O Que Fazem os Professores (What Teachers Make) de Taylor Mali

 

On January 26th, 2013, the teachers in Portugal made a country-wide demonstration against the austerity measures directed towards public education.

Inspired by the amazing poem What Teachers Make by Taylor Mali, we decided to make a small performative activity during the demonstration in Lisbon.

We are thankful to Taylor Mali for his inspiring work, and to all the participants who enthusiastically volunteered to take part in the video.

Resumo da Reunião 21 fevereiro 2013

• Exchange Market (Mercado de Trocas):
• We participated in the market with the motto "É uma questão de questionar."
• As a first experience, our experience was good.
• The next one will be on March 16th. As an improvement, we decided to make
• an announcement on the event page so that people bring their pen-drives
• a guideline describing how to get to videos (pointing the list etc)

• Video project (O que fazem os professores):
• We will finalize the video by Sunday and share it on social media.
• We decided to have another version with English subtitles. 

• Campaigning workshop
• The workshop consists of 3 parts:
• Campaign Objective
• Power Analysis
• Communication Strategy
• We only worked on Campaign Objective.

• New campaign
•  In the workshop we considered the following problems
• tax immunities of the Catholic church
• atheists considered radicals and marginals in the society
• religious practices inside public schools (such as Christmas celebrations)
• religious discourse in public schools
• the fact that the lottery institution (supposedly a religious charity organization) owns many houses which are abandoned
• religious institutions control the lottery money
• church own the most amount of houses in Portugal and does not pay IMI
• there are too many religious schools
• We decided to work on Tax Immunities
• We tried to get a S.M.A.A.A.R.R.T objective for our campaign.
• We decided on some organizational objectives and milestones.

Resumo da Reunião 14 fevereiro 2013

• Exchange Market (Mercado de Trocas) : Our motto in the market will be "É uma questão de questionar." 
• As the theme of the market is consumption and the consumer society, we decided to share e-books and videos related to questioning the existing social norms. We will include the issue of religion within this context, even though we will share many books unrelated to religion.

• Balance: We made a small evaluation, including
• how we feel about the group,
• if we consider ourselves successful, and
• how much time and energy we can reserve for the group in the future.
• According to this balance, we decided to have well-defined, measurable and timed objectives, both organizational and political ones. We therefore decided to preserve a big part of our next meeting to a workshop on building a campaign.
• We will structure our activities, actions and roles around this campaign. Therefore, we postponed the following items due after the workshop:
• March 2nd, Que Se Lixe A Troixa
• reasons for people to become atheists (excerpt from Greta Christina's book, see previous meeting minutes)

Resumo da Reunião 7 fevereiro 2013

• Video project: O que fazem os professores
• We will have the first version of the video by February 17th.
• Web:
• By next meeting, we will finalize our personal descriptions of one paragraph and publish them on the blog.
• Book reading (Greta Christina - Why are you atheists so angry):
• We studied the Resources given by the author. Here is a list of our comments, relating the links to our intentions:
• http://www.the-brights.net/  Has a lot of sources but not many activities. Has a very well organized database of books, blogs etc.
• http://www.venganza.org/  A lot of pamphlets, stickers etc. Good activism material.
• http://centerforinquiry.net/ Has lots of videos, articles that we could translate and use as an outreach opportunity.
• http://www.ftsociety.org/ A more humanist group rather than an atheist one. Nice activism and networking, sometimes press releases etc. They host meet-ups in Lisbon too.
• http://richarddawkinsfoundation.org/  Two words: Richard Dawkins.
• http://secularstudents.org/ Purely American network of secularist student organizations. But they have a "group starting package" that might be useful.
• http://www.atheismresource.com/ Lots of information such as videos, articles, short essays, book reviews etc. But doesn't have activism material.
• http://godisimaginary.com/ Arguments that they have could be used in flyers or posters as they are short and clear.
• http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=Main_Page Good source for arguments and counter-arguments. But only that.
• http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/ Greta says he is the Atheist Times where we can get recent atheist news.
• We also noticed that she mentions a survey she has done in her blog about which ideas convinced former believers to become atheists. (Chapter 12) We decided to take a closer look at these reasons, pick our favorite ones, and discuss action possibilities in the next meeting.
• We decided to attend the meet-up announced by Free Thought Society, the Encontros Ateistas e Humanistas de Lisboa, on February 20th, Wednesday, at 20h00.
• There will be a workshop on communication with new media, in the following days. We will try to attend it.
• Exchange Market (Mercado de Trocas)
• Assembleia Popular de Graça e arredores is organizing an exchange market on February 16th, Saturday, between 11h00-16h00.
• We decided to join the market and share books and videos in electronic format.
• We will make a list of material we have and come up with a visual presentation to be used in our stand.
• March 2nd, Que Se Lixe A Troika
• We decided to join the demonstration and distribute flyers. Here are some ideas for the flyers. We will study each item and see if we can develop a flyer content from them:
• Austerity (why austerity is not a solution)
• Housing (the buildings that belong to the church or church related charity organizations, which are left abandoned while people need housing)
• Religious institutions (How do religious schools and hospitals function? How do they get subsidized?)
• Privileges of religious organizations (are priests subject to civil labor law? etc. Check: www.concordatwatch.eu )
• Open discussion: We had an open discussion in the end of our meeting, related to
• what we expect to achieve,
• how to organize.
• We aimed at not making any decisions but rather understanding each others' positions and expectations.

Resumo da Reunião 31 janeiro 2013

• Logo: We had the first version as a witch character and we agreed it to be the initial version. We had some concerns about the details. We will elaborate more and get several varieties to discuss in the future meetings.
• Movie screening evaluation:
• We had no logistical problems, and a good debate after the screening.
• Overall, we all think we had a successful event. To improve ourselves, we decided to
• strengthen our communication in the organization process,
• visualize the event concretely in the preparations to avoid misunderstandings on expectations.
• Web:
• On Facebook, we will close the profile and function only through the group and the page.
• We put a separate section where all our meeting minutes are available.
• We are still working on our personal paragraphs for the upcoming section "Who are we?"
• Book reading (Greta Christina - Why Are You Atheists So Angry):
• We will share the links in the Facebook group and search through them to see what could be useful for us.
• March 2nd, Que Se Lixe A Troika
• We talked about how to participate in the demonstration and considered the option of distributing flyers.
• We will come up with more concrete ideas for next week and discuss.
• Video project: O que fazem os professores
• We participated the Teachers' Demonstration (Manifestação Nacional dos Professores) on January 26th.
• We translated Taylor Mali's poem What Teachers Make, and let people read it to the camera. We will soon have a video of it.