experiences and priorities, for instance geographically, racially, and

socioeconomically diverse groups or groups of activists working on different types of issues.

• Encourages recognition of the interconnectedness of struggle. Walzer emphasizes the

importance of looking beyond one’s own narrow interests when participating in civil society.

As activists, our goals may be different, but we are connected by a commitment to the greater

good. This relates to the previous point about the importance of interacting and building

connections with those who are unlike us.

• Does not exacerbate – and ideally narrows – the participation gap between the most

privileged and the rest of society. Virba et al.’s data on current trends in participation

within the United States should convince us that in advocating for greater participation, we

should be careful about whom we induce to participate at a higher level. There is a

substantial gap between the political voice of the white and affluent and the rest of the

population. In practice, addressing this gap might take a number of forms, including the

provision of scholarships for low-income participants or training in information-rich acts that

do not explicitly require financial resources (such as participation in protests, gathering

media attention, and lobbying).

From a democratic perspective, we should qualify our support for any training groups

that do not go most of the way toward meeting these criteria. While participation plays a critical

role in the sustenance of democracy, we should look carefully at the systems for developing

participation that we choose to support: We cannot simply ask how effective groups like TFC

are. An equally important question is what precisely they are effective at.

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Chapter  2:  Adult  Education  for  Empowerment  

“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate

integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and
bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which
men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to
participate in the transformation of their world.”—Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the
Oppressed

Guidance on how participation should be encouraged rarely emerges from the field of

political science, which provides little more than the assertion that we must learn by doing.

Those who have seriously considered the question of how to increase effectiveness and

coherence in the process of training social-change-agents generally have backgrounds in

educational theory and practice. These theorists offer us the best insight into how we might go

about training activists, why we should dedicate ourselves to such a task, and what difficulties

we might expect along the way.

There are recognized masterpieces in the field of adult educational theory as applied to

social change, especially Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Yet one of the most exciting and

daunting aspects of this area of inquiry is that the cannon is still developing. This gives those

involved in both research and practice a high degree of creative license in exploring the question

of how best to train our present and future activists. This section should be read less as a

prescription for future activism training than as an exploration of the existing literature, the

difficulties practitioners have encountered in the past, and the ways in which these difficulties

might be overcome or accommodated.

In evaluating any program that seeks to train change-makers, it is important to ask how

that program interacts with existing systems of inequality, including the inequality that exists

within the school system that has shaped our current and future activists. Educational inequality

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and its effects on any social-change training program will be explored in the final portion of this

chapter, as will Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, one of the major pedagogical responses to

educational inequality.

Turning  from  Political  Science  to  Education  

Among political theorists, most of the consideration over how best to train activists has

emerged out of a discussion of local power, as notable theorists have pointed out that to actively

engage in democracy on almost any level, citizens must learn necessary skills within their own

home contexts. John Stuart Mill readily states that “it is no use having universal suffrage and

participation in national government if the individual has not been prepared for this participation

at local level” (Summarized by Pateman, 1976). Tocqueville repeatedly emphasizes the

importance of learning participatory skills, and is broadly recognized as one of the most

prominent theorists advocating for local control of the practical elements of government.

Tocqueville, Alinsky, and others have noted that local participation can lead to broader

engagement in national questions because of its educative power, and Rousseau frequently

makes similar points. This general agreement about the educative importance of participation is

meaningful to a degree, but offers little help for those wishing to accelerate the process of

developing engagement. Participation now is certainly important for participation in the future,

but what if the goal is to increase both? If we rely on engagement to produce more engagement,

it is painfully possible that times of low participation might spiral downward instead of up. We

must look for more practical advice.

The closest that mainstream political science comes to prescribing an approach for

developing participation is Verba et al.’s advice about the educative power of institutions. They

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agree with the classical theorists that participation is learned through doing, but go on to discuss

which existing institutions – institutions that individuals join for reasons other than to receive

activism training – they view as most critical in the development of these skills. Verba et al.

highlight the importance of schools for developing civic skills early on, which is by no means a

controversial point. Service learning in schools has been fairly exhaustively shown to increase

civic engagement later on in life. For instance, an analysis done by Blyth et al. of ten programs

in the 6th through 12th grades showed that “students with more than 40 hours of service in a year

showed a greater increase in social responsibility and civic involvement than those who did less”

(Blyth et al. 1998). Yet, Verba et al. take the important additional step of discussing the

development of civic skills among adults, saying that “the development of civic skills does not

cease with the end of schooling but can continue throughout adulthood” (Verba, Schlozman &

Brady, 1995).

Verba et al. single out the workplace, non-political associations, and churches as typical

places to develop political and other civic skills in adulthood. This focus is based on data

showing that even when these environments are not explicitly political, they can lend themselves

to later political activity by exposing citizens to democratic deliberation, providing them with

opportunities to develop leadership experience, and often forcing them to interact with policy

questions. Verba et al. explain that “not only do these settings provide exposure to political

messages, but they are frequently the locus of political recruitment of citizen activists” (Verba,

Schlozman & Brady, 1995), drawing a conceptual bridge between the non-political environment

and its political implications. Verba et al. present survey data showing that within the

workplace, “over two thirds report attending a meeting where decisions are made and over one-

third planned such a meeting. Non-political organizations and churches also provide the chance

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to practice civic skills: about a third attended a meeting where decisions are made and close to a

fifth planned such a meeting” (Verba, Schlozman & Brady, 1995). To the extent that typical

Americans are engaged in political or pre-political activity, it often comes through these pre-

existing environments.

It is certainly laudable that these environments provide space for recruitment and

training, yet there are a number of reasons why we cannot leave our project there. First, these

environments are not equally frequented by all demographics, and the opportunity to develop

skills within them is often biased along lines of gender, income, and race or ethnicity. For

instance, the workplace seems at first glance to be fairly egalitarian, since almost all individuals

need to work. Yet the type of employment an individual holds and therefore the level of

democratic deliberation and skill building to which he or she is exposed in the workplace is often

highly variable based on race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Verba et al.’s data show that

“what structures the chances to engage in adult civic skills in the workplace is not work force

participation, but the kinds of jobs people have. And these are highly stratified by race,

ethnicity, income, education, and gender” (Verba, Schlozman & Brady, 1995). If we rely on the

workplace to provide training in civic skills, it will disproportionately accrue to highly educated

white men. For many of the same reasons, Verba et al. explain that “organizations replicate

these patterns, although less strongly” (Verba, Schlozman & Brady, 1995).

Churches provide the exception to this rule: Verba et al. tell us that “belonging to a

church is even less stratified by income than having a job [while] women participate more than

men and African- Americans more than Anglo- Americans” (Verba, Schlozman & Brady, 1995).

This is encouraging, and fits with our country’s rich history of religiously driven activism. Yet

while the exercise and development of civic skills in church is fairly egalitarian, the types of

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participation that members of each gender tend to engage in through church are different: more

traditional churches in particular have almost exclusively male leadership, while women’s

participation often tends to be more centered around support-roles. Also, simply based on the

number of opportunities for skill development that churches provide when compared with what

is available in non-political organizations or on the job, they do not begin to compensate for the

stratifying effects of the workplace and nonpolitical organizations. The data clearly show that

“workplaces [the most stratified of the three centers for civic skill development] provide the most

opportunities for the practice of civic skills, churches the fewest” (Verba, Schlozman & Brady,

1995).

If this is not a compelling enough reason to insist that we look beyond the existing

environments available for the development of civic skills, let me offer one more. The types of

training to be had in a workplace, a nonpolitical organization, or a church are dramatically

distinct from one another, reinforcing different behaviors and sending different messages, some

of which are contrary to genuine progressive leadership development. These messages are not

necessarily socially detrimental, but it is unclear that they encourage the type of participatory

skills we are most interested in, that is, skills that increase empowerment and efficacy in

interactions with political structures and decision makers. Discussions about participation in the

broadest use of the term can be useful in framing our investigation, but we are interested in

participation that holds progressive social empowerment as its goal.

Thinking through the groups Verba et al. isolate, we see that some of these training

spaces might function equally well at discouraging empowering political involvement and

leadership development as they do at encouraging it. Let us take workplace training as an

example. There has been something of a renaissance over the past decades in terms of the

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attention paid by academics to the workplace as a progressive training ground, especially with

regards to human resources development, or HRD. However, numerous educational theorists

including Fred Schied and Laura Bierema have critiqued HRD’s implicit support for existing

unequal and stifling power structures. As Scheid puts it, HRD can encourage “psychological

manipulation [that] calls into question the claim that HRD empowers workers, since in reality,

disagreements with management goals and values are seen to be manifestations of character

flaws within the individual worker” (Schied, 2001). Although this scholarship deals specifically

with training inside the workplace as opposed to the development of experience in leadership

positions or organizing, the point stands that learning to participate at work carries with it

implicit hierarchical relationship templates, which might easily detract from the awareness of

inequality and structural oppression that is required for almost all social change work. Similarly,

churches tend to engage in volunteer work more often than in activism or advocacy, and this

generally under the direction of an explicit leader. We might question the extent to which these

environments reliably foster the individual efficacy and leadership abilities we would hope to see

them produce.

If we value heightened levels of participation and political engagement for progressive

social change, we must look outside the institutions that already support their development. It is

insufficient to hope that citizens will develop participatory skills organically, for to do so would

be to leave us defenseless against the continued slide into disengagement that Putnam so well

documents. We cannot leave the work of training our citizens to churches, existing

organizations, and the workplace, since the training that these spaces provide is often

disproportionately concentrated among privileged populations whose security has already been

assured, or else it focuses on skills that often transfer less than perfectly to progressive advocacy

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and leadership. We will now turn our attention to the body of educational theory that examines

adult activism training, and begins to outline a pedagogy that encourages the participation we see

so loudly applauded and so little examined.

Popular  Education:  Theory  and  Practice  

Training activists involves much more than straightforward instruction in organizing

skills: a system of activism training that capitalizes on the same power discrepancies that social

activists attempt to remedy simply reifies the structures that many social activists work to

deconstruct. If it is to be anything more than rote-memorization, education for empowerment

must carry with it an understanding of change and growth that helps activists develop a more

complex awareness of social forces as well as a stronger foundation in practical skills. The type

of activism training practiced by TFC and similar groups attempts to model an empowering

relationship with the world, developing the social consciousness as well as the capacities of the

organizer.

The most important theoretical and methodological framework for emancipatory

education to have emerged in the twentieth century is that of Popular Education, as

conceptualized by Freire and his followers. The major texts contributing to popular education

have grown out of the lived experience of struggle: Freire, author of the highly influential

Pedagogy of the Oppressed, knew the ache of poverty first-hand as a young boy in Brazil.

Similarly, Myles Horton, a founder of the Highlander Folk School and a driving force in the civil

rights movement, grew up as part of a poor family in Tennessee before he devoted his life to the

development of the skills necessary to further social justice. For both men it was partially this

experience that focused their later intellectual energy on formulating an educational process

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through which the poor could emerge as equals in the society that had so long denied their

humanity. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which we will now examine, Freire provides the most

famous account of his own particular approach to social action education. Although Freire’s

teaching extends far beyond literacy efforts, his pedagogy grew out of his experiences working

with adults in his home country of Brazil.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire writes against what he calls the “banking model” of

education, in which teachers are the absolute authorities on and proprietors of knowledge,

contrasted with their passive and ahistorical students. The banking model affirms a static

conception of reality, in which only the teacher has access to knowledge and the oppressed suffer

silently, observing someone else’s history. By marking the world as what the oppressor would

have it be, the banking concept of education explicitly marginalizes those who are not included

in the dominant discourse. This marginalization defines them as tools of those who create

history, thus negating their potential to pursue what Freire views as each individual’s essential

vocation, that is, the process of becoming more fully human.

Within the banking model, the oppressed students are passive vessels for the knowledge

their teachers deem important. Freire explains that “in the banking concept of education,

knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those

whom they consider to know nothing. […] The teacher presents himself to his students as their

necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence”

(Friere, 1970). This resembles Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, in which both parties are confined

by their relationship to a state of semi-consciousness and each is dependent on the other for self-

definition. In fact, Hegel is widely considered to have been one of the major influences on

Freire’s work. Moacir Gadotti goes so far as to claim that “the dialectic between the Master and

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the Slave, developed by Hegel, can be considered the principle theoretical framework of

Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (Gadotti, 1994).

The relationship between teacher and student in Freire’s work is based on a fundamental

and total power discrepancy, where the teacher might pity his or her students but could never,

almost by definition, respect or join them. Through the act of depositing information in students,

even well-meaning teachers normalize an oppressive framing and understanding of the world.

Regardless of content, the banking model of education is fundamentally oppressive based on its

framing of students as problems that need to be fixed. This stance negates the reality in which

students are dynamic beings, active participants in the praxis of creating and shaping the world.

The banking model encourages passivity. Freire tells us that as part of the banking model,

“since people ‘receive’ the world as passive entities, education should make them more passive

still, and adapt them to the world” (Friere, 1970). This passivity is understood as the mark of an

“adapted” individual, who is unwilling or unable to question the system in which he or she

exists. The banking model is the opposite of popular education, or what Freire refers to as

“problem-posing education,” since it seeks to suppress dissent before it can even reach the point

of vocalization. Freire shows how the banking concept is “well suited to the purposes of the

oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created,

and how little they question it” (Friere, 1970).

Freire’s problem-posing model, which recognizes each individual’s constant struggle to

“pursue the right to be human” (Friere, 1970) and is the antithesis of the banking model, is built

on the recognition of constant activity and movement, the flux of the world, and each man and

woman’s constant act of becoming. As Freire explains, “problem-posing education – which

accepts neither a ‘well-behaved’ present nor a predetermined future – roots itself in the dynamic

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present and becomes revolutionary” (Friere, 1970). Through the problem-posing model of

education, the oppressed claim their true status as historical beings and agents of history, in the

perpetual struggle to become more human.

In order to move beyond a relationship of oppression, teacher and student must engage

with each other in genuine dialogue and abandon their existing stratified and hierarchical

relationships. “Arguments based on ‘authority’ are no longer valid; in order to function, authority

must be on the side of freedom, not against it. Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-

taught” (Friere, 1970). Freire recognizes the possibility of true solidarity, which is the act of

abandoning the privileged position that distinguishes oppressor from oppressed: “solidarity

requires that one enter into the position of those with whom one is in solidarity; it is a radical

posture [which can be realized by an oppressor] only when he stops regarding the oppressed as

an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with” (Friere, 1970).

Thus, solidarity cannot be tinged with any hint of paternalism or charity.

This is the root of Freire’s famous claim that “the pedagogy of the oppressed cannot be

developed or practiced by the oppressors” (Friere, 1970). With or without former oppressors

standing in solidarity with the oppressed, the fact remains that the pedagogy of the oppressed

must be developed out of the lived experience of oppression, and cannot be imposed by an

external voice. The oppressed must lead this process through which both oppressor and

oppressed are freed from the dehumanizing positions that confine them. Freire acknowledges

that this is no small task, stating that “this, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the

oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well” (Friere, 1970).

Like Hegel, Freire lingers on the particular difficulty that the oppressed encounters when

attempting to engage with a process of self-definition and liberation. Freire pointedly makes

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note of the fact that it is difficult for the oppressed to find a model of humanity to emulate, since

the oppressor is the only model they have been exposed to. For all of their lived history, success

has appeared in the form of the oppressor. Freire explains that “their ideal is to be men, but for

them, to be men is to be oppressors” (Friere, 1970). This is what Freire calls a process of

“adhesion” through which the oppressed are unable to separate themselves from the reality in

which they are held as secondary to their oppressors. An understandable first instinct upon

emerging from a state of oppression is to react by moving toward the only other social position

that has been apparent up until that point: the state of oppressor. This is a critical concern for

Freire. He asks,

How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the
pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they discover themselves to be ‘hosts’ of the
oppressor can they contribute to the midwifery of their liberating pedagogy. As long
as they live in the duality in which to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the
oppressor, this contribution is impossible. (Friere, 1970).

For Freire, this difficulty with the progression from oppression to equality can only be overcome

through the recognition of the shared dehumanization of both oppressor and oppressed.

Freire has been a major inspiration for the existing scholarship around adult education for

empowerment. In the United States, one of the major difficulties has been how to adapt Freire’s

work to fit the needs of an advanced capitalist democracy. Many authors – including George

Lakey, the founder of Training for Change – number Freire among their major inspirations but

have needed to adapt the pedagogy extensively in order to fit the needs of the populations they

encounter.

