D'Arcy Martin has been involved in community and union education for more than 20 years, most recently with the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union. He is a founding member of the OFL and CLC training Committees, the Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts, and the Ontario Workers Arts and Heritage Centre. D' Arcy continues to contribute to national adult education organizations such as CAAE and CANDLE as an active committee member. In addition to working in union and community education he teaches graduate courses at OISE.
Martin is author of Thinking Union: Activism and Education in Canada's Labour Movement; and co-author of the Doris Marshall Institute publication, Educating for a Change.
D'Arcy Martin was interviewed by Bruce Spencer, Athabasca University Professor of Labour Relations.
Martin on
teaching workers to talk back and question authority.
Aurora: You've worked for almost 20 years as a labour educator inside the union movement. What was that experience like?
Martin: My younger daughter describes my work as teaching workers how to talk back. There's a role for educators, both inside and outside formal institutions, to encourage people to question authority, including, I'm afraid, our own authority as educators. That's the work that I've tried to do, to offer a problem-posing kind of education inside a social movement.
What is ''problem-posing'' education? Instead of a kind of ''banking education'' where educators assume that learners are empty vessels in which to deposit and withdraw information, we see learners as whole people, bringing their own experience and knowledge and unevenness and contradictory thinking into the encounter of learning. When we do that as educators, we have to humanize ourselves and meet people half way. I've found to be a wonderful source of personal challenge and renewal over the past two decades.
When I first made the choice
to work inside the labour movement, as a 30-year-old progressive educator
with community experience, I wanted to see how a problem-posing approach
could be extended into the workplace.
I had the great luck to be hired into the steelworkers union where problem-posing education became a tool for putting the ``movement'' back into the labour movement. Members saw their union as a vehicle for individual and collective learning.
When you work in a social movement instead of in the establishment, you deal with limited resources. You deal with a kind of catch-as-catch-can climate that can be frustrating at times for anybody with professional training. But the passion and selflessness that I have found inside the movement have made up for its limitations and have repaid a thousand times whatever efforts I may have put in.
Aurora: You give a sense of becoming a labour educator as a seamless move from community education. But surely many people involved in labour education don't have a popular educator perspective. What are the constraints of a labour educator versus a popular educator working in the community?
Martin: For generations the labour movement has operated from the perspective that in unity is strength: ``United we stand, divided we fall.'' This is a legitimate and necessary reminder to workers that when you take a stand with management, it's only by collective and unified action that you have any weight.
The difficulty is that unity becomes the only note that some labour leaders can strum. That's a very boring tune in a complex society. Many times over these two decades, there have been situations where elected leaders, other staff, and local activists have wanted to unify everyone and pull them in behind a prefabricated line. The times of crisis when that is truly necessary are rare.
At this point in late capitalism in advanced countries like Canada, divisions are not manufactured by opening up conversation. They just surface. They're there. Men and women think differently. Different age groups think differently. Different cultures and abilities and sexual orientations and political histories all play into this.
Martin: One key role of the labour educator is to create a safe place for those differences to arise and be processed. In this way, unity will be the result of negotiation and listening, rather than the result of imposition. Have people disagreed with me on that? Absolutely, and fiercely, and they continue to do so. But certainly the space for a more dialogue-based rather than imposition-based approach has grown enormously over these two decades within the Canadian labour movement.
Aurora: As a popular educator, you've been able to use discussion group techniques that we might describe as Freirian (i.e. following the methodology developed by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire), beginning with the experience of individuals in the classroom and moving to developing solutions. Sometimes solutions that students come to are those that may well contradict union policies. How do you deal with that?
Martin: We're in a society where it's been exhaustively documented that people are time poor, and so their opportunities for reflective thinking in a nonconfrontational climate are limited.
We create a climate where people are encouraged to linger on the reflective moment rather than rush into solutions. Sometimes, I have to say, ''As we carry this conversation towards action, I have a responsibility to inform you where your individual local, your affiliate, or the labour movement as a whole is heading on this issue.'' That becomes part of the input into the discussion and may involve high tension.
At this point, as an educator, I may have to take sides with union policy over the views of participants. However, most of the time, the educator is a minor player, in terms of the political dynamics of the labour movement. It's the elected people who legitimately and correctly have the political clout. Those people are going to fight it out as they choose to, both in the course and in the decision making. The role of the educator is largely to complicate people's thinking.
