Exercises
Welcome to the Cat’s Cradle (Tiger’s Eye) Exercise Library. This is a depository of educational resources for comrades around the world. It is the product of many years of investigation into pedagogy for struggle.
We invite you to use these exercises in your own work, but we also hope that you can come to understand how they were made, and devise your own, for your own particular circumstances. As Amílcar Cabral said, the revolution is like a dress which must fit each individual’s body. We would be delighted to talk with you about how to do this, and we welcome questions. We also welcome write-ups of how exercises go when you run them, or even brief notes to say when you ran them and how it went. Get in touch with us via the Contact page.
When formatting exercises on this website, we put direct instructions to the participants in a red box. So if the teacher is to say: ‘Now put all your slips of paper in the centre of the table’, we present it like this:
Now put all your slips of paper in the centre of the table.
These instructions might be spoken or they may be written down, depending on what is most appropriate in the context. In many cases you won’t want to follow a script strictly, but we hope this presentation clearly sets out the teacher’s role and makes adaptation of the exercises easier. The basic mechanics of how teachers actually move the exercise along should not be neglected.
We believe that pedagogy is just another way to talk about the dialectical relationship between theory and practice, which is a relationship that must be explored and understood by all who seek communism. It is the place where we can come to understand struggle and the collective life required to serve the struggle. And it is where we can come to understand how to find a communist morality. For these reasons, we don’t believe that pedagogy, or ‘education’ is an optional ‘add-on’ to political work, but should be at the centre of all our activity, which proceeds through practice, reflection and transcendence of old forms.
We recommend that when you read about an exercise, you also read the pages for the associated techniques and the modes page which will give you some understanding of why the exercise is the way it is. Exercises can be endlessly adapted, but when you are adapting exercises first consider whether the problems you are facing are the same as the problems the exercise was written to address. If these are not the same, you will need a new exercise.
What’s the time?
in Al-Quds -
in Panama and Chicago -
in Burkina Faso -
in Scotland -
in Al-Quds -
in Panama and Chicago -
in Burkina Faso -
in Scotland -