Some of the scholarship coming out of the United States has pointed out that Freire’s

distinction between the oppressed and oppressor masks the numerous levels of oppression that

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we all experience on a daily basis.5 There is an increasing awareness that lines of oppressor and

oppressed are unclear – for instance it would be inaccurate to say that in an interaction between a

black man and a white woman the oppression is unidirectional. Social oppression can be

determined along lines of gender, socioeconomic status, race or ethnicity, orientation, age,

disability status, or any number of other mutually dependent and constantly evolving factors,

some of which are more important than others in different contexts, but all of which contribute to

the reality of daily life. To further complicate the notion of exclusively working with the

oppressed, in the West almost every participant is intimately connected with oppression based on

his or her residence in the global North, the elevated position of which is predicated on complex

systems of international domination. In this environment, it is much more difficult to distinguish

between the abstract groups of oppressor and oppressed, and even when a participant in a

training identifies as a member of the oppressed along one line of oppression, he or she is almost

certainly a member of at least one oppressive group as well.

If popular education techniques are to be used in the West, it is almost impossible to

avoid focusing them at least in part on educating the oppressor. This makes the act of turning

away from privilege that Freire demands much more complex, and can lead to resentment or

resistance among unprepared students.

Kathryn Choules has eloquently tackled the question of how to adapt Freireian pedagogy

to the West in her essay Social Change Education: Context Matters. She explains that

The objective of popular education is the transformation of oppressive systems and

the liberation of those oppressed. In social change education in the West, this
objective is often implicit rather than explicit. One of the reasons for this is that

5
While Freire follows in Hegel’s footsteps by recognizing that the oppressor is made incapable
of fully becoming human based on his or her existence within an oppressive relationship, this
still rests on the assumption that there is a distinct group of the oppressors and another of the
oppressed.

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social change education is often practiced with those who are not in need of liberation
in the traditional [economic] sense, as they are part of the dominant group who
benefit from unjust social relations (Choules, 2007).

This difference in students’ social position can lead to significant resistance. Choules offers a

number of pedagogical adjustments that she has found helpful in keeping those who come from

backgrounds of privilege engaged, or in other words, keeping them in the room once the topic of

oppression or privilege is broached. These adjustments include a reconsideration of “the

educator’s authority and positioning, […] the role of dialogue and democratic processes, and the

acknowledgement of political objectives” (Choules, 2007), all of which have been important

considerations for TFC in its own trainings.

In considering the educator’s authority and positioning, Choules brings up an important

point about how privilege appears in a classroom where the teacher has given up his or her

power in favor of a purely democratic space. She explains that “with the presence of students

from the dominant social group, a failure by the educator to exercise authority can allow

exclusionary processes to exist and the dominant discourse to assert itself” (Choules, 2007). In

the worst case, the teacher is forced to either allow privileged voices to dominate the training

space or to assert his or her power over the group in a way that seems at odds with the traditional

Freireian method.

The concerns that prompt a reexamination of the facilitator’s position and authority also

lead us to be cautious in embracing the dialogue that Freire holds to be so central to the practice

of problem-posing education. Choules explains that “when at least some students come from the

dominant group, a practice in which all voices are treated equally has every likelihood to result

in Marcuse’s repressive tolerance: ‘an all-embracing tolerance of diverse views always ends up

legitimizing an unfair status quo’” (Choules, 2007). Choules also points out that dialogue as it is

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understood in Western liberal democracies today tends to elevate a concept of rationality that is

highly biased along lines of class, gender, and race: “dialogue favors individuals who are

confident, articulate, and educated. Those who dominate societal relations, such as men, Whites,

and the wealthy, are able to dominate dialogue in an educational space” (Choules, 2007). In

order to control for this, facilitators may use a number of pedagogical tactics such as mandating a

pause for quiet reflection before discussion begins, but may also need to limit dialogue at times

in order to foster equality within the training space.

The last major adjustment we will examine is the recognition of political objectives

within the classroom. For Freire, this was not a question: he operated in environments that not

only lent themselves to later political activity, but that were often themselves explicitly political

in intent and effect. The adults who came to his trainings shared his political aims, which

generally revolved around economic justice. In many classrooms in the West, there is no

political consensus in the training space and to indicate that one is desired or necessary can

alienate those of differing opinions. In my own experiences organizing activism trainings on

campus, this danger has been made abundantly apparent. Yet to conceal a political agenda when

it exists is disingenuous, a fact which has prompted an ongoing debate about classroom

politicization that continues to this day among academics and practitioners.6

These three adjustments – authority of the facilitator, centrality of dialogue, and clarity of

political agenda – demonstrate the difficulty of adapting popular education to a Western context.

To attempt these adaptations is to engage in a constant process of give and take, both tempering

the effects of more privileged voices in the classroom and preventing their alienation before they

6
For instance, see Brookfield (2002) or Michael Apple (2002).

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can benefit from the training. As we consider TFC, part of our goal will be to assess how well

and in what ways the group has balanced these conflicting needs.

Educational  Inequality  and  Culturally  Relevant  Pedagogy  

It is impossible to seriously consider education as a transformative social force without

also considering the inequality that is present in our society, and the ways in which social change

work is confined and defined by that existing structure. This inequality spans nearly all aspects

of social life, but I will focus on how it manifests itself in the conventional education system. By

the time adults reach a point where they might engage with a group like TFC, they have already

been funneled through an educational system that implicitly reifies structural inequality. While

our school system often treats certain privileged demographics well, it also tends to ignore or

even exacerbate many of the racial and socioeconomic divisions that are endemic to our existing

social framework. We run the risk of ignoring much of the reality of education in this country if,

in considering groups like TFC, we fail to also ask whether these groups tend to contribute to or

correct for the inequality we see in the traditional school system.

Despite the tremendous efforts that have gone into securing educational equality over the

last decades, despite Brown v. Board, school bussing, No Child Left Behind, and most recently

Race to the Top, there is little question that the school system in the United States remains

haunted by racial inequality. Jonathan Kozol, Douglas Massey, and many others have eloquently

illustrated this point. Though national dropout rates as measured by the National Center for

Educational Statistics have fallen dramatically over the past decades (arguably because of

changes in measurement) the dropout rate for African American high school students in 2010

was nearly twice that of a white or Asian American student, at 8.0% versus 5.1% and 4.2%

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respectively (NCES, 2012). In the same year, the dropout rate among Hispanic students stood at

15.1%, although it is possible that immigration and frequent movement among migrant

populations affect this number (NCES, 2012). All of these numbers are the lowest recorded in

over twenty years.

There is little debate that inequality is actively present in our nation’s schools, but this is

often simply understood as a result of the schools themselves, as opposed to the cultures they

encourage and support: it is true that working class students and students of color continue to

disproportionately end up in the nation’s worst schools, but even within the highest performing

classrooms in high-performance schools, there is a discernable difference between how black

and white students tend to score. AP scores track the highest performers in high school, and

since AP classes are generally only offered at well-funded schools, by examining the breakdown

of AP scores we track both who enters the conventionally ‘best’ classrooms in the nation and

what happens – at least from a performance perspective – once they are there.

According to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, the portion of all AP exams

taken by black students has risen dramatically from only 1.4% in 1985 to 5.8% in 2007 (Journal

of Blacks in Higher Education, 2008). Still, the scores they receive remain dramatically unequal.

The College Board’s published data from 2012, show that the national percentage of AP students

who scored a three or above out of five on their AP exams was 57.3%. However, this number

masks a dramatic racial gap: Among white students, 63.5% score a three or above, while among

black students, 27.7% of students who took the test scored at least a three.

A similar phenomenon can be identified as members of different races enter college. The

National Center for Education Statistics reports a dramatic difference between the six-year

graduation rates of students from different races, as shown in the graph below:

Figure 2.1: Percentage of college students who receive their degree in 6 years or less, 2004-2011.

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(NCES, 2012)

Even in environments that are often associated with educational opportunity and access to

resources such as college or AP classes, something is happening to perpetuate a performance gap

between races. Why is it that, even when students of different races sit next to each other in the

same classes, white students still tend to have more academic success? Moving beyond the

question of why, what can be done to remedy this distressing trend?

Numerous hypotheses have been advanced to explain this phenomenon, but perhaps the

most important contribution comes from the field of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, or CRP.

Instead of placing the blame for differences between white and black test scores on

disadvantaged students, or claiming that minority parents do not care about education (an

assertion that is easily invalidated by even the briefest survey of parents of color’s struggles to

secure educational opportunity for their children), CRP looks within schools at the cultural

frameworks that either embrace students or make them feel discounted and unwelcome. One of

CRP’s central assertions is that there is often a cultural “mismatch” between students from

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minority backgrounds and the predominantly white middleclass framing that is placed on the

traditional curriculum and school environment. This mismatch automatically advantages

students who enter school steeped in white middle-class values and behavioral patterns, while

negating the experiences and traditions of those who come from other cultures. Instead of

putting minority students in the traditional position of feeling that they need to choose between

their own culture and that of the school, CRP attempts to embrace the backgrounds of all

students, moving away from a deficit model of understanding minority families and cultures.

Gloria Ladson-Billings, one of the major theorists to have written about CRP, explains

that Culturally Relevant Pedagogy has three goals: to “produce students who can achieve

academically, produce students who demonstrate cultural competence, and develop students who

can both understand and critique the existing social order” (Ladson-Billings, 1995), CRP can

take a number of forms, and there is no set checklist for culturally relevant practices in the

classroom. To clarify the demands of the pedagogy however, Ladson-Billings does give a few

examples of practices used by teachers who have had success in bringing students from all

cultural backgrounds fully into the classroom. These teachers “saw themselves as members of

the community, saw teaching as a way to give back to the community, [and] believed in a

Freirian notion of ‘teaching as mining (1974, p. 76) or pulling knowledge out” (Ladson-Billings,

1995). Teachers who had success with CRP focused on the communities to which their students

belonged, often incorporating the experiences or traditions of the children into the curriculum”

(Ladson-Billings, 1995).

CRP demonstrates the importance of addressing educational inequalities in a way that is

not limited to blaming the victim or discussions about school resources, which, while clearly

very important, ignore the cultural biases that are often apparent in the United States’ educational

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spaces. At the same time, CRP shows us a possible way of tackling educational inequalities that

has been very well received both by academics and by practitioners. A group like TFC, which

attempts to encourage social change through the training of activists, clearly has an interest in

working with members of marginalized groups. In TFC’s case this is made clear by the group’s

literature, but I believe such a goal is also implicit in any attempt to challenge existing power

structures.

It is important that activism training groups self-consciously invite members of minority

backgrounds into the training space in order to counteract the effects of existing inequalities both

educational and otherwise. It is equally important that once participants are in the room, genuine

attempts are made to ensure that all feel welcomed, seen, and valued in a way that facilitates the

learning process. It is unnecessary for any training group to specifically employ CRP if it has

discovered other effective methods of achieving this end, but it is important that some such

method, whatever it is, inform the pedagogical decisions that trainers make about how to include

and welcome those of diverse backgrounds.

As with the last chapter, I will end by briefly restating the points that should be

considered in examining the effects of a social change training group. These insights, along with

those that emerged from the chapter on political theory, will help guide our subsequent

consideration of TFC’s theory and practice.

1. Popular education sheds an important light onto the complex process of modeling socially

transformative relations in the training space. Freire reminds us that in order to combat

oppressive power structures, trainings must be built around dialogue, dynamism, and equality.

2. While the foundations of popular education remain the same across cultures, Choules is

right to emphasize that when working with members of a dominant class, parts of the

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methodology may need to be adapted. These adjustments are intended to include dominant

voices in the training space, while ensuring that other less privileged participants are equally

heard and respected and that the training space does not become a platform for the uncritical

defense of oppressive relationship models. In order to maintain this balance, Choules

recommends that the facilitator feel empowered to personally exercise a greater degree of

control over the space and the dialogue within it than might be obviously called for in Freire’s

writing. She also urges caution in choosing whether to explicitly politicize trainings, since

political agendas often vary among participants. There are many possible ways to achieve this

desired balance, and each trainer will to a certain extent develop his or her own strategies.

What we should take from Choules is an understanding of training groups can attempt to create

a space in which all voices are heard without reproducing traditional frames of domination, and

the beginning of a vocabulary for assessing whether they are successful in that endeavor.

3. Finally, adult education for empowerment cannot ignore the inequalities it inherits from the

K-12 school system and society at large. In light of these inequalities, a group that is truly

dedicated to supporting social justice should consider the demographics it trains, encouraging

minority enrollment in order to begin to correct for existing structural inequalities. Also,

extensive scholarship has demonstrated the importance of cultural relevance within the training

space or classroom. In considering training groups like TFC, we should look at how members

of different races or other demographic groups react to the trainings, and if members of

minorities do not feel as accepted and welcomed by the pedagogy that is being employed as

members of the majority do, we should ask why not and what can be done to rectify the

situation.

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The aim of creating such a list – and the list at the end of the previous chapter – is not to

hold any group to unrealistic standards or even to imply that these standards are absolute. This is

especially true considering that some of the points above require maintaining a complex and

constantly changing balance and are often entirely in the hands of an individual trainer. Instead,

the goal is to look at what tactics and theories are already in existence, considering how practice

conforms to theory, and what prompts divergences when they appear. On these points of

divergence, we might also wonder which differences between theory and practice are incidental,

and which seem to be necessary compromises that trainers must make in order to operate within

the confines of the existing system. In the next section we will examine the TFC organization’s

theory, methodology, and results. By examining the qualitative and quantitative data that have

been collected on the group, we hope to answer some of the questions posed above in a way that

lends generalizable insights into the process of adult education for empowerment.

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Chapter  3  –  Direct  Education’s  Theory,  History,  and  Effects  
 
 
“We  believe  that  transformative  individual  and  collective  action  is  necessary  for  justice,  peace,  
and  survival/sustainability.  We  recognize  that  training  and  direct  education  can  be  incredibly  
transformative  tools/processes  and  can  make  for  more  effective  actions,  organizations,  and  
social  movements.    As  such,  the  mission  of  Training  for  Change  is  to  develop  high-­‐quality  skills  
(and  tools)  for  training  with/among  change-­‐agents/activists”  (TFC,  2007).  
 
 
A  Brief  History  of  Training  for  Change    

Before founding Training for Change, George Lakey was active in Movement for a New

Society (MNS), a radical pacifist group that was centered in Philadelphia during the 1970s and

1980s and grew out of A Quaker Action Group. Lakey helped found MNS after being inspired

by the activism work he witnessed being done in Europe as a young man, and as part of MNS, he

and other future TFC members were able to develop and hone the skills they would use and help

develop in others over the next decades.

Although MNS is most often remembered as the group that brought pacifism and direct

action into the mainstream among U.S. organizers during the 1970s, its roots and effects were

much more broad. MNS’ primary goal was the creation of a massive nonviolent movement

toward a new utopian society: with this in mind, much of its focus internally was on the creation

of alternative communities among its members, who shared responsibilities and lived

communally. This modeling of the society they hoped to bring about was – at times tenuously –

combined with organizing in the broader world, and MNS was a major force in the fight against

nuclear energy along with other major struggles of the day.

One of the central tasks MNS chose for itself was the development of activism skills.

Members of the group and visitors alike came to MNS’s Life Center to learn critical skills in

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activism tactics and theory. In his book Oppose and Propose!, which documents the theory and

history of MNS, Andrew Cornell explains that:

MNS's primary and most enduring contribution to 1970s' social movements was
the trainings that it provided radicals in democratic group process, strategic
campaign planning, and direct action tactics. Training collectives devised a series
of learning experiences that varied in length from one day to two weeks to an
entire year in residence at the Life Center. Other trainers traveled throughout the
country, offering '4 x 4' worships (intensive four-day sessions with a break in the
middle) to groups of nonviolent organizers working together on a specific
campaign or simply living in the same town. Beyond the specific content of these
trainings, MNS's model of movement education helped establish a culture of
training within the antiauthoritarian Left that continues to the present day in the
form of DIY skill shares, workshops at anarchist book fares, and tactical trainings
at convergence centers prior to large demonstrations (Cornell, 2011).

While being interviewed by Cornell, Lynne Shivers, a central MNS member, explained

that training was “a key component” of the work the group did (Cornell, 2011). Along with

communal living, Shivers believed that this training was what set MNS apart from other similar

organizations that existed at the time. Shivers recounts that:

A couple of friends of mine went to Europe near the end of when European
organizers were working against the placement of Cruise missiles in various
countries. They asked the nonviolent action groups, 'Where did your training
come from, initially?' And all of them said, 'The Life Center.' To me, that's just a
fabulous recognition of the impact and ripple effect of the work that we did there
(Shivers, quoted in Cornell, 2011).