Aurora: Over the past 15 years, there's been a successful move inside union education to loosen up, with more varied or experientially based approaches. What are you most proud of in terms of the way you've changed or developed aspects of labour education?
Martin: One recent example is a course developed with my friend Jorge Garcia-Orgales, called Union Judo. It is really a course in strategic thinking.
In judo you don't stand back from your adversary. You look at and touch your adversary. You deal directly in a physical way. At the point when an adversary of greater strength and power begins to move, you use that momentum to bring them down to your level. That's the logic behind the term Union Judo. It's an image that is tactile and visual. Many working class peope learn visually, as I do. If we can't picture something, we can't make sense of it. So Union Judo brings a picture.
Dorothy Wigmore and I have developed an activity called Workplace Mapping, where people draw their work area on an overhead transparency. Then they layer another overhead on top and draw who is in the work area and the social patterns among them. Yet another layer shows the flows of information that come in about management and about the union. This visual activity encourages people to step back from their immersion in the workplace culture and to look at it with a bit of critical reflective distance. The depth of workplace knowledge that people bring in is celebrated in an activity like that.
The job of the educator is to mobilize that knowledge and to focus it towards the possibilities of collective action, because, after all, the purpose of labour education, like all progressive education, is not just to study the world, but to change it.
Aurora: Staying with that thought about creating visual images, how do you link that work inside the classroom with work outside, such as the Mayworks Festival of Working People in the Arts?
Martin: In about 1985, we became aware of an annual May Fest in Glasgow, Scotland, involving thousands of working people and theatre artists from all over the world.
Our 12-year-old Toronto initiative, while more modest, is an annual festival for five to ten days in early May, called Mayworks, that brings together labour-positive artists, who are a minority in their community, and arts-positive unionists, who are a minority in their community. Bringing these two minorities together creates a chemistry and a creative dialogue.
We now have an annual set of Artist in the Workplace projects where professional artists work inside unions to produce a sculpture, a song, a play, a quilt, a banner. Those products then become part of the life of that union.
A few years back we looked for a physical location in Ontario where some of this work could be headquartered. We took over the Custom House, the oldest public building in Hamilton, Ontario, and converted it into the Ontario Workers Arts and Heritage Centre. It showcases the creative spirit of workers over the years. The current exhibit is one on union banners from International Women's Day, May Day, and Labour Day.
We expect the next one to be highly controversial. It'll be called ''Booze: Alcohol and the Working Class.'' It's an exhibit on the role of alcohol in the lives of workers, picking up on both the pub culture and the temperance movement, two parts of the heritage that working people have in North America.
We've already got sponsorship from unionized bartenders, brewers, distillers—all the people who work along the production and consumption chain of alcohol. This will attract a group of workers who would never normally go into a museum, and who will find, when they come into this exhibit, some of their own experience reflected.
When you respect the experience of working people and build on it, creative possibilities emerge that are almost endless. You have to take care of yourself and keep your balance, because the organizational and financial capacity of unions is limited.
Aurora: We tend to think of Freire and the popular education movement as the basis for a lot of this work. But we can find other sources, particularly in Canada. As you were speaking about broadening out and connecting with workers who are interested in art, I was thinking of Coady's argument (Moses Coady) that education is not just about the economy. Working people have to ''live a life'' as well. It's the living of life that captures the mood of what you're describing in Mayworks. It's celebrating people's culture and recognizing they have a life outside the economy.
Martin: That lovely line in the song that ''Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses'' makes a powerful point. Many people in English Canada are materially comfortable, but emotionally, spiritually, and politically impoverished.
We need to address the totality of people instead of just a narrow band. Addressing that wider perspective brings energy and renewal into the labour movement; it is a strategic focus. You can't beat only the drum of material comfort. In between the times of emergency, you can't sustain a social movement on that one narrow band.
Aurora: Your book Thinking Union: Activism and Education in Canada's Labour Movement is different from many texts on workers' education, because it doesn't just focus on educating the member for a narrow function within the union and discuss techniques to achieve that. It takes a broad approach to thinking about the union culture. Is your description of union culture in Thinking Union similar to labour movements elsewhere, or is it specifically a Canadian experience?
