Jane Rocks the Rebellion

We gathered in Avila Retreat Center’s courtyard, six rebels. No more Kurt Lewin – we’d had enough of his 12 Principles. We didn’t see how using these principles was going to help us in any way. Each of us had already completed the Introduction to Popular Education and Advanced Learning Design courses, we had applied our learning.

I remember back to those years of Eric Berne’s Parent-Child-Adult Model, the Task/Group Maintenance bicycle, and the Tuckman Model of Group Formation. The stages at that time were: forming, norming, storming, and performing. Yes, we were storming, but did we name that then?

Jane heard us, rocked, and ultimately held her position, we would do this new application task. These principles captured the essence of sustained learning through belonging to a new group. We too were a new group, we stormed and performed, graduating from the Master Teacher class.

Darlene Goetzman