PTO 2011 Conference Workshops
Pre-Conference and Post-Conference Workshops
Pre-Conference Workshop (3 days)
Beyond "Silly Games:" Popular Education as a Methodology for Political Education, Leadership Development, Grassroots Organizing, and Movement Building
Workshop Facilitator: Francisco "Pancho" Argüelles Paz y Puente
Based on their organizing experiences and contexts, participants at this workshop will share, learn and practice concrete popular education exercises (dinámicas) and explore how to use this methodology in their organizing processes to build local power, develop community leaders, win policy victories, and strengthen a popular movement for liberation and structural change. Participants will practice how to ground their organizing efforts in their local context and personal experiences through dialogue. We will also explore the use of popular education for political education purposes: a participatory process to analyze power and privilege, understanding the system and our place in it in order to change it. Facilitator Pancho Argüelles is Co-director of Colectivo Flatlander, a small organization that helps build a stronger popular movement for social, economic, and racial justice in the South and Southwest of the United States. Colectivo was founded in 2002 by immigrant and Chicano organizers who sought to provide grassroots immigrant rights groups and organizers with tools, political analysis, training opportunities and spaces for dialogue that modeled popular education principles.
The workshop will be bilingual; participants can choose to participate in English or Spanish. There will be simultaneous translation available.
Monday, July 18 - Wednesday, July 20 (12:00 - 5:00 p.m.)
Cost: $300 US per person
About the Facilitator
Francisco "Pancho" Argüelles Paz y Puente
Pancho was born in Mexico City and has lived in the US since 1997. He began working in popular education in 1983 in Chiapas as a rural teacher. He studied Pedagogy and was part of the student movement in UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico). He later worked with Guatemalan Refugees in Chiapas; with Campesinos in Nicaragua (was coordinator of the team that started the Universidad Campesina in Esteli Nicaragua, training promotores in sustainable agriculture); went back to Mexico and coordinated a research collective on Poverty and Environment; and from 1994-1996, coordinated "Caminemos Juntos" a rural development project in the mountains of Central Mexico and served as an adviser for several projects in Chiapas. In the U.S., he has worked mainly with the immigrant rights movement, especially with Maria Jimenez in Houston and nationally with the AFSC groups, the National Organizers Alliance (NOA) and the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR) where he was a board member until December 2006. He is co-author of the Curriculum BRIDGE: Building a Race and Immigration Dialogue on the Global Economy, a book on how to use popular education while doing organizing with immigrant communities, that won the Gustavus Myers Human Rights Award in 2004. In 2006 co-founded Houston Interfaith Workers Justice where he was the training coordinator and interfaith organizer until June of 2010. He has worked as an independent consultant on Popular Education and Training/Organizing Strategies, with the Highlander Center of Tennessee; the PRAXIS project; NNIRR and the Colorado Coalition for Immigrant Rights (CIRC) among others. Currently he works full time as Co-director of Colectivo Flatlander providing capacity building services and technical assistance to grantees of Communities Creating Healthy Environments a national capacity-building initiative funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to support diverse, community-based organizations and indigenous groups organizing for effective, culturally competent policy initiatives that address the root causes of childhood obesity at the local level.
Pancho lives in Houston, Texas, where he is involved with "Houston Unido" the local immigrant rights coalition and serves on the advisory board of "Living Hope Wheelchair Association" an organization of immigrant persons with spinal cord injuries that organizes to support each other and to fight for their rights. Pancho is a founding member of Colectivo Flatlander.
For more information please visit:
Last but not least, he is married to Christine Kovic and has two kids, Antonio (6) and Maria (4)!
Post-Conference Workshop (3 days)
Jana Sanskriti Process and Forum Theatre: Scripting Play and Power Instead of Playing the Script
Workshop Facilitators: Sanjoy Ganguly and Sima Ganguly
The participant actors will be scripting the play at the core of this workshop. The games and exercises in the workshop will act as social metaphors. Through games the participant actors will relate to their realities and will relate to themselves. Thus actors will find oppression; all of us will try to understand various dimensions of the oppressor and oppressed characters. The ideology of the oppressor will be understood through techniques. After the scenes are scripted, the Forum play will be structured. Some rehearsal of Forum will be included.
Due to circumstances outside our control, the time of Sanjoy and Sima Ganguly's workshop has been altered. If you have questions about the change in the time of the workshop, please speak with a PTO board member or registration volunteer at the conference.
Saturday, July 23 (2:00 - 8:00 p.m.)
Sunday, July 24 (11:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.)
Monday, July 25 (9:00 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.)
Cost: $300 US per person.
About the Facilitators
Sanjoy Ganguly
Sanjoy Ganguly was active in Communist politics as a student. Disillusioned by its centralist tendencies, he left the party to search for a political culture of dialogue and democracy. He began working in the theatre in rural Bengal in the early 1980s. His encounter several years later with Augusto Boal and the Theatre of the Oppressed, coupled with his own passionate commitment to the creation of a more just and equal society, led him to found Jana Sanskriti, an independent organization committed to the use of theatre to conscientise and empower the communities it serves. With a more than thirty active theatre groups associated with the group, Jana Sanskriti is now the largest organization of its kind in India.
For more information on Sanjoy Ganguly's work experience, click here.
Sima Ganguly
Sima Ganguly has been an actor/activist with Jana Sanskriti since its inception; she is part of its coordination team. Sima graduated in Music from Rabindra Bharati University. She directs workshops mainly for the teams JS has developed outside the state of West Bengal. She has been among the lead actresses in Jana Sanskriti since its beginning. She was born in December 1964.
Workshops will take place at a Chicago location (to be announced) accessible to public transport; transportation from conference hotel will be provided for those unable to get there via public transportation. Contact Kelly Howe and Jasmin Cardenas at ptochicago2011@gmail.com with any questions about transportation. We're in the final stages of deciding between workshop locations.