Martin: When I bump into labour educators from other countries, there's an immediate connection. Once you have moved in your workplace into a position of representing fellow workers, and you have overcome the fear of the employer that is involved in that step, you become a certain kind of person. Sometimes this distances you from fellow employees, and sometimes it creates difficulty in your home and community. But you've taken a step forward and, in doing that, you have something in common with people around the world.
I've worked in other continents, and I've found that regardless of barriers of language, race, or gender, there is an instinctive knowing about collective strength. There is a common experience that by embodying that collective strength, you can grow as a person and make a grain of difference in the broad sweep of political economy. That experience crosses borders and draws union-active people together. The union bureaucrats have a lot in common across cultures as well, but they're a different breed.
Aurora: I should point out to readers that D'Arcy is fluent in at least four languages used on this continent. I'm not sure how your Inuktitut is?
Martin: I'm very sorry I don't speak any aboriginal languages. I reached age 20 as a WASP kid from Hamilton believing that I couldn't speak any language but English. I'd had the bad experience in high school where the focus in French was not to communicate, but to conjugate correctly.
When I began to hitchhike in Mexico and had to learn Spanish to survive, I realized as an adult the power of language to open doors and new ways of thinking. I became fascinated. I've only picked up French, Spanish, and Portuguese, but in many parts of the world, people speak five or six radically different languages. And I'm talking about people who haven't finished grade six, who are working in restaurants or on the street.
It's a great shame that in Canada learning other languages has become a basis for political posturing, instead of a source of richness.
Aurora: It certainly aids in your task of trying to unite popular educators in North and South America. We've seen some evidence of this in the popular educators movement, and also more recently in union education, at the Educ-Action conference in Toronto. That conference was a great step forward in terms of just bringing people in. How did you feel about that, as somebody who has worked to unite labour educators?
Martin: When I first heard that a meeting was being planned for people who educate workers, I thought there might be a hundred people. They had to close the doors when it went over 400. These were kindred spirits, hungry to compare notes and pick up inspiration from one another. We saw the extent to which, however different the context may be, there are common themes; it was magic. In the North American free trade agreement the elites communicate freely. The grass roots, individually and organizationally, have blocks placed in the way. We lack the airfare, the computers, the translators (in a word, the cash) needed for ongoing international solidarity. So occasions like the Educ-Action conference are to be treasured.
I once led a small study tour of English Canadian and Quebecois union activists to Mexico. A number of prejudices were broken by the experience of sitting and talking with union-active people in Mexico. It was amazing. Some participants had stereotypes of Mexico from tourist brochures and John Wayne movies. They came back with a deep respect. For a number of those people, although it was a relatively brief experience, it changed them for life.
Certainly for me, the start of my critical learning was in Canada. But what deepened and anchored it was experience travelling in Latin America. It was exposure to the ideas and music of people like the Brazilian Paulo Freire, the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano, and the magnificent Argentinian singer, Mercedes Sosa. These are glorious voices in an age of shrinking dreams. For the Canadian workers movement to see Latin America only as a source of cheap labour and a threat would be a tragically missed opportunity.
Aurora: Although we are trying to weld connections internationally, we also have to work in our own communities and at the base. What I liked about Educating for a Change was that it provided practical guidance, but it also provided critical analysis. It's not a simple or a simplistic book. Has anything changed in the way you approach the issues?
Martin: I hope we've learned some things since 1991. That book brought five of us together who had been in community and workplace environments trying to do critical and problem-posing educational work with adults, to share what we had learned in the 1980s. I look forward to getting together with a number of people very shortly, and writing what we are learning during the '90s.
Educating for a Change brought an awareness of international education (particularly in Southern Africa and Central America), anti-racist education (particularly in southern Ontario), and labour education. The book represents a dialogue among those three currents of experience and an attempt to draw together some of the craft that is required for real democratic practice by adult educators.
Sometimes people think that when a conversation is well led or well animated it must be a fluke. But I think a good workshop is no more a fluke than a good lecture. The amount of preparation and process design required for a good workshop is greater than that required for a lecture because you have to work in stereo.