MNS’ work in activism training set the foundation for what was to come. In many ways, MNS

was the birthplace of Training for Change, a fact the first generation of TFC members readily

admit. Not only were George Lakey, Betsy Raasch-Gilman, and Erika Thorne – all of whom

have been deeply involved in TFC’s work over the past two decades – members of MNS, but

Lakey explicitly links TFC’s formation to MNS’s work. After MNS disbanded in 1988, it was

four years before Lakey officially founded TFC, but he explains that “one reason for starting

Training for Change in the early 1990s is that it seemed that we'd taken a giant step in MNS in

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terms of training skills and process skills, but that there was way more to develop” (Lakey,

quoted in Cornell, 2011).

Training for Change was not the only training group to grow out of MNS, although it has

enjoyed the most success. TFC in Philadelphia was accompanied by New Society Trainers in

Seattle and Future Now in the Twin Cities. Future Now was founded by Betsy Raasch-Gilman –

now one of TFC’s training elders – and although both Raasch-Gilman and Thorne have both

transferred the majority of their energy from Future Now to TFC over the years, the legacy of

Future Now is much of what makes the Twin Cities a hub for activism training to this day.

TFC’s growth into a major training group was not without its complications. From the

start, it was very much Lakey’s personal endeavor. In an interview, Raasch-Gilman explained

the process of convincing Lakey to allow other trainers to facilitate TFC trainings without him:

I think it may have been 1996 when Erika and I tried to do it [facilitate a training]
together, the two of us. Now, TFC was growing really by the seat of its pants.
George didn't have a grand vision of where he was going with the organization. He
needed co-facilitators, and he did co-facilitate with people in the twin cities, and
when Erika and I said ‘you know George, we'd like to do this workshop. We'd like to
lead it’ he said ‘Wow, that's not something I've done before. Tell you what, I'll come
out, and I'll be there as your coach in the background and you can lead it, but with my
supervision the first time.’ […] That was a stretch for all three of us, but at the end of
the workshop or the next one, because we did it again, he said ‘ok, I certify the two of
you together to lead this.’ We were the first ones ‘certified,’ whatever that meant,
because that was just a word he pulled out of the air, because he didn't really have a
process or an intention to create other trainers who would be doing this thing (B.
Raasch-Gilman, personal communication, July 2012).7

Gradually the organization of Training for Change grew, and more trainers were given cause to

feel personally invested in the group, even as leadership remained predominantly in Lakey’s

hands. This pattern continued until the early 2000s, at which point Lakey announced his

intention to retire. Raash-Gilman explains that,

7
Like Hunter, Amador, Kutz, and Thorne, Raasch-Gilman has waived anonymity in this project.
The remaining interviewees chose to remain anonymous.

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George's idea was that TFC would fall off when he retired, that that would be the
end of that. […] His retirement, he was really good about the way he did that.
Really good. He knew three or four years in advance that it was coming, and his
initial idea was to shut down the organization.
His board said ‘no you're not!’ and he said ‘oh yes I am’ and they said ‘well
we're out of here then, because that's not what we're in it for’ so he got a new board.
And then the trainers, […] there was a core of us who said ‘no you're not!’ This time
he said ‘I'm retiring, I'm resigning, so if you're going to keep this thing going it's on
you, not on me’ and we said ‘alright, it's on us, not on you’ and he said ‘alright, I'll
support you’ (B. Raasch-Gilman, personal communication, July 2012).

In order to conduct the restructuring process as carefully as possible, TFC took a “fallow

year” during which it reconsidered its structure and mission. As the culmination of a series of

ongoing discussions and steering committee meetings, in November of 2007 trainers, board

members, and “people who had expressed a desire to get involved in the discernment of next

steps” (Training for Change, 2007) gathered in Philadelphia. This gathering was guided by a

document that had been compiled over the past five months outlining TFC’s future, and which

included discussion of the group’s “Mission and vision, Overall Directions, Staff/Directorship,

TA [Training Associate] Structure, Board, TFC Programs and Training, [and] engagement in

movement building” (B. Raasch-Gilman, personal communication, July 2012).

What came out of this gathering? Led by Nico Amador and Daniel Hunter, two young

men of color8, Training for Change has maintained its original mission but has re-structured in

order to disperse responsibility within the organization. One major change that has come about

since the transition is that TFC has made explicit efforts to reach out to younger and more

diverse trainers and participants. In 2012, with Nico Amador as the executive director9, the

organization celebrated its twenty-year anniversary.

8
Daniel Hunter is biracial African-American, while Nico Amador is Hispanic.
9
Daniel Hunter chose to focus his energies on training and activism, and has since moved away
from his position as co-director.

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Training  for  Change’s  Goals  and  Mission  

TFC’s mission statement, as stated in the 2007 document discussed above, is “to develop

high-quality skills (and tools) for training with/among change agents/activists” (Training for

Change, 2007). While nominally specific, this mission leaves room for individual visions and a

diversity of possible implementations. Members of TFC have complex and often divergent views

of both the ideal form and the future of the organization. While no two trainers gave the same

answer when asked about their own vision of and for the group, responses tended to fall within

three general categories: the political, the methodological, and the personal, all three of which

take on greater or lesser importance depending on the trainer. Despite the potential divisiveness

of this topic, it is a positive sign for the group that most trainers expressed excitement rather than

apprehension at the prospect of choosing which visions to prioritize.

On the political level, TFC is dedicated to providing support for progressive social

movements as they go about making change, and to helping them develop their own internal

training capacity and infrastructure. Some trainers, especially those who came out of MNS,

speak of the nonviolent revolutionary aspect of this work, and how the training TFC provides

feeds directly into social transformation. In particular, TFC has developed strong relationships

with a number of environmental movements and organizations, especially Greenpeace. This,

combined with public trainings that often focus on training individuals instead of particular

groups, contributes to a broad and radical vision of social transformation.

A component of this social change vision is a dedication to increasing diversity, within

the organization and among trainees. The particular steps that are being taken in order to

advance this goal and their effectiveness will be examined in depth in a later section: here we

simply note that diversity is a commonly discussed and widely accepted goal within the group.

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Being a member of TFC generally necessitates a strong commitment to direct education

(the pedagogy which guides the group’s work) and a belief in its social value. As pedagogy,

direct education can in theory be applied outside of the explicitly political realm of activist

training and training of trainers. One of the group’s training elders in particular, whose

background is in the field of higher education, was originally drawn to TFC because of direct

education’s pedagogical value instead of its political applications. Another, who came to TFC

through MNS, feels that the pedagogy could be useful in teaching everything from accounting to

history.

While Direct Education is theoretically helpful in teaching any subject, all but one trainer

interviewed agreed that there is an implicit political awareness that grows out of the pedagogy.

By virtue of its respect for and emphasis on participants’ innate knowledge and abilities, Direct

Education is seen as inherently empowering. Celia Kutz, a TFC Training Associate, explained

that “the premise is that wisdom is in the room, and that we as the facilitators are holding a

space. Asking questions that support individual and group learning and wisdom to come out, is a

political act in itself because classrooms – in the United States for sure and lots of other places –

are not set up like that. By tackling the way knowledge has been reserved for certain races,

classes, abilities, by breaking that open it's a political act in itself” (C. Kutz, personal

communication, July 2012). The direct education methodology is at the very heart of TFC, and

spreading that method is one of the commonly recognized goals of the group.

The final set of goals that members of the group expressed is harder to define, but is

deeply rooted in the pedagogy itself and the personal exploration and growth it encourages. As

one trainer who wished to remain anonymous explained, “I really believe that this work assists

people in their growth. It allows them to develop the way they want to develop, as opposed to

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having it imposed. To me it just unleashes people's potential for growth” (personal

communication, June 2012). This personal transformational work does not necessarily relate to

broader social movements, though in many cases it can help groups work through common

roadblocks, such as the internalization of self-limiting beliefs or latent racism within the

organization. As Amador explains, “some of our anti-oppression work […] isn't strictly skill

building, but it's other work that groups or people might need to do in order to become effective

in the types of social change work that they want to do” (N. Amador, personal communication,

July 2012).

These broadly recognized but certainly distinct values lend themselves in diverse ways to

visioning for the group’s future, a fact that makes this particular moment in TFC’s trajectory

particularly exciting as well as somewhat uncertain. While at the moment these differing visions

for the group appear to exist symbiotically, some interviewees expressed the awareness that

competing visions may lead to conflict in the future. Amador points out that “In the last few

years we've kind of been getting our feet underneath us again after George's retirement, so we do

really need more of a long term vision for the organization […] We've sort of been flying by the

seat of our pants” (N. Amador, personal communication, July 2012).

In an organization whose pedagogical focus is on the creative and intentional process of

conflict transformation, it should come as no surprise that many trainers expressed excitement

about the conversations to come. In the meantime, the group has remained highly dynamic in its

implementation of new programs. The last few years have seen the creation of a new eight-day

training, the Organizing Skills Institute, while since the summer of 2012 the group has held its

first TSAT (the Training of Social Action Trainers, one of TFC’s flagship trainings) open

exclusively to people of color, as well as the first entirely Spanish-Language TSAT. TFC has

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also partnered with the New Sanctuary Movement to create a program termed the New

Leadership School for Immigrant Rights, which is now entering its second year. TFC may be in

the process of emerging from a transitional stage, but the group appears to be energetic and

forward thinking, regardless of any uncertainty surrounding its future.

Direct  Education  

The pedagogy behind TFC is a rich mosaic of diverse theories and approaches to adult

education. While it shares many of the systems of thinking that can be found in popular

education, direct education is distinct in a number of important ways – as Choules points out, a

simple pedagogical transplantation would be unable to thrive in a Western environment. Direct

education has been shaped by its history and the experiences of its members – most prominently

George Lakey – within the U.S. social movements of the last half-century. Exploring the

pedagogy behind TFC allows us to see how some of the theoretical concerns explored in

previous sections play out in practice, and to understand how this particular methodology shapes

the effects that the group has on its participants.

The theory behind Training for Change was highly influenced by MNS techniques, but as

Erika Thorne explained while being interviewed for this research, it was also organized around

Lakey’s and the group’s experiences with Worldwork, Friere, lifespring training techniques,

reevaluation co-counseling, parent effectiveness training (which was especially popular within

MNS) and Gestalt psychology. (E. Thorne, personal communication, July 2012). Lakey cites

“educational theory, group dynamics, humanistic psychology, and social activism” (Lakey,

2010) as the context for the theory of direct education.

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In his book, Facilitating Group Learning; Strategies for Success with Diverse Adult

Learners, Lakey lays out the theory of Direct Education in detail. The term direct education was

intentionally chosen to represent a relationship between the learner and the subject: Lakey

explains that “Direct education takes the most direct path to the learner in the here and now

[italics in original]” (Lakey, 2010). This is done through the creation of an authentic space – or

“container” – in which participants feel enabled to challenge themselves and others, while taking

responsibility for their own learning. Direct education is a complex and rich pedagogy, which I

cannot summarize adequately here. Instead, I will focus on those components that I believe are

most helpful in understanding TFC’s operations and effects. More information about the

pedagogy can be found in Lakey’s book.

Traditional education often focuses on the material or the relationship between the

teacher and the students, while paying almost no attention to the relationships between

participants. Yet, as almost anyone who has passed through the United States’ educational

system can attest, much of what we truly internalize during the course of our schooling has to do

with the implicit power relationships between peers. One of the major defining characteristics of

direct education is its emphasis on groups and group dynamics. Lakey explains that “In the old

paradigm of education, participants in learning groups are left to their own devices to create their

informal order [which] can distract from – or even sabotage – the formal learning process”

(Lakey, 2010).

Despite the distractions or derailments that can emerge as part of a group’s internal order,

TFC supports the “secret life of the group,” for instance by starting trainings with a meal so that

by the time the training formally begins each individual has some concept of his or her position

within the group. Why does TFC work so hard to recognize rather than suppress groups’

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implicit dynamics? Partially because most meaningful learning is necessarily a social process

and therefore any attempt to suppress the social nature of learning would run counter to the goals

of the workshop, and partially because when used as tools for learning, group dynamics can

strengthen and accelerate individual and group growth. There is often an assumed compromise

between the good of the individual in a training space and the good of the group, but direct

education denies this dichotomy: Lakey asserts that “the learning breakthrough available to the

participants is a product both of their own motivation and responsibility and of the considerable

support of the group” (Lakey, 2010).

Direct education has a particular way of developing a safe and active group learning

environment. TFC trainers often discuss the group “container,” that is, the framework of trust

and safety that is built into an effective training space. Lakey explains that a container “might be

thin or thick, weak or robust. A strong container has walls thick enough to hold a group doing

even turbulent work, with individuals willing to be vulnerable in order to learn.” Although the

facilitator generally sets up a container – which can be done through the use of a number of

tactics10, the behavior of the participants is what gives it its strength, and more developed groups

often grow to take on responsibility for the container as the training progresses, as part of the

larger process of each individual taking responsibility for his or her own learning.” (Lakey,

2010).

The growth of all participants, not solely those who automatically feel comfortable in the

training space, is impossible without an intentional emphasis on difference and at least some

10
One method often used in TFC trainings – and which is very popular among participant
respondents – is a “diversity welcome,” in which the facilitator takes a moment to welcome
different types of diversity into the room. For instance, the trainer might welcome diversity in the
form of race, gender identity, orientation, region, religion, ability, age, socioeconomic class, or
any other line of social division that might be holding members of the group back from feeling
full safety and ownership in the group.

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degree of anti-oppression work. Direct Education’s approach to anti-oppression work relies on

the theoretical tool of “mainstreams and margins,” borrowed in part from the work of Arnold and

Amy Mindell. (cited in Lakey, 2010). The mainstream of a group is the subset of participants

automatically favored by the dominant discourse: Lakey explains that “every course and

workshop, like other groups, has a mainstream: those qualities, behaviors, and values supported

by the group. Other qualities and behaviors [the margin] are put out of the center, to the

periphery” (Lakey, 2010). The nature of the mainstream and the margin is dependent on the

nature of the group: divisions can be based on age, race, cultural norms, gender, or other equally

broad lines of domination, but can also be manifested in highly group-specific conflicts. As

Lakey goes on to point out, “all of us carry some mainstream identity or other, even if we mostly

identify with a marginalized identity.”

Because of its flexibility in isolating important aspects of unequal social relations, the

language of mainstreams and margins can be helpful during group discussions of subjugation,

oppression, and bias as they appear within the training space and in the broader world. Lakey is

able to use the language of mainstream and margin to describe a struggle between city

administrators (the mainstream in this scenario) and protestors, and demonstrate that “the

mainstream is by nature clueless about the experience and perspective of unfamiliar margins”

(Lakey, 2010) while he later uses the same language in a more complex discussion of cultural

availability for growth and change:

The margins are usually the “growing edges” where the breakthroughs come from. This
is because those who maintain control of the group (or of anything) need to be in control
of themselves first, so they don’t tend to be authentic as soon. This is not to say that it’s
all the margin’s responsibility to prompt growth, but it’s important to keep an eye out for
what’s going on there” (Lakey, 2010).

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What is the role of the trainer with respect to the mainstream and the margin? Should the

trainer side with the margin against the mainstream? These basic questions appear in various

forms in the work of Friere, Choules, and many other educators who struggle with oppressive

dynamics in the classroom. Lakey ultimately concludes that by weighing in actively on the side

of the margin, the facilitator often breeds more resentment within the mainstream than actual

change: instead, he suggests finding ways to support the margin and to create a strong enough

container to safely hold all participants when conflict emerges. These moments of conflict are

often the most transformative, and should be anticipated and carefully cultivated instead of

feared. Lakey explains that “direct education’s approach to what historically has been called anti-

oppression work is to support conflict between mainstreams and margins and to go outside the

participants’ comfort zones, where curiosity has a chance once again to emerge” (Lakey, 2010).

Direct education’s focus is on holding an empowering space for productive conflict instead of

explicitly siding with either side once conflict has been joined.

