ROOTS OF CHANGE STUDY CIRCLE PROGRAM
- Rethinking basic assumptions
- Exploring root causes
- Pointing to a new direction
HOW IT WORKS | EDUCATION FOR ACTION | CURRICULUM IN BRIEF
START A STUDY CIRCLE | ORDER THE CURRICULUM CD
Einstein once remarked, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” If this is so, we must begin the process of building a better world by rethinking basic assumptions and exploring root causes.
To this end, ISEC is pleased to offer our ground-breaking Roots of Change curriculum and study circle program. The curriculum includes voices of the world's leading political, economic and ecological thinkers who lay out both how we've arrived at our present predicament and what we can do about it. The emphasis is on education for action: moving beyond single issues to look at the more fundamental influences that shape our lives. No academic background is required.
The program has three main goals:
- to encourage a broad analysis of the origins and workings of the global economy:
- to promote discussion about the impacts of corporate globalisation on our own communities, as well as communities around the world:
- to generate strategies for effective local action and global partnerships.
“The readings challenge me to reconsider things I ignore or take for granted, and help to counteract the mesmerizing effect
of everyday life in urban America.”
Diana Young, Berkeley,CA
HOW IT WORKS — COLLECTIVE STUDY FOR LOCAL ACTION
Roots of Change is a guided study circle program. ISEC helps set up small study circles (usually six to twelve members) and provides a series of readings to generate discussion. Study circles usually meet once or twice a month to discuss the readings and forge strategies for effective local action. There are no 'teachers', though most groups choose one of their members – sometimes on a rotational basis – to act as facilitator. ISEC staff are available throughout the program both for logistical and intellectual support, and to facilitate the move from education to action.
EDUCATION FOR ACTION — LEARNING FOR A CHANGE
Roots of Change is specifically designed to help participants move from education to action. The program seeks to expose the assumptions that diminish our ability to bring about real and lasting change. Among these is the deterministic assertion that 'there is no alternative'—that the world we live in is the inevitable result of evolution or human nature. Enhancing our historical and economic literacy is an important first step toward freeing ourselves from these stories and becoming more effective agents for positive change.
A major theme running throughout the curriculum is community-its breakdown and renewal. In a very real sense meeting and learning together is itself an act of community renewal.
Since the program began in the early 1990s, participants have gone on to initiate numerous projects in their own communities – from farmers’ markets and coops to alternative currencies and local food councils. In doing so they joined millions of others around the world who are resisting the destruction of people and the planet, while renewing their local economies, communities and cultures.
Rather than leaving things to the ‘experts’, it’s time to heed the words of Alice Walker: “we are the ones we've been waiting for”.
We have recently launched our updated and revised curriculum and have already received interest from communities across the world –from small farmers, students and professors in the USA, to City Council members in the United Kingdom, to individuals as far away as Kazakhstan, India, Cameroon and Malaysia.
“Taking part in an ISEC study group was very supportive and empowering, giving me the confidence to get involved in local action.”
Pam Hine, Totnes, UK
ISEC staff will be available to help facilitate the move from education to action by connecting groups to inspiring resistance and renewal initiatives in your area. We will also help link your group to others occurring simultaneously across the world.
Click here to download the 'Introduction to the Programme and Materials'
Includes introductory material and the curriculum outline, synopsis and reading list.
Click here to download a sample reading
Click here to see our expanding list of organisations and initiatives for change
STARTING A STUDY CIRCLE IS SIMPLE
Click here for our simple Step-by-Step Guide
CURRICULUM SYNOPSIS
Over the last 500 years, societies the world over have been transformed from those that are predominantly local and human scale, to those that are industrialized, globalised, and ever larger in scale. In the process, power has become consolidated and centralized, the separation between production and consumption has grown, and people have become alienated from each other and from the natural world. This broad, structural change - and the forces that have animated it - is at the root of many of the crises we face.
The first part of the Roots of Change curriculum (‘500 Years of Progress?’) unravels this history. In the process readers will be treated to a selection of powerful voices that question a number of widely-held assumptions about progress, growth, wealth, and development.
Deep questioning of this nature can be exciting and liberating, but it can also be overwhelming.
In recognition of this, the curriculum also includes the Hope Trove, full of beautiful and moving excerpts of poetry and prose on hope, on working through despair, on expanding our boundaries, and on personal/social transformation.
The second half of the curriculum (‘Resistance and Renewal’) provides readers with a broad understanding of the steps needed at the local, national, and international levels to shift the world in a more sustainable direction. We have taken pains to showcase examples of resistance to the dominant order, as well as renewal, through brilliant ideas and initiatives that prefigure a much more humane, healthy, and happy future.
For every critical exposé in the first section, we include in the second, new ideas and tangible, instructive, living solutions that will inspire. Where the curriculum ends, the journey of action begins.