You have to work not only in the content but also in the process. That is a challenge to craft, to rigour, to stamina. Caring is required to animate this work, and then craft to carry you from good intentions to real effect. That's my trade. That's the trade of the kindred spirits I've referred to. We're distributed in communities, in the labour movement, and in the academy.
A couple of weeks ago, when a graduate student realized that I was one of the authors of the book, she said spontaneously, ''It's such a practical piece of work. It's very demanding, but also very forgiving.'' I was thrilled. We have to challenge each other, but we also have to#&151dare I say it#&151express some love for one another. To sustain a spirit of opposition when society tries to persuade you that you're a loser and that your attempts to realize a dream are illusory, you have to be nourished at other levels than just good critical cerebral exchange.
Aurora: I really like the book's sensitive discussion around racism and anti-racism teaching because it doesn't present it simply as, ''This is what you do and this is the result you'll get.'' You discuss the deep-seated issues people are going to face. That kind of approach is different from something I would call simplistic Freirianism where you go in the classroom and say, ''What's your experience?'' And you then facilitate without some thought about the issues and problems you're raising. How do you react to that?
Martin: I think that's North American liberalism, certainly a misreading of Paulo Freire. In computer lingo they say ''garbage in; garbage out.'' Popular education accepts that we all start with some garbage in our thinking, which can include racist stereotypes and other blind spots. The process of critical dialogue is meant to refine, sharpen, and transcend some of that garbage we bring in. We start with common sense and aspire to good sense. That's human; it's something computers can't do.
That's the way Gramsci talked about it years ago, and it's the way popular educators who are accountable have to operate. To simply facilitate and move the garbage around is to evade your responsibility for intellectual leadership. That's what education is. To exercise that leadership in a responsible way doesn't mean ramming ideas down people's throats or arguing with people, but it does require sensitive and focused ability to draw people in and challenge them to move from common sense to good sense.
I've never thought that a facilitator was a neutral role. Many facilitators have given the trade a bad name by claiming neutrality. If there was one term that rang clear in Paulo Freire's writing, it was ''There is no neutral education.'' It will come to taking sides—on issues in the classroom, on issues in the world. That'll be demanding; it requires nerve sometimes. But it' much more rewarding than a kind of sterilized circulating of concepts and a building of individual skill for manipulating words.
Aurora: That connects with another concern I've always had as a labour educator. It's a fear of being locked into a workplace perspective. People can use the workplace as a starting point and learn from that experience, but they also need to connect it to the outside world. Do you want to react to that at all?
Martin: The educator can model his connection, and if you have whole people in a workshop and you provide conditions for them to exchange some of who they are, it simply comes out. I ask, ''What has happened in the last week that affects the way you approach this seminar today? You are not required to answer, but if you do, don't talk for more than three minutes.''
People are very self-disciplined. They speak about things that have happened to them, not just in their work, but in their homes, community, families. They speak about something they've read that is completely unrelated to the course but triggered an idea for them; something they've seen on television; an experience they had moving house that taught them something about the change in context from one residence to another. These are almost universal experiences that are not limited to the workplace.
You have to open the door for that totality to be brought into the conversation, and then you have to keep the focus so that you don't discard or ignore the legitimate focus on the workplace, but you never do it in isolation. It's the same person that walks into work and, somewhat changed, walks out from work at the end of the day. Most people know that community and workplace are directly linked in their own lives, and spontaneously distrust any Marxian or other framework that prioritizes work over other aspects of life.
Aurora: You were saying before we started this interview that the unifying theme here is a notion of people becoming active participants in civil society. Would you like to come back to that thought?
Martin: We're in a time when the market is the triumphing. The push for market-based solutions, the idea that the corporate sector will resolve all our problems, has put us into a fairly sterile political debate between the public sector and the private sector. I've spent most of my life in the third sector—the social sector. This is the part of civil society operating in people's communities and work, where people gather voluntarily. They build neighbourhoods, families, unions, and other networks. This is the source. This is the ocean on which the market floats.
For us to put forward only state-ist responses to the current corporate bandwagon is to miss the richness of what people are already engaged in. The spiritual and creative leadership for the next wave is likely to emerge, not from validation by the media of Conrad Black, but from validation of ourselves and our work. I'd be surprised if it emerged from the corporate office towers.