In describing the first TFC training he ever participated in, Daniel Hunter – now a TFC

training elder – shows how support for the margin operates in practice, even when the trainer and

the margin are in conflict. Hunter remembers:

I've always been rebellious. I've always been someone who challenged authority
where I saw injustice happening, where I saw something that I thought was wrong. I
remember I was in a workshop with George [Lakey]. I thought he'd done something
wrong, and I took him on in front of the group.
George did two things that no teacher had ever done before. The first was, he
thanked me for the attack. The second is he said 'you might need to escalate it in
order to get somewhere.' That thought had never occurred to me, and later we got to
talk about it and part of what he said is, 'look, this education is for activists. For
rebels. […] I'm going to support rebellion in the room. Not necessarily side with
every rebellion, but I will support it. I will not use my oppressive behavior to put it
down, to squash it, but I will also not roll over.'
I think a lot of activist trainers I know roll over. Someone launches an attack on
the facilitator and they say 'oh you're so right, I'm so wrong, ladadadada.' That
actually doesn't serve activists to strengthen our skills in taking on power, because we

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attack George Bush and we expect him to roll over. That's not what's going to happen,
and it's not helpful for us to believe it is. We actually have to mount, we have to
organize, we have to get allies. The training space can be a spot to practice that.

As shown by the example above, refusing to fight for the margin is very different than

automatically dominating or further marginalizing it. Part of learning activism skills is learning

how to fight for a cause even when faced with substantial opposition. The facilitator’s authority

in the training room is powerful enough that practicing opposition against it can lead to the

development of important activist skills, but also powerful enough that in taking an explicit side

in a conflict, the trainer limits either side’s ability to genuinely fight and have the experience of

winning – or losing – based on its own strategic decisions.

Instead of giving the margin training-wheels, TFC facilitators and direct education

methodology attempt to create safe spaces for genuine conflict, where the margin develops the

self-assurance needed to fight for its vision and interests. It is the facilitator’s role to hold the

space, freeing participants to focus on the work they can do inside the container and among

themselves, while also keeping the workshop moving and safe.11 As seen in the example above,

holding this space often includes a strong assertion of the trainer’s authority.

As a group that prioritizes empowerment and respect for the internal life and knowledge

of the group, TFC has a somewhat surprising take on the facilitator’s position within the training

space: instead of attempting to be part of the group, TFC trainers often draw a clear line between

themselves and participants, in order to underscore their particular brand of authority. When

asked in an interview about the common practice among TFC trainers of setting the facilitator’s

chairs slightly apart to signal a separation between participant and trainer, and especially whether

11
The particular tactics required in maintaining the container can take a number of forms, often
highly dependent on the particular group. Advanced groups that have grown strong enough to
fight the facilitator or absorb much of the container-maintenance role back into the group are
often especially allow for redefinitions of the facilitator’s ideal role.

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that practice fit with Freire’s insistence on education by and for the oppressed, Daniel Hunter

explained:

One reason for the chair to be in front of the room and separate, is to lift up the
fact that, as trainers – we do this especially as trainers in training of trainer
workshops, although not exclusively – as trainers you carry rank. You can't walk
away from it. You can't act as though you're a member of the group and expect
everyone to treat you just like other members. You're constantly carrying that
rank, and I think that's what Paulo [Friere] was raising. It doesn't matter what you
do: if you begin to insert yourself into the process and insert your styles and your
things, at some level you risk reinforcing dependency. One way to do that is to
separate, in a physical way, just as a signal and a reminder (D. Hunter, personal
communication, July 2012).

The facilitator carries power, and in some cases the only way to create a balanced space

within the group (and remember, in direct education the group is understood as the foundation of

the learning environment) is to actively separate the facilitator from the participants.

This recognition of facilitator rank and authority within the training space is occasionally

met with opposition, especially among participants with middle- or upper- class backgrounds. It

is uncommon for those who grew up middle- or upper- class to be asked to yield authority to a

teacher, as documented by Jean Anyon in her 1980 essay “Social Class and the Hidden

Curriculum of Work.” Anyon distinguishes between the types of education she observes in

classrooms serving students of differing socioeconomic backgrounds: working-class students are

often drilled in obedience and taught via memorization, while students enrolled in “affluent

professional schools” are encouraged to emphasize their own interests and often have “a fair

amount of officially sanctioned say over what happens in the class” (Anyon, 1994).

One past participant who wises to remain anonymous, but who identifies as coming from

a fairly affluent background explained in an interview that:

A lot of what I disliked about their facilitation was that they would say, like 'ok,
now we're going to play this, and we'll explain to you the rules, and these are the
rules' and they'd kind of step off [refusing to play the game themselves], and all

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the participants would play the game. And… obviously they wouldn't have like
forced anyone to participate, but they were very much in a position of power.

On first consideration, this seems to contradict one of direct education’s most

fundamental tenants: that most of the wisdom that comes out of a training is already present in

the participants, and is simply waiting to be elicited – a tenant that comes directly out of

Freireian popular education. How can TFC hold that the real experts on the subject at hand are

often the participants, while also firmly asserting that facilitators maintain authority over the

training? Lakey addresses this question directly in his book, equating the process of direct

education to a tour of a museum: “Where does a museum guide get her or his authority? Is it

from knowing more than the participants in the tour? No. The tour may include Ph.D.’s in art

history, outstanding artists, or the granddaughter of Miró! But the tour guide has a particular kind

of expertise: knowing the museum” (Lakey, 2010). Even though the facilitator may not have any

more expertise within the subject than any given participant, the entire group benefits from the

creation of a space in which each individual is able to safely explore and engage in what Freire

would call the process of becoming. It is the facilitator’s responsibility to hold this space.

Each activism trainer and organization – or at least each organization that recognizes

complex relationships, power differentials, and struggles between participants – must come to

terms with the complex issue of authority and conflict within a training. TFC and Choules are

examples of how educators in Western settings can adapt their pedagogy to a non-Freirian setting

while maintaining the goals of individual growth and liberation that accompany the Freireian

legacy.

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Application  and  Results  

Having offered a summary of TFC’s history and theoretical approach, we now turn to the

more tangible questions that arose during our earlier discussion of democratic and educational

theory. The group’s ability to overcome the challenges we anticipate as part of this type of work,

and its creativity in finding solutions, will help us understand the broader feasibility of activism

training organizations as agents for change.

We will ask two major questions in this section: whether TFC improves skills and

increases activism and organizing capacity, and, if so, whether TFC’s effects are the same across

all demographics. One might argue that groups like TFC should actively combat other social

inequalities by primarily working with members of minority populations, but this is a higher bar

that will only become relevant if the evidence examined within the first two questions leaves us

with an impression of egalitarian efficacy.

When asked whether they would recommend TFC to a friend, 94% of respondents

responded that they would, while only 2% stated that they would not, and the remaining 4% were

unsure. Using a Fisher’s Exact test, which is in many cases preferable to a Chi-Square Test due

to its lack of reliance on a number of statistical assumptions that tend not to hold true with

smaller datasets12, there was no statistically significant difference across any of our independent

variables – race, gender, issue focus13, level of education, and age. When asked whether they

felt that TFC achieved its mission of creating and promoting “high-quality skills and tools for

training with/among change agents/activists” 98.1% of respondents replied that they did, while

12
These include the assumption of regular distribution, which, while true of the means of a large
group of samples, often makes Chi-Square tests unreliable with smaller datasets such as this.
13
For instance, an individual working on environmental issues as compared with an individual
working on local community issues or issues of race. For some participants, the activism work
they do is their paid profession. For others, it is what they do in their free time.

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only 1.9% responded that they did not. Again, there was no statistically significant difference

between the responses given by members of different races, ages, genders, issue involvement, or

levels of education.

TFC’s perceived success in achieving its mission is some proof of the quality of its

training, but the responses I received to my question about recommending TFC to a friend are

even more of an endorsement: to recommend a training to a friend, most individuals must feel

that the training is relevant to what they are doing, that an increased saturation of TFC’s method

and tools would benefit their community (defined in this case by their friends) and that the

training is worth both the time and money it requires.

In terms of its effects on participants, TFC tends to score very highly across the board.

When asked to rank whether TFC increased their effectiveness in their chosen field on a Likert

scale between one and five14, 86.6% of respondents replied with score of a four or five while

only 4.8% responded with one or two. When asked whether TFC had helped them reach their

own personal goals, 84.0% responded with a four or five, while only 6% responded with a one or

two. When asked whether they were satisfied with the training, 88.8% responded with a four or

five, while only 5.4% responded with a one or two.

There was no statistically significant difference along any examined demographic lines

for any of these questions, except on personal satisfaction with the training. On this indicator,

when the 1-10 questions were condensed into 1-5 questions and our racial breakdown was

condensed into white non-Hispanic versus people of color15 both of which increase statistical

14
The original survey used a 1-10 Likert scale, but for statistical clarity I have condensed these
1-10 measures into 1-5 measures, with one now representing what was originally one and two,
two now representing what was originally three and four, etc.
15
In creating this variable, I was very aware of the over-simplifications and obfuscations that
come with combining members of all racial or ethnic minorities into one group. In doing so, I do

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significance, there was a significant difference between people of color and white non-Hispanic

individuals. Here, while approximately the same percentage of each population responded with

a one out of five (5.7% among people of color and 5.1% among whites) people of color were less

likely to give very high marks, with 64.2% responding with a score of five out of five as

compared with 77.8% among whites. This fact will be discussed again later in the analysis.

Along all other demographic indicators (age, gender, type of work, level of education) there was

no statistically significant difference for any of the above questions. In general, TFC is very well

regarded by its participants.

Now that we have established with a reasonable degree of certainty that the overall

response to TFC has been positive and that it appears to be achieving its mission of increasing

activist capacity, I turn to a more in-depth examination of whether TFC disproportionately

affects members of certain demographics. I will primarily consider questions of race and

socioeconomic status, partially because these tend to be the areas in which educational

discrepancies usually appear. Gender will also be an area of inquiry, though since teaching is a

primarily female profession and most TFC trainings are trainings of trainers, women are

overrepresented in the TFC training space. With the questions of race and class, I will be

looking at participants’ reactions to the training more than simply each group’s numerical

representation within the classroom.

Though some of these questions are directly addressed by the dataset, others need to be

examined through proxies. In particular, instead of addressing questions of socioeconomic status

not mean to imply that membership of one minority group can be equated to membership in
another. Instead, I used this tool as a way of isolating what can be crudely understood as racial
privilege: anything that the white-non-Hispanic variable tells us reflects on the racial majority it
is designed to isolate. With a larger dataset, it would have been possible to separate out each
demographic and examine them in isolation.

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through a numerical breakdown of family or parental income, I instead rely on level of

educational attainment as a proxy. It is certainly possible that an individual with an advanced

degree might fall under the poverty line or conversely an individual who never graduated from

high school might be a high wage earner or have come into substantial reserves of wealth, but

one of the assumptions I make in this research is that for most individuals, education is a

reasonable proxy for freedom of economic movement in today’s market economy, while it also

gives us some indication of what socioeconomic status the individual enjoyed as a child.

While this discussion will progress well beyond simply counting heads, it is still

important to know, on a basic level, who attends TFC trainings. I will first consider the racial

breakdown of the group’s participants, based on survey responses. I designed the survey

questions to conform to the standards used by the United States Census bureau so that TFC’s

numbers can be compared with the broader public, but this comparison should be understood as

approximate: TFC periodically runs trainings in major cities across the United States, as well as

occasionally taking its trainings overseas. While most of TFC’s work takes place in

Philadelphia, even these local trainings often draw participants from around the state and

country. Accordingly, TFC’s numbers (with 94.3% of respondents answering the question about

race) are presented below alongside state and national Census numbers.

Table 3.1 – Participation in TFC Trainings by Race

Race: TFC TFC pre TFC post PA, U.S.
Total* 2008 2008 2011 2011
African American or Black 6.8% 3.7% 9.0% 11.3% 13.1%
Caucasian or White 71.6% 75.5% 71.3% 83.3% 78.1%
Asian 5.2% 5.7% 4.9% 2.9% 5.0%
Native American or Alaska Native 1.1% 0% 0.8% 0.3% 0.2%
Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander 0.4% 1.8% 0.0% 0.1% 0.2%
Other 14.8% 13.2% 13.9% 2.1% 3.4%

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TOTAL 100% 100% 100% 100% 100%

*In some cases the total number is not the weighted average of the pre- and post-2008 numbers,
since the total is calculated based on all of those who responded to the race question, and the pre-
and post- numbers are calculated based on all those who responded to the race question as well
as the question about the first year they interacted with TFC.

What does this tell us? TFC tends to have fewer African American participants than the

national or state average would predict, though it also tends to have fewer white participants.

The number of Asian participants is approximately the same across all categories, and since there

are so few Native American, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander in any category

it is difficult to say what if any systematic difference there is between TFC and the rest of the

state or country. The fact that there are both fewer African Americans and fewer whites in TFC

can be accounted for by the fact that such a high percentage of TFC participants mark themselves

as “other.” While it is surprising how few African Americans come through TFC, the number is

substantially higher after the transition to new leadership. These data show that TFC is not, in

general, more white-dominated than we would expect from a random portion of society.

Since the race data as shown above is too spread out to give us any insight into statistical

significance, as discussed earlier I will base my racial analysis on the percentage of white-non-

Hispanic people in the group as compared to people of color. For this, the national average in

2011 was 63.4%, in Pennsylvania it was 79.2%, and for TFC it was 72% before 2008 and 67.2%

after 2008. In other words, the percentage of TFC’s participants who are white non-Hispanic is

below the Pennsylvania average in both time periods, but above the national average.

The majority of TFC participants are female, a full 62.5% versus 35.6%. 2% marked

‘other’ in response to this question. In terms of highest level of education, TFC participants also

tend to be fairly well educated: 27.0% hold advanced degrees, 53.4% have Bachelors degrees,

11.7% are in college, and 8.0% have a high school degree. There was no statistically significant

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difference in terms of gender or level of education between those who first worked with TFC

after 2008 and those who had encountered it before that time.16

With regards to the type of work that TFC participants do, the responses were heavily in

favor of those working on racial justice, which comprised a full 46.6% of respondents. A large

portion of those working on racial justice are white, which makes sense given that one of TFC’s

primary trainings over the years has been for white people confronting racism. The second

largest area of work is in local community issues, with 27.9% of respondents. This is trailed by

political campaigns at 7.4%, environmental issues at 5.4% and LGBTQ rights at 4.9%. 7.8% of

respondents marked ‘other.’ There is no significant difference17 between those who first

interacted with TFC before and after 2008. Thinking back to Mutz and Berman, this is

somewhat heartening. TFC tends to work with individuals whose own work is well-distributed

among a number of different fields, meaning that TFC is not contributing to the type of

homogenous networks Berman saw as so dangerous in Weimar Germany. Also, while it is true

that TFC attracts individuals at the left end of the political spectrum, we can extrapolate from the

fact that such a high percentage of TFC’s participants are working on issues of racial justice that

inclusively and equality are highly valued among the group’s participants.

While the question of age differences within the training space is interesting, and while

any group’s internal diversity must be considered partially based on the ages represented within

it, there are too many other reasons why age differences might appear in the training space for

16
I am using 2008 as the cut-off point for the transition to new leadership, even though much of
the transition had begun in 2007 or even before. Changes take some time to set in, and I am
interested in looking at the substantive effects of new leadership in my post-transition group, not
the relative chaos that is often found near the beginning of any organizational transition.
Arguably, using 2008 as a cutoff might still be too soon, since changes continue to be made to
this day. I chose 2008 as a compromise value, with the hope that it would be understood as an
approximate midpoint in an ongoing process.
17
Using a Somers’ D test.

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age to be a major focus of this investigation. Since the “long civic generation” (Putnam, 2000)

of highly participatory individuals born between 1910 and 1940, there has been a gradual decline

in engagement from each generation to the next.18 Within each generation, Putnam observes

engagement “rising from early adulthood toward a plateau in middle age, from which it

gradually declines” (Putnam, 2000). My assumption, as confirmed by the dataset is that most of

TFC’s participants are in their early adulthood: 47% are under the age of 34, while 81.9% are

under the age of 54. Not only is education a relatively more important component of young

people’s past experience – they are accustomed to thinking in terms of educational aims – but

they also have more of their lives as activists ahead of them, making training a more important

investment. It seems unlikely that the disproportionate number of young adults is due to TFC’s

methodology or pedagogy instead of to macroscopic generational and social trends.

A word about gender identity and orientation: since publicly announcing oneself – or

being outed – as LGBTQ often has implications for personal safety, and since many members of

the LGBTQ community choose to keep that aspect of their identities private, the survey did not

include a question about orientation or trans* identity. While some respondents and an

interviewee did self-identify as members of the LGBTQ community,19 and while multiple

members of the TFC team identify as queer, there are no systematic data on the proportion of

LGBTQ individuals within the group. Luckily, anecdotal evidence and personal experience

indicate that the queer community is well represented both inside the organization and among

participants. Amador, the executive director, stated in an interview that:

18
For instance, an average U.S. citizen born in 1960 would be more engaged at the age of twenty
than one born in 1990 would be at the same age.
19
As part of the question on gender, there were response options for Male, Female, and Other.
Those who selected Other could provide another term if they chose.

