I have organised a project in which each person teaches a class on the fundamentals of RC to everyone else in the Community. The purpose is to give people experience in teaching fundamentals, so we become more able to help RC grow.


I have been leading our local RC Community class for six years. I have done some useful work over that time, but there hasn’t been a big increase in people taking broad new leadership.


Long before our class started, many in our developing Community had lost the habit of teaching RC, particularly to new people. Some had been in RC a long time (thirty to forty years), others were quite new (one to two years), and some were in between. Half had taught fundamentals at least once, in some cases a long time ago.


I set up a project: each person (besides me) in our Community class of fourteen people would teach one class on a “fundamentals topic” of their choice. It was not important which topic they chose, only that it be something they would teach in a fundamentals class. It didn’t matter if two people decided to teach the same topic—we would all benefit from their differing perspectives on it.


I wanted each person to get experience taking complete responsibility for leading a group of people, preparing a class, working with an assistant, and reading the literature to reconnect with the theory. I specified that people should choose a fundamentals topic for several reasons:


• We have to become good at teaching fundamentals as part of building RC.
• We need to keep thinking freshly about the fundamental theory.
• Teaching about something is a good way to understand it more deeply.
• I wanted to avoid a tendency I had seen for people when they had an opportunity to teach to think first of teaching about an oppression in which they were in the oppressed role. I think it’s important for all RC leaders to have an explicit theoretical and practical commitment to think about everyone and everything, not just a section of the population or what they feel most comfortable with.

Everyone was willing to take on [undertake] the project.


So far four different teachers have taught four different classes. Each has been useful and different. We’ve seen four new ways to think about RC and communicate it. And 
I am consciously giving people a lot of space to make mistakes, so they can see the results of any mistakes and learn from them.


The project is making us think differently about each other. I also hope it will give all the new teachers a different perspective on themselves, and their ability to teach RC to new people.