While I hope social renewal can be reflected in government, I don't look to government as the source. I really do believe that we need to go to the arts, to surprise, to cartoons, to the ways that we can shake up the received wisdom to constitute something new. It's from the civil society, in that third sector, that the real motors of tomorrow will come.
Recently a man named "Betinho" died in Brazil. Herbert Jose de Souza, or Betinho, came as an exile to Canada in the 1970s. By the time he died, he was a Ghandian figure in Brazil: a hemophiliac weighing 92 pounds, who mobilized enormous affection and support. Over 10 percent of that massive country belonged to voluntary associations inspired by Betinho, with no centralized bureaucracy to run them. A national campaign against hunger and misery, started by one visionary person and sustained on a voluntary basis by an enormous wave of people, ultimately was able to hold military, corporate, and political leaders at bay while moving an alternative vision forward.
That's not to say that Brazil is in better shape than Canada. I don't think it is. But there are many examples of such visionary leadership in civil society. That's where I look for hope and sustenance for the generations ahead. One of the many things we've learned from listening to aboriginal people in this country is to think of six generations ahead. When I try to think six generations ahead, don't look for my models to the Canadian banks.
Aurora: So many adult educators have been sucked into educating for a livelihood, rather than educating for life. Educating for livelihood centres on corporate training and the learning organization, and it's a very narrow view of the world. It denies the notion of a civil society in which people can participate as equal citizens. Yet there was a different vision in adult education in Canada. What steps do we need to take to recapture that vision and to mold it into a new vision more appropriate for the 21st century?
Martin: For a start, we need some economic justice. The gap between rich and poor in Canada is widening daily. People have a legitimate right to want to earn a living. One thing that working in the labour movement gives you is a sense that self-interest and the material push is legitimate. It's not a bad start, but it is only a start.
The labour movement embodies a collective enlightened self-interest of working people. This may seem a bit cryptic. Let me exand. The labour movement is:
Adult education contains a component of learning for its own sake, for the surprise and playfulness and creativity it can bring. Of course we need to develop skills to stay productive and contribute materially to the society and to our own immediate community. We also need to develop subtle, delicate skills of community building. That's the underdeveloped part of Canada at this time.
My sense about the next decade is that it's the time of building communities that facilitate economic and spiritual survival. I think those potentials are already emerging and we just need to keep watering them and protecting them from the desert winds of the corporate sector.
Aurora: One of the criticisms that has been made about using new technology as a teaching tool is that it undermines the collective and the community. At Athabasca University, we believe we can actually turn that around. Do you see any role for new technology and distance education in building community and as an aid within labour education?
Martin: As we speak, I have a little book in front of me called Working Together On-Line, produced by Web Networks in Toronto, the only unionized Internet service provider in the country. I believe that the new communications technologies have the potential for community building. In fact, for humanists to abandon that technology to the right would be a tragic mistake. I've promoted Athabasca University's work publicly and will continue to do so.
If those communication technologies only bind elites together, we're in big trouble. They don't only increase the speed of interaction, they change the quality of interaction. Why should we be so afraid of that? Certainly, there are parts of it that can individualize. But I've been lonely in a crowd, and many of us have been lonely at times in what may appear as close-knit families.
We shouldn't romanticize the types of community that have existed and vilify an emerging set of interactions because we don't fully understand them. We should build on memory, but not on nostalgia. We should move forward with all the tools at hand.
Karl Marx said that the dominant ideas of every epoch are the ideas of the dominant class. Thus, the dominant technologies of every epoch are also the technologies of the dominant class. They're much too important to leave only to the dominant class to use. We should do everything we can to wrest some control and to reshape those tools to build community instead of competitive isolation.
D'Arcy Martin's keynote address to the CAAE.
A note on Labour Education by Bruce Spencer.
Arnold, Rick, B. Burke, C. James, D'Arcy Martin, and B. Thomas. Educating for a Change. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1991.
Martin, D'Arcy. Thinking Union: Activism and Education in Canada's Labour Movement. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1995.
The Purposes of Adult Education by Bruce Spencer, Thompson Press.
Foundations of Adult Education in Canada (Second Edition) by Selman, Cooke, Selman, and Dampier, Thompson Press.
Aurora Online
Citation Format
Bruce Spencer (1998) An Interview with D’Arcy Martin, Aurora Online