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In terms of queer identity, that seems very strongly represented in the

organization and who shows up to the workshops [laughs]. That's not as big a
concern [as race or class]. I think we could build more with trans* communities
specifically, but […] we've had a lot more trans* people come through our
workshops in recent years” (N. Amador, personal communication, July 2012).

Unless there is a dramatic change in institutional culture and TFC’s organizational

composition, it seems likely that LGBTQ individuals will continue to be well represented

in the TFC training space.

Identity Transformation

A potential response to the work of groups like TFC is that, while they can be helpful to

those who come to trainings, they cater to those who already identify as activists. In this light,

they are not actually increasing participation but instead only empowering those who are already

participatory. TFC is explicit in its mission of increasing activist ‘capacity,’ empowering those

who have expressed an interest in empowerment. This means increasing quality but not

necessarily frequency of participation within that group, and says nothing of helping new

individuals identify as social-change-makers. This is potentially a major problem for this

research: my earlier section on democratic theory argued for increasing social levels of

participation and the number of engaged individuals, not necessarily for making existing

participation more effective.

Despite the recognition that activism training groups cater to those who already identify

with some element of social change, my curiosity prompts me to wonder whether TFC changes

individuals’ identification with social change identities, and how TFC participants identify

before and after they enter the training space. There is an enormous amount that can be said

about identity formation and transformation, and the broader scholarship on the subject falls

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outside the scope of this thesis. Yet despite my inability to do the topic full justice, I am

interested in whether all TFC participants already view themselves as change makers (in which

case the above challenge would prove to be very serious), and if not, whether TFC has any effect

on that identity.

Of course, in terms of whether TFC has an effect the bar must be set fairly low: identity

is built up over the course of many years, in response to numerous and often untraceable factors,

so even changing how a few individuals identify can be interpreted here as a major impact for

one group to have. The choice to embrace an empowered identity label like organizer, for

instance, may indicate a dramatic shift in how that individual relates to power and his or her own

willingness and sense of empowerment to fight for the issues she or he feels to be important.

This empowerment and transformation is a major component of TFC’s goals, as discussed

above. In Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Lave and Wenger discuss

identity transformation as a gradual process that takes place alongside and as part of meaningful

learning. While Lave and Wenger were able to find such identity transformation in the long-

term apprenticeships they studied, finding the same effect in a few-day-long training would be a

strong testament to the power of the workshop and ability of the trainers.

While I believe this set of questions can tell us something important, we should also

recognize its limitations. In comparing data on identification with social change maker identities

across communities, we must be careful about the deductions we draw. For one thing, there is a

real possibility that each of these terms have different meanings in different communities.

Perhaps the term “advocate” for instance is more often claimed by white upper class individuals,

even if the “advocacy” work they do is not substantively different than that done by working

class people or people of color. With that in mind, I chose a number of different identity labels

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with the hope of uncovering any aggregate pattern between them, even if variation with any

particular term should not be taken at face value. A second limitation is that the data are not

longitudinal. Ideally, I would have asked participants about their identification both before and

after their experiences with TFC, in order to more accurately understand the group’s effects.

Instead, I must rely on respondents’ memory, which should always be understood as a limited

though powerful reflection of the past.

I designed the survey to investigate whether participants identify with certain change

maker identities (activist, organizer, advocate, educator, and leader), and whether they identified

that way before their experience with TFC. It would belabor the point to walk through each one

of these identities, so instead we will focus on the leader identity as a representation of the

general trend and note when others do not fit with the overall pattern it represents. In examining

the data for the leader identity, I found that, 47.5% of participants identified as a leader before

and after their experience with TFC, 44.5% neither before nor after, and 8.0% only after the

training(s) in which they participated. This 8% change is much more dramatic than I had

hypothesized, as was the relatively equal spread between participants who did and did not

identify as leaders before the training.

While the difference between most independent variables (age, gender, education, etc.)

was not statistically significant at the 0.05 p-value level, there was a statistically significant

difference between those who are white non-Hispanic and people of color.

Table 3.2 – Participants’ Change in Leader Identity by Racial Privilege

White Non-Hispanic Total
Yes No Respondents
Developed New Leader Count 8 8 16
Identity through TFC % 5.9% 12.5% 8.0%
Already Identified as a Count 73 22 95
Leader Before % 53.7% 34.4% 47.5%
No Leader Identification Count 55 34 89

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Before or After % 40.4% 53.1% 44.5%

TOTAL Count 136 64 200
% 100% 100% 100%
Fishers Exact Test, Two Sided P=Value = 0.022

While 53.7% of white-non-Hispanic individuals identified as leaders both before and

after their experience with TFC and 40.4% did not identify as leaders either before or after, 5.9%

reported identifying as a leader after TFC while they had not before. This is contrasted with

people of color, among whom only 34.4% of identified as leaders before and after, 53.1% of

whom did not identify as leaders either before or after, and a full 12.5% of whom identified as

leaders after but not before their experiences with TFC. This is more than twice the percentage

increase that we saw with white non-Hispanics.

A similar pattern follows with the term “Organizer:” there is no statistical significance

along any of our measures except for “white non-Hispanic,” and, interestingly, gender. With

regards to gender, when the four participants who responded ‘other’ were excluded from our

calculations20 there was a statistically significant difference between men and women, with

women being much more likely to develop an organizer identification (a 8.5% change as

opposed to a 4.2% change among men) and also more likely to identify as an organizer across

the board: among women, only 37.3% did not identify as organizers before or after, while among

men that number stood at a full 57.7%. Among white non-Hispanic individuals, 54.3%

identified as organizers before and after, 40% identified as organizers neither before nor after,

and 5.7% identified as organizers after but not before. Among people of color, 34.4% identified

as organizers both before and after, 57.8% did not identify as organizers either before or after,

20
I excluded these four participants from all my calculations on gender, not because the
experiences of those who do not fit within the gender binary are un-important for this analysis,
but simply because there is such diversity within the gender label ‘other’ that I could not expect
to draw a meaningful deduction about the group, even if the number of respondents had been
much larger than it was.

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and 7.8% identified as organizers after but not before, a more modest change than among those

who came to identify themselves as “Leaders,” but certainly one that trends in the same

direction.

The pattern does not hold for “Advocate,” where there were significant differences along

lines of age and gender, but not race: older participants were much more likely to have a change

in advocate identification,21 while women were more likely to develop advocate identities as well

as more likely to have had them before entering the training space. Nor does the pattern hold for

educator, where the only statistically significant difference was along lines of gender: women

were much more likely to hold the identification already before interacting with TFC (61.8%

percent among women as compared with 39.1% among men), but TFC increased identification at

around the same rate for each gender.22 For the “activist” identity, older participants were more

likely to have their identification with the term increased, while interestingly women were both

significantly more likely to have their identification increased (10.0% as compared with 4.1%

among men) and to already identify as a leader before the training (61.7% as compared with

40.5%).23 While people of color did have their identification with the term activist increased by

9.0% as opposed to 6.3% among whites, this number did not reach a rigorous threshold of

statistical significance.

What can we understand from this? The data indicate that TFC does not only work with

those who already identify strongly with various activist identities, but also works extensively

21
Using a Chi-Square Test.
22
In looking at education, the data could not be accommodated to any of my three tests (Chi-
Square, Fishers Exact, or Somers’ D) without violating the test’s assumptions. However,
examining the data clearly shows that there is no major difference between how individuals with
different levels of education responded to this question.
23
Here I had the same problem as above with examining the levels of education. There appears
to be no significant trend in the data, but none of our tests could be run to verify this fact.

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with those who do not already hold those identities. For many identity terms, the spread is

roughly half and half. This might be attributable to the group’s emphasis on outreach and its

work with young activists, whose identity may be less solidified. The data also indicate that TFC

trainings are more likely to have an effect on whether a person of color identifies as a leader or

organizer, while the same effect is mirrored though not significant at a 0.05 threshold in other

identity categories. With the ‘leader’ identity, this effect is more than twice as pronounced with

participants of color. For the ‘organizer,’ ‘educator,’ ‘activist,’ and ‘advocate’ identities, TFC is

also significantly more transformative for women than for men. These trends provide what is

most likely the strongest point against any assertion that TFC magnifies inequality by increasing

empowerment among those who are already empowered, while leaving the rest of the population

behind. Based on my data, TFC appears to have a slight but important compensatory effect.

These findings also indicate that of the individuals who participate in TFC trainings, there

is a difference between how members of racial minorities and the racial majority already

identify, with the majority being more likely to identify with change-maker terms before

interacting with TFC. There is also a difference between how women and men originally

identify with terms like activist and educator. It is beyond the scope of this study to investigate

the larger implications of these findings, as well as whether they hold true in the broader world

or simply among those who participate in TFC. Again, it is possible that this phenomenon may

have to do with the different social meanings of these terms I chose to investigate. From the

focused perspective of a program evaluation like this however, I can say that TFC increases rates

of identification with change-maker terms, and that this effect is more pronounced among

members of racial and ethnic minorities and women. TFC is much more able to change

individuals’ identification than we might have expected, people who come into TFC trainings are

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not exclusively those who already identify as leaders, and TFC appears to be combating broader

social inequalities in how frequently members of different communities self-identify as change-

makers, if these inequalities relate to perceived levels of personal empowerment instead of

cultural differences between groups.

Efficacy Beyond the Training Space

A major question that arose out of the earlier discussion of democratic theory is whether

groups like TFC actually increase participation outside the training space, or whether they simply

make existing activists better at what they do. I began to address this question in the discussion

of identity transformation, but the data also allow a more detailed examination of what TFC’s

ripple effects actually are in terms of levels of engagement. Of course, we should remember that

TFC does not present itself as a group dedicated to increasing participation: its focus is on

quality. Any quantitative increase in democratic participation or activism is ancillary to the

group’s stated goals, regardless of its importance to this research.

The survey contained three questions that helped me consider both how TFC impacts

participants’ activities after the training and whether there is a difference in the degree to which

TFC increases different populations’ levels of engagement. The first question is whether the

participant’s experience with TFC raised, lowered, or had no effect on the frequency with which

she or he facilitates a meeting. A full 39.9% of participants said that the experience raised the

frequency with which they facilitated meetings, while 59.1% said that the training had no effect

and 1.0% said it lowered the frequency with which they facilitate. This is understandable, since

much of TFC’s work revolves around developing facilitation skills, and becoming more

comfortable with a skill may reasonably lead to an increased frequency of its use. Another

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question asked whether TFC raised, lowered, or had no effect on the number of meetings the

respondent attended in a year. For this, 25.1% responded that the experience raised the number,

72.9% said it had no effect, and 1.9% said it lowered the number of trainings they attend in a

year. Most importantly, the final question asked whether the participant’s experience with TFC

raised, lowered, or had no effect on the number of hours he or she spends in a given month

working on their issue of choice. Here, 29.7% of respondents reported that TFC increased that

number, 69.3% reported that TFC had no effect, and 0.9% responded that TFC lowered the

number of hours they spend working on their issue in a given month. This final question is

designed to capture all types of engagement with the issue that increase as a result of TFC’s

work, including meetings, phone-calls, actions, lobbying, or any other behavior the participant

views as relating to his or her issue of choice.

TFC clearly increases engagement across all three categories. This is a heartening

finding, particularly since TFC makes no effort to increase the frequency with which participants

attend meetings or the amount of time they put into this work, and instead focuses on increasing

the effectiveness of the trainee’s activism tools. The implication is that increased quality of

participation also tends to increase quantity, a positive finding to say the least.

But how does this participation break down along demographic lines? Remember, one of

my central concerns with other forms of activism training (for instance training that is developed

in the workplace or nonpolitical organizations) is that these centers for activism development

often disproportionately increase the skills of already active populations: for instance, the

workplace tends to give leadership experience to white middle- or upper-class men. The fact that

these spaces increase participation is not enough. Not only do they fail to correct for social

injustice and systems of domination, but they effectively contribute to them (with the possible

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exception of churches, but it is unclear what real leadership and empowerment training

traditional churches provide). If TFC disproportionately increases engagement among already

engaged and socially advantaged portions of society, or even if TFC does nothing to correct for

the participatory inequalities that already exist in the outside world, we will need to think very

carefully about whether the group can realistically be understood as a force for progressive

change.

With my first question, whether the training increased the frequency with which the

participant facilitates a meeting, there was no statistically significant effect across any

demographic lines. That said, though it did not reach a statistically significant level there was a

noticable difference in how people of color and white non-Hispanics responded: while only

35.9% of white respondents said that TFC raised the frequency with which they facilitate

meetings, that number was a full 48.5% among people of color, or a full 12.6% difference. Since

this is not statistically significant with such a small sample, we should not read too far into this

finding. Yet, it is indicative of the trends that will appear with the second and third questions.

For the question of approximately how many times in a year participants attend a meeting

on an issue they are involved in, we see a similar but more pronounced pattern. There was a

high level of statistical significance – using the Fishers Exact test – between white non-Hispanics

and people of color, with a p-value of 0.02. People of color were substantially more likely to say

that the frequency with which they attended meetings had increased after their experience with

TFC, 36.9% of respondents as compared with 19.7% among white non-Hispanics. This is a full

17.2% spread. There was also a substantial and statistically significant difference across

genders, with a p-value of 0.018: interestingly, men were more likely than women to increase the

frequency with which they attended meetings as a result of TFC. As I will discuss below, this

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may be because young adult men are generally less participatory, and therefore are more

favorably situated than women to increase their involvement.

The most dramatic findings have to do with whether TFC increased, decreased, or had no

effect on how many hours the respondent spends working on their chosen issue in a given month.

In some ways this is the central question, since it includes not only what happens in meetings

(either attendance or facilitation) but also behind the scenes work, for instance making phone

calls and having one-on-one meetings. Instead of simply tracking particular types of

engagement, this question is designed to capture everything that the participant does with

relation to the issue she or he is passionate about.

Here, the data speak with remarkable clarity. Neither gender, nor education, nor age have

any significant effect. However, the difference between TFC’s effects on white non-Hispanic

people and people of color is remarkable. With a Fishers Exact p-value of 0.0046, people of

color are much more likely to report an increase in how many hours they spend working on their

chosen issue as a result of TFC. 43.3% of people of color reported that TFC increased the

number, while only 23.4% of white non-Hispanics reported the same phenomenon.

What are we to understand from this? While people of all backgrounds and races agree

that TFC offers highly valuable programs and training, the effectiveness of those trainings at

increasing rather than simply honing participation is much higher among people of color.

Recalling Verba et al.’s discussion of how participation is dramatically concentrated among

privileged communities, this is a critical finding.

There has traditionally been a dramatic ‘participatory gap’ (Verba, Schlozman, & Brady,

1993), between white non-Hispanics and people of color. TFC appears to have a compensatory

effect. This does not necessarily mean that the training is more engaging or meaningful to

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people of color: it could also be an indication that racially privileged individuals are more likely

to be ‘saturated,’ or already highly participatory24, to the point where an increase is harder to

achieve. Another possibility is that TFC participants are all highly engaged, regardless of broader

demographic patterns, in which case something else would need to be happening in the training

space such that people of color’s engagement is disproportionately increased.

Unfortunately I do not have data on participants’ original levels of participation, and so

cannot test which hypothesis – if either – is likely to be accurate. Yet while the existing data do

not allow me to speak with confidence about participant’s initial state (the expectation being that

either everyone comes in equally engaged already, or broader social discrepancies in engagement

are mirrored in TFC’s participant pool) the fact remains that broader social discrepancies do

exist, and by increasing engagement among people of color, TFC has a serious compensatory

effect. This is true both in terms of disproportionately increasing rates of participation among

people of color, and in disproportionately increasing their identification across a variety of

change-maker roles.

The other significant finding in this section is that men were more likely than women to

report that the frequency with which they attend meetings rose as a result of their work with

TFC. This is interesting, although the pattern’s significance was not replicated in terms of

meeting facilitation or hours per month and is therefore less striking than the racial patterns

presented above. Again, since I do not have data on how many meetings male and female

participants attend I cannot say with certainty what is taking place within the training space, but

24
I should note that participants in TFC trainings are likely to be disproportionately participatory
across the board, although perhaps to different degrees. Anyone who voluntarily attends a
training designed to increase the impact and efficacy of social action is probably already active
in his or her community: the question now is simply whose engagement TFC increases from a
baseline which is likely to be a high already.

