GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

and use it, but I am pretty sure that everything we have put into it is everything

you would have wanted us to put into it and everything that we do in our day

jobs. What it does is it signs it off at the end of it.

So that is where we are up to with it. Thanks for you time, thanks for listening.

Thank you. (Applause)

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much, Colin, and thank you for the work that you

have been doing on that, it is really important and I think it is going to change

the face of many unions in the future. Our next speaker, colleagues, is another

partner. I would like you to welcome Mike Seal from Newman University.

MIKE SEAL: Have you read the book, all of you? Some of you? Good. I will just

say a couple of words about that and a little bit about the courses we have

been doing. If you do get a chance, do read the book. It is of its time and it is

timely, it has been described as. Probably most importantly, it is not just

academics like me writing in it. If you actually look at it, it is almost a third

academics, it is a third trade union educationalists and probably the most

important for me is it is a third activists, some of whom are in this room and

have not actually written for years and certainly not written for publication and it

took some persuading and some support to do that, but I think it is vitally

important that those chapters are there, because if trade unionists do not write

about their education and their ideas, other people like me will, so it is very

important that we get writing.

That kind of leads on to, for me, the courses we have been running. We have

been doing a level 4 course of training for trainers and hopefully in September

we will be doing one for postgraduate and it is firmly located, as is the book, in

the idea of what we call popular education, which is actually a history I would

not say we have forgotten, but maybe neglected sometimes and it is a way of

looking at how do we do education that engages with people. In a funny way

what people are doing well anyway if you come on these courses, it is a way of

celebrating it and maybe naming it and maybe developing it, putting the politics

back into it. I remember when I wrote the chapter looking at the youth festivals

with Sarah as we were discussing it going, “We kind of do this” and going,

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