The Exercise Fair


An exercise fair is when you have tables set up around the room with different exercises on them. These exercises might all take different amounts of time. Some may have a permanent facilitator sitting at the table to instruct on the exercise, and others may just contain typed instructions. The aim in a fair is to have each participant travel round at least three different tables of their choosing during the time they are given. 

CCTE have run exercise fairs twice - once in Birmingham, England, during a Marx course, once in Chicago during a public session on Burkina Faso run with BAP.



Theory

To explain exercise fairs, it’s helpful to understand the theory behind soft opens and small acts.

The Exercise Fair was conceived in the face of numerous problems:

  • When you know people are likely to arrive at different times, an exercise fair can allow people to trickle in and start work on something as soon as enough people show up to complete any one exercise with them. 
  • When you’re worried about an environment feeling ‘like school’, with all its negative connotations, especially among new people who don’t know each other well, an exercise fair gives a bit more room to breathe. People can move around the exercises at their own pace, and so on. 
  • In an environment where there are different levels of confidence with the material, or confidence in general, it can allow people to choose exercises based on where they feel they need to learn most, and also spend more or less time on an exercise if they are stuck or are finding it easy.
  • A fair can be a way to bring a large number of people in a short space of time up to a similar level before undertaking a communal activity or exercise (for example, in Chicago it was producing squares towards the aim of making a pamphlet, in the Birmingham case it was doing some focused work on areas of Marxist philosophy).
  • When you are at the start of a new working relationship with another organisation and want to try a range of things in quick succession to understand where the most effective collaboration could take place. This then moves you to the next problem of figuring out how to work together. 
  • Sometimes a fair might be a good idea when you have a lot of substantial problems and want to address them in a short space of time. But we are also self-critical about this. An exercise fair shouldn’t be an excuse to avoid figuring out which are your most important problems, or in other words, what it is most crucial that your organisation figure out next! Be careful to run one where you are genuinely sure that a less-focused activity is a good idea. 
  • An exercise fair might be useful in introducing exercise-based learning, including devising one’s own exercises, to people who are interested in but unfamiliar with the method. The relatively small exercises that are deployed at these sorts of fairs naturally lend themselves to self-facilitated investigative exercises (Small Acts being a concrete type). Making a small act is often a good way in to cooking up your own exercises for it is relatively unintimidating.   So exercise fairs can be a good starting point for both inexperienced participants and inexperienced facilitators. 

With perhaps the exception of the last problem, a criticism of these problems is that many of them are about the practicalities of getting some educational activity ‘over the line’, rather than there being any underlying theory which suggests this is a promising educational technique. An Exercise Fair is only revolutionary once it is understood and practised as a potential vehicle for the actual seeds of revolution when conditions are otherwise not ideal.

None of this is to overlook the practical problems of teaching and collaborating, only that we don’t want to pretend that there is anything particularly radical underlying this technique. We’ve written up some times we’ve run exercise fairs below and the problems that the exercises attempted to address

Birmingham 2024

An adaptation of the Marx Course developed by the All Chicago Tenants Alliance was run over a day. Because the principle of the Marx course is to teach people how to apply Marxist thinking to their own particular conditions and organisational problems, we spent the first half of the day doing some small acts which were designed to help people think about the educational problems within their respective political groups.










Chicago 2024

We ran an exercise fair on the Sahel in Chicago on Sunday 24th October 2024 in collaboration with the Black Alliance for Peace chapter in Chicago. 




There were a lot of problems with Sahel solidarity in the West that we wanted to address together:

  • How can we teach people about AFRICOM in a way that makes them want to teach others?
  • Why exactly does AFRICOM exist?
  • What should people in the US learn from African resistance to AFRICOM?
  • How can we challenge the media portrayal  of the Sahel states?
  • How can activists in the US learn better commitment to their organisations? o
  • What should we be learning and applying from  Cabral, Nkrumah and Toure?

The exercise fair ran for about an hour. The learning that happened during the fair was used as the basis for the central activity of the workshop which was the production of  a collective pamphlet in a similar manner to Cumbernauld Squares. At this point the tables were rearranged into small groups so that people could work together. The exercises that had been done in the first hour were accessible for people to see, becoming material for the production of new learning materials.  

Here is a link to one of the exercises that we created for the fair, and here are some pictures: 



This is a copy of what the start of the facilitation and planning document looked like: 

[11:00 - 12:30] Exercise Fair 

As people come in, BAP/CCTE people greet them, explain how the tables work, explain where the food/bathroom is, and tell them that we will introduce everyone at 11.20, but in the meantime we are just getting started.

Greeter might say something like this:

“We’ve set up seven tables which you can visit in any order you like, taking breaks as you prefer. You probably won’t get round all of them in the next hour, unless you are very efficient, so we recommend that you pick three that you are particularly interested in, and then make sure you get round those, and then if you have time you can also visit others. You can see the subject matter of the tables written on them. We encourage you to work in pairs or small groups - this can be people you know, or people you don’t know. It’s great if it’s someone you don’t know. You can approach the exercises in groups of 2-4”

We will have seven tables laid out around the room for people to circulate around. People will be able to move around the tables at their own pace, each exercise should take no more than 20 minutes.

All facilitators (CCTE and BAP/other orgs) can move between tables to help people complete them. We hope that facilitators will be able to participate, but we should also expect that they will spend a lot of time helping others.