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there is some reason to believe that in terms of the type of work TFC participants tend to engage

in, men might in fact be less participatory in general than women (favoring an interpretation in

which women are already ‘saturated’ with participatory habits). Using data from the 2006 Civic

and Political Health of the Nation Survey, Marcelo, Lopez, and Kirby were able to show that

especially among 15-25 year olds, women were more active in ‘civic activities’ than men

(Marcelo, Lopez, and Kirby, 2007). The graph below demonstrates this trend, although it is also

clear that the differences across lines of gender are small, which fits with my data that only

reveals a significant difference between genders within one of our three engagement categories:

how often men attend meetings.

Table 3.3: “Participation in Civic Activities among 15-25 year olds by Gender”

Source: “Civic Engagement among Young Men and Women,” (Marcelo, Lopez, and Kirby, 2007).

If men are in fact less participatory within the young adult age group (remember that young

adults are disproportionately represented among TFC’s participants) it makes sense that men

would be more favorably situated than women to increase their participation after working with

TFC.

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Based on the data presented above, it seems clear that TFC does in fact increase levels of

participation, and fairly dramatically: along each of my three indicators, more than one in four

participants said TFC had increased his or her engagement. This in itself is sufficient to answer

many of the political theorists we discussed earlier, but TFC goes beyond the minimum

qualification of increasing participation: instead, it actively corrects for the racial inequality that

Verba et al. (1993) discovered within our nation’s participatory patterns. Unlike the other

institutions we examined earlier that increase participation, TFC avoids contributing to the

participatory gap between whites and people of color, and in fact addresses and begins to close it.

Race and Socioeconomic Status in Training for Change

For most of its history, TFC has held anti-oppression trainings and trainings for Whites

Confronting Racism. Lakey speaks proudly of the ways in which his own working class

background has informed the methodology, and generally TFC trainers tend to be well-versed in

issues of class and race. The relatively new scholarship program as well as leadership from

people of color show that issues of race and class are generally viewed as both priorities and

areas of concern, yet ones in which progress is being made.

This has not always been the case, and older members deliver mixed evaluations when

questioned about the group’s relationship with racial and class dynamics. Two trainers in

particular, Thorne and Raasch-Gilman, brought up early struggles around race, while

emphasizing that despite Lakey’s working class roots, socioeconomic status remains a major

issue for the group.

Most trainers, when asked about diversity within the group and possible reasons why

people of color and working class people might not be proportionally represented within the

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trainings, stated that disproportionate representation was not due to the theory itself, but instead

to external factors and the networks TFC has made. Yet a few trainers did talk about

organizational culture as a possible area in which TFC might alienate people of color and

working class people. We will consider these factors after looking at more structural or

situational explanations.

In terms of who joins the organization as a trainer, a few interviewees pointed out that

training and teaching in general have historically been considered middle-class, often white, and

often female professions, which influences how easily different participants identify themselves

as future trainers. Amador points out that “for people who want to be full time trainers or do that

as a primary role, it's been something we've acknowledged that that is really a middle-class

profession, and not necessarily something working class people are attracted to or feel like it's a

viable profession for them” (N. Amador, personal communication, July 2012). Part of this has to

do with how precarious the training profession often is: Amador continues “being a consultant

often requires having stability in other parts of your life because the income is not necessarily

consistent. I think that that's particularly hard for people who are parents or working class.”

People of color are well represented within the organization, yet a trainer observed that in

terms of candidates for trainer status, “we can and we do appeal to people of color who are

middle class in background [and] to working class white people, but we are not appealing to

working class people of color.” While either race or class privilege may be enough to help an

individual view training as a viable professional option, those who lack either form of privilege

are less able to overcome the structural barriers to choosing training as a profession.

The question of who joins the group as a trainer is in some ways secondary to that of who

is drawn to it as a participant, though the two are related by way of the message that a participant

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receives upon seeing someone of his or her own race or background at the front of the room.

Recruitment is a central area in which structural inequalities can emerge, and as shown earlier,

even the fact that there have been substantial efforts to increase minority recruitment has not

dramatically decreased the percentage of trainees who are white and non-Hispanic, though it has

increased the percent of black participants.

The most immediately evident reason why TFC might be less than entirely accessible to

working class participants is the simple fact that trainings take time and costs money, both of

which are in short supply for many working class activists. A common suggestion among survey

respondents is that TFC find a way to provide free childcare during trainings, or schedule more

workshops at night so that those who work full time and over the weekend could attend. TFC

has always been clear about not turning anyone away from a training because of inability to pay,

but as Hunter points out, the initial price-tag can be intimidating. With that in mind, TFC has

recently set up a scholarship program intended to bring more people of color, people from the

global south, and people from working class backgrounds into the group. Hunter explains that:

The creation of a people of color, working class, global south scholarship fund [is
a] signal that we're getting better. […] A lot of people of color or working class
people read something that says 'this is how much money we cost' and then check
out. [But] they do see ‘scholarship’ (D. Hunter, personal communication, July
2012).

Has this been effective? In many ways it is too soon to tell, since these programs are still

relatively new. Using education as a proxy-variable for class however, there is no significant

difference25 between those who interacted with TFC before 2008 and those who interacted with

the group after the transition to new leadership in terms of their reported level of education. If

25
Using a Chi-Square Test.

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the group’s demography has changed in response to these new programs, it is not yet apparent

within the group’s database.

Another area where there has been gradual improvement is in the networks that

individual trainers and the group as a whole have developed. Since TFC was historically driven

by Lakey’s vision and his was the face of the organization, there was often a disconnect between

TFC and communities of color, despite the fact that some TFC trainers were themselves of

African American heritage. During her interview, Thorne explained regretfully that “the

impression that direct education often leaves is that it’s not useful for working class or poor

people, not useful in movements where there’ve been long-time cross cultural and cross race

coalitions” (E. Thorne, personal communication, June 2012). Her assessment is that this has

more to do with the group’s image than its methodology. As an anonymous trainer explained,

“the legacy of George and George's work in the peace movement doesn't address the needs of all

communities. He has his hands in a lot of different pies, but they sometimes start looking white

and middle class” (personal communication, June 2012). Accompanying the evident respect for

Lakey that the trainers share is a recognition that his identify as a white male Quaker did little to

help invite other marginalized identities into the room.

As Hunter and Amador have taken leadership of the organization, this narrative has

begun to shift. The interviewee above continues on to say that “Daniel [Hunter] and Nico

[Amador] have probably reached out into working class communities and communities of color

in more effective ways, and I'm seeing more people of color than I used to see” (personal

communication, June 2012). Amador agrees that much of this change has to do with the

networking that he and Hunter have done, while admitting that “myself and Daniel have both felt

the challenges at different moments of being the two people of color in the organization that have

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been doing a lot of the leadership, balancing what's true for the organization now with where

we'd like to see it go” (N. Amador, personal communication, July 2012).

While structural and situational barriers to diversity in TFC – some of which are likely to

improve over time while others such as the required time commitment are unlikely to change –

are certainly central to this discussion, numerous trainers noted that the issue of socioeconomic

class in the organization is still underdeveloped, in terms of who comes in but also who comes

back. Thorne shared that:

We’ve been working racially from the beginning, with an acknowledgement of a

need for diversity and of the barriers to really developing it, but we’re just starting
to develop that conversation around class. […] There’s always a few really
excited people in each training, and generally those people who indicate that they
want an ongoing relationship with TFC either are middle class or have worked for
that status and are comfortable with it (E. Thorne, personal communication, July
2012).

Some trainers feel that there are ways TFC’s methodology facilitates engagement among

the more privileged, beyond the structural constraints such as cost and time commitment. Hunter

observed that those participants who tend to reach out to him without him initiating the contact

often come from privileged backgrounds. His interpretation of this phenomenon is that “that act

of reaching out is hindered by oppression. I think that's part of the dynamic, and that's one of the

signs of privilege, feeling like 'oh yeah, I can call up so and so and just chat with them' or 'I can

ask them for their time'” (D. Hunter, personal communication, July 2012). Another interpretation

of that pattern and of similar ones – though the explanations are not mutually exclusive –

emerges out of an anecdote Raasch-Gilman offered:

I don't know if anybody has talked to you about the recent – the first – Spanish
language Training of Trainers. That really gave us a lot to think about in terms of
our appeal. I've been cogitating on it, turning it over and over and over for
myself.
I was there as an observer, because my Spanish isn't strong enough to
carry out an entire workshop, but I could understand what was going on. Most of

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the time [laughs]. There were only three male-bodied people there, and one of
them was twelve years old. Only three male-bodied people, and a whole bunch of
Latinas, all of them quite working class. One person was from Peru but the rest
were from Mexico. I think there might have been one Puerto Rican too. There
were two points at which some of the women really rebelled against the direct
education methodology. One of them was after Andrew [a TFC trainer] had
explained about the cycle of direct education they had been doing all along on
Sunday morning. Three of the women just really rebelled, and said ‘You say that
this is the first time you've done this in Spanish. Do you tell this to other people?’
Andrew was put quite off guard by this and said ‘Well yes, of course, yes
it's the first time we've done it in Spanish but we've done it in English many,
many times!’ ‘Well do you tell them all the same things or is this because we're a
group of Latinas?’ ‘No, and in fact this methodology has been developed in a very
international fashion. We've used this methodology in Russia, we've used it in
Asia, we've used it in Canada, we've used it in South Africa, we've used it all over
the place and this is what we teach.’
I really reflected on that sense of ‘wait a second, you're giving us a bunch
of crap because we're Latinas.’ I don't know of course what was in the minds of
the women who were objecting. I speculate it might have been that they can see
perfectly well that the mainstream in the United States and their own countries
concentrates on the individual leader, who knows a lot, who gets up and lectures
and tells people what to do, has a lot of knowledge and is good on their feet and
can give a good presentation. That's who gets the status and that's who gets the
monetary rewards for doing that work and gets recognition. And then we're
telling them about facilitating in a style of learning which doesn't put them in that
authoritative role, doesn't stress ‘well, here's how you do a really accomplished
lecture,’ doesn't stress ‘here's how you use your powerpoint,’ doesn't stress the
things they can see perfectly well are rewarded in the larger world.
It's made me think about how, us turning our backs on our educational
model, is partly a result of us having had access to it. We're turning our backs on
it because we've had access to it, but for those who've never had access, and that's
what's getting rewarded. […] It was the Peruvian, who has a middle class
background, who said ‘I wonder if we're just so reluctant to adopt these new ideas
because we're frightened.’ That, again, was someone with a background of higher
education. […]
We're turning our backs on something that they've never had access to,
and that they need to have access to in order to live in this society. In that sense
it's not the right tool for them. Or, they don't see the potential of it being the right
tool. When you're shut out of something, do you want to get in or do you want to
turn your back on it? (Raasch-Gilman, personal communication, July 2012).

There are a number of possible reasons why this interaction might have taken place, as Raasch-

Gilman herself goes on to point out: “I wouldn't want to make too much of it given that it's just a

small, small sample, and we haven't had that kind of reaction – George has taken this all over the

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world – that's the first time I've heard of that reaction” (B. Raasch-Gilman, personal

communication, July 2012). Yet Raasch-Gilman’s interpretation prompts the question of whether

TFC, as a pedagogy that advocates alternative paths than those that often lead to social

“success,” risks being viewed as irrelevant or even as second best to those who lack access to the

conventional educational channels that lead to social power.

Remember our earlier conversation about why TFC may be a less attractive employer for

working class trainers – or potential trainers – of color, than for individuals with a background of

privilege: the work TFC offers, often part-time, seasonal, and admittedly underpaid based on the

required level of skill and dedication, tends to lack the status that qualified applicants might find

elsewhere. Thorne explains that “for many people who have grown up working class or poor,

and for many people of color, a perceived professional status is very important in a way that it’s

not for me as a member of the racial majority” (E. Thorne, personal communication, July 2012).

There are a number of reasons for this: As Raasch-Gilman points out, trainers from privileged

backgrounds are familiar with the economic privilege they walk away from in choosing the life

of a trainer. They also continue to carry their privilege with them regardless of profession:

economic troubles are more likely to be fixable with a phone call to a relative, a friend from

college can arrange an interview for a more lucrative second job to help pay the bills, and the

ability to code-switch back to the language of privilege can make that interview more likely to

end in employment. This heightened degree of flexibility that accompanies privilege –

especially economic privilege – means that success for the lucky few can look like almost

anything, since it’s often primarily driven by personal interest and passion and built on a secure

foundation of economic security. For many working class people and people of color, creating

that foundation is itself often understood as success. When success is socially defined as

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economic security and the prestige that comes with steady employment, any deviation from that

single point runs the risk of being understood as failure.

In telling this story, it is almost certain that Raasch-Gilman remembered back to her days

in MNS. The countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including MNS, had limited

appeal outside a narrow subset of society. As children of middle-class baby boomers became

disillusioned with their parents’ generation, their rebellion often led them to envision new forms

of society for themselves, a prefigurative politics that defined MNS and much of the

Antiauthoritarian Left of the day. Yet MNS and other similar movements had little appeal for

those who had been denied access to the middle class experience of suburbia and Tupperware

parties. In his book on Movement for a New Society, Cornell criticizes MNS based on the fact

that

Rather than creating a model of the new society, they were establishing one of
many possible new lifestyles that grew out of a specific configuration of values
that they prioritized. One former MNS member insightfully reflects, “A lot of
what was defining our culture was our rebellion against white culture. So we
were a counterculture, but we were actually counter to white culture.” This made
MNS’s internal culture less appealing to people of color, and some working class
people, who had a different relationship to the dominant, white middle-class
culture to begin with (Cornell, 2011).

This monoculturalism and inability to appeal to a wider segment of society was in many

ways what forced the decline and eventual “laying to rest” of MNS. If the group’s

prefigurative politics was unable to appeal to all those who would exist in the real society

to come, the thought was that the Movement for a New Society was fundamentally flawed.

The lesson to take away from MNS’ monoculturalism is that a movement or

pedagogy that only appeals to those with a certain background cannot, despite its best

intentions, claim legitimacy in visioning for a truly inclusive future. Our question now is

whether TFC has been able to avoid this same trap, under the guidance of a diverse group

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of trainers and benefiting from the experiences of Lakey, Thorne, and Raasch-Gilman, all

of whom witnessed and learned from the decline of MNS. Numerically, the answer seems

to be yes: TFC is relatively diverse, and whites are underrepresented among participants

when compared to state and national numbers. However, the question of whether all

participants feel equally culturally comfortable is a somewhat separate issue.

An important connection to be made here is with culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP).

One of the most important points that CRP adds to a discussion of inequality is that, in entering

schools, students from minority backgrounds are often forced into a false choice between

maintaining their own cultural identity and adopting the dominant culture of school, a behavior

which may lead to academic success but can be severely alienating – consider the accusation of

“acting white” frequently lodged against academically-oriented students of color. CRP and the

situation Raasch-Gilman discussed are addressing different outgrowths of the same root issue:

privilege often manifests itself in the flexibility never to have to choose between security or

conventional success on one hand and the larger components of identity on the other, one’s

passions, background, and community. One of CRP’s major aims is to create learning spaces in

which this compromise is not necessary for any participant. Our question for Training for

Change as a group is whether it can do the same.

We have already seen that, despite TFC’s inability to provide a steady and full time

professional existence for most of its members, it has been successful in attracting a racially and

economically diverse training core – although the intersection of racial and class-based privilege

remains a barrier. In terms of its participants, my questions are then: does TFC make certain

people coming through its workshops – likely those from less privileged backgrounds – feel that

there is a tension between their own culture and that of the organization? Do people of working

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class backgrounds and people of color feel that what they learn in TFC is designed for people

from their own communities?

Most participants in TFC trainings are unlikely to enter the training space expecting to

develop the tools that they would in a traditional professional training.26 Especially those

working on local community issues or identity politics are likely looking for tools that will

appeal to their own particular communities and co-organizers. But as CRP reminds us, there

needn’t be a division between education that confers real-world power and that honors our own

diverse roots and the communities to which we belong. It is no easy task, but a training

organization could certainly provide skills that translate into real power and do not cater to

privilege. The fears of the Latina women in Raasch-Gilman’s example – namely that they were

receiving watered down and ineffective methods because of their ethnicity – would in that case

not exemplify a more general experience with the group. We must ask ourselves, do participants

in TFC trainings feel that the tools they receive are applicable to their struggles?

