Using RC Literature
I am responding to Diane Shisk’s1 e-mail asking us to think and discharge about making RC literature available and accessible to our students.
Last fall my Area2 Reference Person asked me to lead an ongoing class. The Area has supported his proposal to focus on two things as an Area: (1) connection, and (2) completely discharging oppressor material.3 I decided that those would be good themes to plan the class around.
The literature that everyone in my class gets as part of their class fee is the Fundamentals Teaching Guide and Class Outline (Liberation)—Part II,4 the Guidelines,5 and a one-year subscription to Present Time. As part of my effort to help the class members get better connected and be able to counsel each other, every other week we give one person in the class a twenty-minute session in front of the class and then forty minutes of one-way time, in the form of two twenty-minute sessions with class members. During that forty minutes, I counsel the rest of the class.
The week before someone’s long turn, I ask people to read a Fundamentals Teaching Guide article about one of that person’s identities. We use the suggestions in the article to discharge in class. I also bring copies of the relevant RC journal to class to sell. We have done two of these so far this year—reading and discharging about African-heritage liberation and artists’ liberation. This week we will discharge about Native and Indigenous liberation in preparation for next week’s long turn, and I will bring copies of Heritage6 to sell. So far I have sold one copy of Black Re-emergence7 this way. It’s a start!
Mary Ruth Gross
Regional Reference Person for Albany
and Inland Northern California, and part of Berkeley, California, USA
Richmond, California, USA
Reprinted form the e-mail discussion list for RC Teachers
1 Diane Shisk is the Alternate International Reference Person.
2 An Area is a local RC Community.
3 “Material” means distress recordings.
4 An RC publication about how to teach the liberation theory of forty-one different constituencies
5 The Guidelines for the Re-evaluation Counseling Communities, the policies for the RC Communities
6 The RC journal about the liberation of Native peoples
7 The RC journal about Black liberation