There are a number of ways to approach this question, and the results are promising for

TFC. First, remember that almost all respondents stated that they would recommend TFC to a

friend, and there was no statistically significant variation within this between any subgroups I

investigated. When asked whether they felt that TFC achieved its goal of “high-quality skills

and tools for training with/among change agents/activists” a full 98.1% of past respondents

replied that yes, they did. Again, there was no statistically significant difference between the

responses given by members of different races, ages, genders, issue involvement27, or levels of

education. While people of color were less likely to give TFC the highest possible mark (five out

26
It is possible that misunderstandings of this sort may play a role in explaining the negative
reactions of the women in the Spanish language training of which Raasch-Gilman spoke.
27
For instance, an individual working on environmental issues as compared with an individual
working on local community issues or issues of race.

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of five) in terms of their satisfaction with the training, this difference was slight. I have already

described the almost uniformly high rankings that participants gave the group in terms of its

effectiveness in helping them meet their own personal goals and increase their own effectiveness

in their chosen fields.

When asked how frequently they use the tools they developed as part of a TFC training,

55.8% of respondents responded that they used the tools “very often,” with 11.7% responding

that they used them “never” or “once or twice.” The remaining 32.6% said they “sometimes”

use the tools they learned from TFC. There is no statistically significant difference between

respondents based on gender, level of education,28 or work type. In particular, our variable that

compares white-non-Hispanic people with people of color failed dramatically to achieve

anything approximating statistical significance, with a p-value of 0.24, showing that there is

essentially no difference between how often members of the racial majority and minority use the

tools they acquire from TFC.

There was a notable difference along lines of age, however, with 25.0% of those 65 or

older responding that they never use the tools they learned and only 33.3% of the same age

responding that they use the tools “very often.” While age is not a major concern for us, it is

interesting to note that older trainees tend to use the tools they develop less frequently. A

possible explanation for this is that older trainees either have already developed the tools they

use on an every day basis before entering TFC, or that the elderly do not use this type of tools as

often, since they tend to be less active. It does seem that much of TFC’s work appeals primarily

to younger age groups: though not statistically significant, older participants were also

28
Using a Somers’ D test.

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somewhat less likely to rate their satisfaction with their overall experience as a five on a 1-5

Likert scale.

Clearly, TFC appears to be almost universally held in high esteem as a skill building

organization. Across demographics, all participants tend to feel that they derive useful skills and

were helped in achieving their personal goals. This appears to have answered the question of

whether the Latina women’s fear could reasonably be based on the belief that TFC, as a non-

mainstream pedagogy, offers a substandard set of tools and training that does not help them with

the struggles in which they most wish to engage. On an aggregate level, the answer is that TFC

succeeds in providing useful skills to minority participants. How then can we understand the

three women's resistance to the direct education pedagogy? Was this a non-representative

anecdote? Or might it still be a reflection of deeper currents?

One of the most interesting questions administered in the survey was to what extent the

respondent felt that the training was designed for people like them. On a scale of 1-5,

participants were asked whether they agreed with the statement that “the trainings I participated

in seemed like they were designed to be helpful for people with backgrounds like mine.”29

While, like many of the questions examined earlier, the ‘people like me’ variable shows no

statistically significant difference among lines of age, gender, education30 or type of work, it did

show a significant difference between white-non-Hispanic individuals on one hand and people of

color on the other. Though the three women were unusual in thinking that the training was

formulated for the Latin@ community, they were not unusual in their belief that the training they

29
While this variable is helpful in a number of ways, it is also flawed. I will use it to consider
whether direct education pedagogy is interpreted by various subgroups to be designed as to
appeal to them, or in other words whether they felt they were the pedagogy’s audience. Yet the
term “people like me” is necessarily ambiguous, and as will be touched on later, the question
talks about the pedagogy’s design in the past tense, not how applicable it feels in the present.
30
Using a Somers’ D test.

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received was designed with a certain group in mind: white participants were significantly more

likely to say that the felt the training was designed for people like them, even as they were no

more likely to say that they found the training helpful based on the indicators I explored above.

I should note that a statistically significant difference does not imply a majority of people

of color did not feel that the training was designed for them: to the contrary, of the participants of

color who responded to the ‘people like me’ question, 7.7% responded with a one out of five,

while 36.5% responded with a five. This is far from indicating that members of a racial minority

feel systematically alienated by TFC’s pedagogy: in fact, the majority of people of color lean

toward feeling that the pedagogy was designed for people like them. This simply shows that

members of the majority feel even more assured that they were the intended audience. A similar

pattern plays out with level of education, but it does not meet a rigorous threshold of statistical

significance, perhaps because of Lakey’s working-class roots.

Table 3.4 – Participant’s Agreement that the Training was Designed for People with
Backgrounds Similar to Their Own by Racial Privilege
White Non-Hispanic Total
Yes No Respondents
1 Count 2 4 6
% 1.8% 7.7% 3.6%
2 Count 2 4 6
% 1.8% 7.7% 3.9%
3 Count 15 11 26
% 13.2% 21.2% 15.7%
4 Count 44 14 58
% 38.6% 26.9% 34.9%
5 Count 51 19 70
% 44.7% 36.5% 42.2%
TOTAL Count 114 52 166
% 100% 100% 100%
Fishers Exact, Two-Sided Mid-P Value = 0.032

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This finding is difficult to reconcile with our earlier discussion of the data. How is that

there is almost no difference in how demographics think about the quality of the training they

received or about the relevance of the training to their own personal lives, but people of color are

less likely to feel that the training was designed for people like them? While there is no

authoritative interpretation of this apparent contradiction, I will hazard a few informed guesses.

An instinctive response is that this should come as no surprise: the default in this society

is for education to be geared toward the dominant culture, and unless a major attempt has been

made to prove that a particular training was designed to be multicultural – or even monocultural

in a direction that does not favor the majority – it is safe to assume that it was not. Even if those

without racial privilege feel that they benefit from a pedagogy, they would generally be justified

in assuming that it was not meant for them. CRP tells us that, at least in some cases, this should

lead to disempowerment or a sense of alienation, which is generally called to our attention by

way of minority students’ different and less positive reactions to the curriculum.

So, is TFC disempowering? This seems unlikely. The above data about identity change

and increased levels of participation indicate that TFC does tend to empower its participants, and

especially tends to help people of color develop social change identities and increase their levels

of participation. Members of all communities give almost uniformly positive responses to

whether they felt they had developed meaningful skills while working with TFC, and to other

similar questions. TFC has developed a strong and justified reputation as an organization that

empowers its participants.

Is TFC culturally alienating for participants of color? This deserves a closer look. On

one hand, the data do not indicate that TFC participants are alienated from their communities

through their participation with TFC: there is no survey question that directly addresses

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alienation, but the majority of participants work on local community issues or racial justice, both

of which require the maintenance of close and abiding ties with tight communities built around

identity. Those working in these fields are not significantly different than those working in any

other in terms of their belief that the trainings were designed for people like them. TFC

participants are not alienated from their own communities.

Could they instead be alienated from the training space, without that spilling over into

their community work? Perhaps. It is possible that minority participants do not feel themselves

to be fully represented in the training space, but do not feel alienated enough for it to effect what

they take away from TFC. This would probably need to be a very marginal level of alienation in

order for it not to effect their work: if margins felt actively discouraged from being in the room

instead of a more subtle lack of affirmation, they would probably react more negatively to the

entire experience than do other participants. Since the difference between people of color and

white non-Hispanic participants in their impression of whether the training was designed for

them is small, a marginal difference in whether they are alienated by the training is all that’s

necessary to explain the data.

Is there any support for this hypothesis? I believe there is. One of the trainers mentioned

in the interview that, even though there is an active attempt made in each training to embrace

different cultures (consider the “diversity welcome” and active discussions of mainstream and

margin) there is a way in which TFC is still rooted in “the way whiteness thinks” (C. Kutz,

personal communication, July 2012). Essentially, the default in TFC trainings is still a very

White way of communicating. When pressed to give examples, Kutz explained that “it’s not like

in the TSAT [Training of Social Action Trainers] there’s written ‘sing a song,’” which would be

one example of a historically non-White way of teaching and learning.” She also notes that:

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I do think it's a lot about who's in the room. I think the willingness to stay present in
this moment, and like, we're going to deal with what's here, can be perceived as
'racism doesn't exist.' That's not what we say at all, but the assumption, because of the
way racism has played out, is that 'well you're not going to think about this, because
you're not going to name it right up front. If you're not going to name it up front, you
don't even know it's there!' Assumptions get made, when in fact the way we're really
approaching it is that 'name it! You see it, name it. Why do you need me, the person
in front of the room, to name it?'” (C. Kutz, personal communication, July 2012)

This is an important point that is often in the background in TFC discussions about race or

oppression in the classroom: TFC does not tend to bring minority cultures into the room itself,

instead supporting those cultures as participants assert them. Remember Hunter’s point about

finding ways to support conflict within a training without explicitly siding with the margin,

instead empowering it to learn to fight for itself. The facilitator’s choice not to advocate for the

margins might explain why fewer people of color were maximally satisfied with the training.

While there is no indication that TFC was intentionally designed to appeal to whiteness,

there is certainly a concept of creating a somewhat neutral training space, and neutrality tends to

favor privilege. The attempt to make the training space one in which conflict is encouraged but

no side is lent explicit support might have an alienating effect among participants who are

disproportionately oppressed in other spheres of society. Indeed, Lakey’s emphasis on

mainstreams and margins shows that he is well aware that external power dynamics enter the

training space and power cannot be ignored or assumed away. While these inequalities would be

present no matter what a trainer attempts to do (remember our earlier discussion of the power of

the group), a trainer’s decision not to explicitly weigh in might make the margins feel that their

subordinate position is accepted, even as they are encouraged to engage in conflict and fight for

the position they desire.

A blank slate is not neutral, especially in cases where the facilitator is white or middle

class, as are most of the participants. As TFC acknowledges, trainers have substantial authority

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whether they choose to accept it or not. This partially explains an interesting pattern that

emerged during the interviews: younger trainers of color tended to view race in TFC as a smaller

problem, having to do with outside factors that impact recruitment. Older trainers and younger

white trainers talked about race as something that does play a role in the training space, and that

still needs to be wrestled with. A facilitator of color letting the margins fight for themselves

might be read very differently than a white trainer doing the same thing.

The focus on struggle within the training space finally offers a key for unlocking the

issue of why people of color, who are less likely to feel that the training space was designed for

people with backgrounds like their own and slightly less likely to be maximally satisfied, felt that

the tools they learned were valuable, use those tools often, and would recommend the training to

a friend. More importantly, it explains why people of color generally experienced more of a

change in their identification with empowering labels like organizer or leader, and

disproportionately reported that TFC increased their levels of engagement. In a space that is

built around supporting healthy struggle and teaching the tools that such struggle requires,

margins have every opportunity and every reason to fight for themselves and therefore more of a

chance to really practice what TFC is attempting to teach, making the training a more

transformative experience. TFC provides a space that, although no more ‘neutral’ than any other

space which does not explicitly fight for the rights of the margin, does make it clear at every

point that the margins are seen, respected, and supported if they should choose to fight for

themselves, even when the facilitator does not choose to fight for them.

This clarifies the question of how a training can be read as at least marginally alienating,

but at the same time is functionally empowering for participants of color: the facilitator generally

avoids challenging the mainstream’s power, but instead supports the margin in doing so. Here

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we see again how TFC deals with the essential puzzle that grew out of reinterpretations of

Freire’s work in the West: what is the role of the facilitator? Does she or he fight for the margins,

bringing them fully into the group but in the process running the risk of disempowering and

doing the work for them? Or does the facilitators support members of the margins in fighting for

themselves, empowering them to struggle, but by not emphasizing or defending their culture

occasionally making them feel that the pedagogy is not designed with them in mind. Each

possibility carries costs. While Choules solution is more effective at balancing power in the

space, and hypothetically might avoid a situation in which people of color are slightly less likely

to feel maximally satisfied or to feel that the training was designed for people like them, it would

be unlikely to have the same disproportionately transformative effect, which is based on

empowering margins.

So, does TFC practice Culturally Relevant Pedagogy? This question may be more

complex than a binary yes or no could do justice to. CRP’s central tenants are the encouragement

of excellence, individual connection with participants,31 and acknowledgement of students’

cultures in the classroom. To the extent that this final point requires an educational space to be

designed to compensate for broader social inequalities, such that no participant needs to struggle

in order to assert his or her own culture, TFC fails the test by not attempting to strip the

mainstream of its privilege at the door. But to the extent that acknowledging all participants’

cultures in the classroom can be seen in TFC’s implicit support for the margin’s struggle, and in

its creation of a container in which the margin is comfortable asserting, then yes, TFC does

31
Although the question of personal connection between participant and trainer has not been a
major focus in this work, in their assessments of the group many past participants remember how
connected they felt with the trainers. During the summer of 2012, I noticed that trainers tended
to spend almost every break in a training supporting individual participants. This connection is
certainly a central element of the group culture, if not explicitly outlined out as part of the
pedagogy itself.

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appear to fit the qualifications of CRP. It is up to individual participants and TFC leadership to

decide if the current balance is sufficient, in which all groups are empowered and appreciate the

training they receive, but some populations need to fight harder than others in order to have their

position secured in the group.

One obvious question arising out of this discussion is what – if anything – has changed

since Lakey stepped down from his position as Executive Director. Lakey’s personality and

insight shaped TFC for the first three quarters of its existence, and he was part of MNS when the

group disbanded – in part due to its lack of racial diversity. While Lakey was able to create a

curriculum that appealed to change-makers along multiple lines of difference, his successors,

first Hunter and Amador and now Amador alone, have continued in his footsteps while also

increasing the group’s outreach in communities of color and working class communities.

Almost all our discussion up until this point would predict that the pattern of cultural

identification discussed above would become less pronounced after 2008, since there is no

reason to think that the restructuring would affect TFC’s practice of supporting the margin in

challenging the mainstream, and seeing leaders of color should help people of color – if not

necessarily working class people – feel welcome in the space. Yet this is not the case. If

anything, the problem seems to have gotten worse after 2008. When the population is divided

into those who reported their first contact with TFC as having been after 2008 and those who

reported having had contact with it before, it is only among those who came into contact with the

group after 2008 that the question of workshop design and cultural intent becomes statistically

significant. This should not be read too far into, since the second group is much larger and

therefore what appears to be the same general pattern in each only has enough data-points to

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achieve significance in the second. The important point is that this problem does not appear to

be going away with time, and it may in fact be getting worse.

This is difficult to explain, and the limitations of our data may make it temporarily

beyond explanation. Leadership by people of color should reasonably be expected to at least

stabilize people of color’s identification with the pedagogy. A possible explanation can be found

in the peak-end effect, which, as originally explained by Kahneman, is essentially the idea that

over time individuals tend to remember the peak of an event (the most dramatic moment, or the

high point) and the event’s end. A widely recognized psychological pattern, the peak-end effect

might explain how generally satisfied participants from, say, 1995, might rate TFC highly on

almost every category, including whether the training was designed for people like them, simply

because the peaks are the memories that have lasted over the years, while more recent

participants have not had time for the occasional (and relatively small, based on my data) point

of cultural disconnect to fade from memory.

This seems to be born out in the rest of my data: although the differences are often not

statistically significant, when the broader population is divided into those who interacted with

TFC before 2008 and those who first met it after, the before population tends to rate TFC more

highly on a number of the quality indicators discussed above, for instance whether TFC helped

them reach their own goals.32 While this is a possible and largely benign explanation of why the

32
Of course, this pattern could just as easily be explained by assuming that the overall quality of
the group has fallen over the past years, and that therefore the differences between those who
interacted with TFC in the more distant past and those who worked with the group more recently
are based on a real change in quality. This is a serious possibility, but one that is made less
likely by the fact that, in the survey respondents’ long-form responses to questions about the
group’s weaknesses and room for growth, not a single respondent said anything about the
group’s quality declining. Numerous respondents reported having had prolonged exposure to the
group over the course of many years, and if the quality of the trainings had decreased during that
time I would expect to find some indication of it in their responses.

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estimations of TFC’s culturally specific design do not improve over the years, the real reason

may be much more complex. Only time will tell if this finding is a statistical artifact, a trick

memory plays on us, or a serious issue the group must find a way to address.

A second possibility has to do with the ambiguous phrasing of the question itself. The

question, a 1-5 Likert scale of agreement with the statement “The trainings I participated in

seemed like they were designed to be helpful for people with backgrounds like mine,” asks about

the trainings’ original design, not how it is being practiced today. Seeing that the group now has

leaders of color does not necessarily imply anything major about how the pedagogy was

originally intended. Lakey is well-known in many activist circles, and those who knew him as

the face of TFC might well have understood his own commitment to diversity, and projected that

onto the pedagogy’s original design. For those who first learned of the group after Lakey’s

retirement, it would be immediately evident that the pedagogy was older than Amador, and

therefore must have come from someone else. It is easy to learn that TFC was founded by a

white man, but slightly harder to discover that Lakey comes from a working class background,

has a biracial family, and is deeply committed to racial justice. To the extent that this question’s

wording reflects back on the pedagogy’s originator, it is reasonable that as familiarity with

Lakey fades so does the awareness that he designed direct education with all change-makers in

mind.

Numerous members of TFC have expressed an awareness that while the group’s

pedagogy is not explicitly biased in favor of any particular background or culture, navigating

questions of race and socioeconomic status continues to be an area of difficulty for the group.

Much of that has to do with structural impediments such as the unavailability of childcare, the

necessary cost of providing the trainings, or the fact that TFC is occasionally written off as a

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white Quaker group due to its ties with Lakey and therefore has little rapport with communities

of color. Yet I believe, based on the survey data and trainers’ first-hand accounts, that this has to

do with TFC’s particular approach to mainstream and margin dynamics, an approach that

emphasizes supporting the margin in its conflict with the mainstream, but not fighting its battles

for it.

It is unclear whether TFC’s approach necessitates this difference in how members of

societal margins and mainstreams relate to the pedagogy. The fact that this effect has not

disappeared and may in fact have increased since leadership changed hands in 2007-2008 seems

to imply that it is here to stay. In the final analysis, TFC will need to decide if the findings above

are ones that they feel comfortable with. Yet participants’ almost uniformly high regard for

TFC’s work is encouraging, as is the fact that TFC tends to disproportionately increase people of

color’s levels of participation and identification with empowering identity markers.

TFC clearly still has work to do around making itself accessible across lines of race and

class. Yet as reluctant as I am to make a pronouncement such as this in light of the modest but

statistically significant difference between how racial and socioeconomic mainstreams and

margins think about the pedagogy’s original aim, if that work is largely structural instead of

pedagogical, TFC remains valuable and important to the development of modern activism and

participation. There is always room for improvement, but not only is TFC increasing activism

skills across the board, it also appears to decrease the racial participation gap and have modest

compensatory effects in terms of existing discrepancies between how people of color and whites

self-identify as change makers.

TFC’s past is complex, as are its challenges. Its continued vulnerability is apparent in the

fact that it almost dissolved upon Lakey’s retirement. But the dedication and passion of both the

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trainers and the participants have continued to make it an important contributor to modern

activism development. Through its prioritization of empowerment, transformation, and social

justice work TFC has navigated and continues to navigate a complex and occasionally rocky trail

through some of the most central questions that exist in the field of activism training, especially

the question of respect for participants’ own cultures and the role of the facilitator.

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Conclusion

“The strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.” – Walt Whitman

The research presented above has shown that power can be learned, and that the struggle

for democracy can be supported as skillfully as it must be waged. It has begun to answer a

number of important questions about activism training, yet in the process it has raised many

more. In order to examine how activism training operates in practice, I chose to study Training

for Change, an organization committed to training activists and raising their capacity to carry out

social change: I did this through a mixed methods approach employing participant observation,

interviews, and surveys of TFC participants. My data indicate that TFC does in fact increase

efficacy, and does so in a way that disproportionately effects people of color. Based on my

interpretation, this may come at the expense of marginally alienating people of color within the

training space, by creating a safe space in which they are invited to advocate for themselves but

the trainer does not generally advocate on their behalf.

In chapter one, I led us through a survey of major democratic theories on participation.

While civic engagement is generally a public good, it is also important to remember that

participation can weaken rather than support civil society when it is used to perpetuate social

cleavages and unequal power structures. Participation is also unequally distributed in favor of

the most privileged members of society, who disproportionately tend to have their voices heard

and interests accommodated. Consequently, we should be careful in the types of participation

we endorse.

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Given the types of work in which TFC participants engage (a full 46.6% of respondents

report that they work on issues of racial justice, followed by local community issues and

environmental issues respectively) we can say that TFC not only brings different types of

activists together but that the organization generally works with activists who understand the

importance of bridging as well as bonding capital. My data on change-maker identities (e.g.

activist, organizer, and leader) show that TFC increases individuals’ identification with social

change identities while also increasing the frequency and intensity with which participants

engage with their chosen issue. Perhaps most importantly, TFC avoids criticisms aimed at other

well-known skill-building institutions in that it does not contribute to broader social inequalities

in participation. In fact it has the opposite effect, disproportionately increasing people of color’s

frequency and intensity of engagement, as well as their identification with terms like leader and

organizer. Within the framework of democratic theory, TFC appears to be a salutary

organization, furthering participants’ abilities to fight for democracy’s most radical implications.

My discussion in chapter 2 of the theory surrounding education for empowerment helped

shape my interpretation of TFC’s work. TFC has had a complex relationship with questions of

authority within the classroom. Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed asserts the central

importance of the student-teacher relationship – a relationship which Freire hopes to dissolve

into one based on a generative equality, in which the oppressor and the oppressed are jointly

liberated. While the importance of Freire’s work and insight has only grown with time, I

discussed how it must be adapted to fit a contemporary Western context, where the distinctions

between oppressor and oppressed often blur and where participants who carry oppressive

identities are often reluctant to engage with the reality of their position.

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Choules recommends that the facilitator be willing to assert his or her power within the

classroom, in order to support the margin in its struggle to be heard by the mainstream. On one

hand, TFC’s “direct education” breaks with Freire’s popular education by asserting the authority

of the facilitator, allowing the trainer’s implicit power to be made explicit. Hunter, a training

elder at TFC,views this as a necessary acknowledgement, honoring and channeling the power of

the group while also creating space for participants to practice challenging authority. Yet, TFC’s

use of facilitator power is very different than what Choules advocates: while TFC holds a space

for the margins and supports its struggle, the group’s trainers do not attempt to obscure the

privileges that participants bring into the room, nor do they actively attempt to stifle those

privileges when they become apparent. Instead TFC views itself as a conflict-positive group,

providing a safe space for struggle and developing skills that ideally help margins fight for

themselves. This might explain why, while participants of color speak just as positively about

the group as white non-Hispanic participants and tend to be more affected by the training in

terms of changes in identity and involvement, they are less likely to feel that the training was

designed for people like them and slightly less likely to say that they were maximally satisfied

with the group. By not orienting itself against the room’s mainstream, TFC fails to create a

neutral space, but in creating a safe and empowering space for struggle, it is more transformative

for its marginal members.

Depending on our interpretation of the term, this tradeoff may or may not qualify TFC as

“culturally relevant:” the group does not attempt to ensure that all cultures are equally

represented in the classroom, but it does make space for them to flourish if they do come

forward. The choice between prioritizing comfort or empowerment is a complex one, and there

are certainly cases in which either approach might be necessary (TFC recognizes this, and

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attempts to avoid dogmatic universalities in its approach). In an important sense, the results

speak for themselves: TFC increases equality in voice, is highly regarded by its participants, and

increases both frequency and intensity of participation among all participant sub-populations.

There are certainly ways in which the group can improve its accessibility and impact within

underprivileged communities by eliminating structural constrains, such as unavailability of

childcare at trainings or training schedules that do not fit well with working class time

constraints. However, TFC appears to have a positive impact on the communities it serves.

While the group is marked by its own particular idiosyncrasies and struggles, I believe that it

deserves our support. Given its ability to increase participation while also addressing inequality,

our democracy would benefit from more groups like it.

So, where does training for empowerment go from here? For TFC, the answer remains

unclear. The group continues to grow and intends to add another staff position within the year.

This upcoming summer, along with its flagship Super-T, TFC will conduct a major series of

trainings with 350.org. The website and all materials are now available in Spanish, and the

availability of scholarships remains an important and shared group priority. TFC is evolving,

and differences of opinion within the group persist about which priorities should be emphasized

going forward even as there is a stable consensus about the mission and goals of the

organization.

I hope that in studying this group and others like it, future researchers can take up where

I have left off. In the interest of facilitating that process, I offer a few far from exhaustive

suggestions for further research. While some of these emerge from the limitations of my data

and other research constraints, others suggest that the study of adult education for empowerment

has the potential for enormous growth.

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First, longitudinal data would have allowed me to determine exactly how active training

participants were before and after their experiences with TFC, instead of relying on participants’

retroactive estimations of the trainings’ effects. Longitudinal data would also have allowed me

to develop a more complex analysis of identity formation in the training space, which in itself is

an interesting area for future investigation. A follow-up study that included longitudinal data

would increase the precision with which these topics could be analyzed.

During the course of my research, I discovered a number of interesting trends that

unfortunately fell outside the scope of my study. A number of these would benefit from closer

examination, especially since my own primary focus was on questions of race and class, and

researchers with stronger statistical skills may be able to reveal more complex relationships than

I was able to discern. For example, further research might examine some of my secondary

findings on gender: while men disproportionately increase the frequency with which they attend

meetings after participating in TFC trainings, for the ‘organizer,’ ‘educator,’ ‘activist,’ and

‘advocate’ identities, TFC is significantly more transformative for women than for men.

The most important question for further research may be to what extent can TFC be

understood as representative of how adult education for empowerment operates in general. In

many ways, Training for Change is a best-case scenario in terms of activism training: the trainers

are uniformly dedicated to their work and passionate about access, privilege, voice, and the

creation of meaningful social change. TFC is among the most highly regarded activism training

and training-of-trainer groups in the country, and it may be inaccurate to assume that other

groups operate at its same level. It is interesting and important that activism training can be done

as effectively as it is through TFC, while also actively addressing questions of inequality; indeed,

the main value of case studies such as this is that they show us what is possible while also

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identifying some of the constraints that make theory and reality diverge. Yet, we need more

data, and our next step should be to look at other groups, both those that operate similarly to TFC

and those that use different approaches, to see whether they have similar effects.

There are a number of groups that would be appropriate as secondary case studies,

including the Ruckus Society, which focuses on training in direct action techniques, and Turning

the Tide, a UK based activism training group. Ruckus’ work focuses on a narrow branch of

activism – direct action. An analysis of its demography and effects would shed light on whether

my emphasis on participation in the broadest sense (since TFC trainings range from

transformational group work to direct action to antiracism activism, with a particular emphasis

on training trainers across all subject areas) obscures more subtle variation in who enters the

training space and what they get out of it.

An investigation of the UK’s Turning the Tide, which shares TFC’s Quaker roots and has

been inspired by direct education, would begin to answer another major question: how does

activism training function in societies other than our own? What are the external or

environmental factors that shape educational programs and their reception? While TFC does

have international components,33 the trainers themselves are all from the United States (with the

exception of one Canadian), and they interact almost exclusively with American institutions

through their activism. How do activists develop skills in countries or regions where explicit

activism trainings would not be allowed by a repressive government? While activism itself is

practically universal, the tools it requires and the ways in which those tools are developed may

be highly dependent on the local culture. How do these variations affect who is trained and what

participants take away?

33
Remember that Lakey was inspired by his travels in Northern Europe and by Freire’s work in
Brazil, and that participants regularly travel from around the world to attend TFC’s trainings.

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It is tempting to push forward without pausing to take stock of how far we have come, yet

the implications of what we have learned about TFC are dramatic. While democratic theorists

eagerly extol the virtues of participation, I found no discussion within mainstream democratic

theory of how participation could be actively rather than passively developed. That there is

already at least one group (and potentially many more) successfully working to increase

participation in a way that counteracts broader inequalities should not be understated. It shows

us that power can be learned.

At the beginning of this work, I said that the beauty of democracy is that it implies a

better world. TFC and groups like it are radical in the truest sense: they nurture the roots of the

world we are attempting to create. This new world is built on skilled struggle, equality, empathy

and empowerment. It is not a political position but praxis, and in this sense may never be fully

realized. Training for Change, in however great or small a way, helps develop the tools we need

to move forward. For this it deserves all the support that we as a society can provide.

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Appendix A: Survey Questions

Question Response Options:

Gender: Male, Female, Other: Please Specify [write in]

Age: Under 18, 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, 65 and
Over
I Identify as: Native American or Alaska Native, Asian, Native
Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, African
American or Black, Caucasian or White, Other:
Please Specify [write in]
Do you Identify as Hispanic, Latino, or of Yes, No
Spanish Origin?
What is your highest level of formal No High School Degree, High School Degree, In
education? College, Associate Degree, Bachelors Degree,
Advanced Degree
What type of work are you involved in? Environmental, Labor, Housing, LGBTQ Rights,
Healthcare, Homeless Rights, Racial Justice,
Political Campaign, Local Community Issues, Other
How many Training for Change trainings have [number entry]
you participated in?
What year(s) did you participate in these [write in]
workshops?
What was the name of the training or trainings [write in]
you participated in?
Please select any descriptors that apply to you, (Does the descriptor (Did it apply before your
and if they applied before your experience apply) experience with TFC)
with TFC:
Activist Yes, No Yes, No response
Educator Yes, No Yes, No response
Organizer Yes, No Yes, No response
Advocate Yes, No Yes, No response
Leader Yes, No Yes, No response
Radical Yes, No Yes, No response
Approximately how many hours per month do [write in]*
you work or volunteer with an organization
involved in advocacy or community issues?
Did your experiences with TFC raise, lower, Raise, Lower, No Effect
or have no effect on that number?
Approximately how many times in a year do [write in]*
you attend a meeting around a issue you're
involved in?
Did your experiences with TFC raise, lower, Raise, Lower, No Effect
or have no effect on that number?
How many times in a year are you involved in [write in]*
facilitating a meeting around an issue you're
involved in?

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Did your experiences with TFC raise, lower, Raise, Lower, No Effect
or have no effect on that number?
How else are you involved? [write in]
If you want to explain any of your answers [write in]
above, please feel free to do so here.
Please answer the following questions on a scale of 1-10, with 1 meaning you strongly disagree and
10 meaning you strongly agree.
The training(s) I participated in helped me 1-10 Likert Scale (later adapted to 1-5)
reach my own personal goals.
The training(s) increased my own 1-10 Likert Scale (later adapted to 1-5)
effectiveness in the settings I work in.
The training(s) I participated in seemed like 1-10 Likert Scale (later adapted to 1-5)
they were designed to be helpful for people
with backgrounds like mine.
I am satisfied with the experiences I had with 1-10 Likert Scale (later adapted to 1-5)
Training for Change.
Which tools or skills you developed in the [write in]
training have you used since?
How often have you used the skills you Very often, Sometimes, Once or Twice, Never
learned in the trainings?
What is your most positive memory about the [write in]
training(s) you participated in?
What is your most negative memory about the [write in]
training(s) you participated in?
Were there any elements or particular [write in]
moments during the training(s) that made you
feel uncomfortable? What were they?
Training for Change's mission is to "develop Yes, No
high-quality skills (and tools) for training
with/among change agents/activists." In your
experience, is Training for Change achieving
that goal?
Can you think of any changes to Training for [write in]
Change runs that might help it reach more
people or serve communities better?
Would you recommend a Training for Change [write in]
training to a friend? Why or why not?
If you wish to be entered in a raffle for a $50 [write in]
Amazon gift certificate, please leave your
email here. It will not be used for anything
other than the raffle.
*Although some of the write-in responses for these questions were intelligible, many consisted of vague
answers like “oh, fairly often” or “not as much now that I have children.” I was not able to analyze these
results, which is a failure of my survey design.

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Appendix B: Interview Template

Although interviews will not be entirely structured, the outline below provides a framework to
ensure that the important questions are covered in each interview. Not all questions will be
asked in each interview, and some individuals will be asked questions that only pertain to their
own work and position within the group.

Introductions
• Can you tell me a bit about your relationship with Training for Change?
• When did you first get involved?
• What is your current role?
• Why are you interested in this type of work?
•
Theoretical Foundations
• What do you see as the theory behind the TFC?
• How was that theory shaped?
• Has it changed over time?
• Are there any theorists that you think are particularly relevant to the work TFC does?
• What do you see as the goals of TFC?
• Do you feel like everyone in the organization is on the same page about the goals of the
group?

Practical Elements
• What do you see TFC’s strengths and weaknesses to be?
• Do you have any concerns about the way the organization operates?
• What are your favorite and least favorite things about working with TFC?
• How do you think about diversity in the group, particularly with respect to race and
class?
• Can you remember any particular moments you feel exemplify what TFC is trying to do?
• What about any uncomfortable or difficult moments?
• What do you think TFC’s effects have been?
• Where do you see TFC going in the future?
• Is there anything else I should know?

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