A SAMPLE POLITICAL EDUCATION SESSION
Please please please note that there are 1000 ways to design and facilitate a political education session and then 10 more ways after that. This sample is meant to generate ideas, NOT to suggest in any way that this is the right way or that there is a right way to host a political education session.Time: 2 hours
Goal: understand racism as more than personal,
as institutional and structural

Introductions
You can do introductions in any number of ways appropriate to your community and your culture. You might want to ask people to share their preferred gender pronouns. You might want to start by sitting in silence, facilitate some collective breathing and centering, you might want to lead some singing … do whatever makes sense for you and builds community.

Agreements
If you have a culture of setting agreements, you might want to do that now. As members of SURJ, you might want to share the SURJ values as your agreements. A quick and effective activity that helps to make the agreements more relevant is to ask people to pair up and take a minute to talk about which agreement is hardest to live into and which is easiest and why.

Storytelling
To get people talking and present (given all that is going on in their lives outside of the session), offer an active listening activity. Ask people to pair up or make small groups of 3 or 4. Invite them to take 3-4 minutes each to share their answers to a question or set of questions that both call on their stories (experience) and the topic at hand. For example, you might ask people to take 3 minutes each to share one or two things that they learned from their family about race and/or racism, including one thing that actually perpetuated racist thinking and one thing that interrupted it. You might ask people to share how they learned what they currently know about racism. As the facilitator, you will want to model by sharing how you would answer the questions (perhaps with a partner); your modeling will set the depth of vulnerability in the room. If you show vulnerability (my family gave me mixed messages, my family gave me explicitly racist messages, my family was silent), then others are more likely to do so as well. After the time for sharing is over, you can debrief, asking people both how it felt to share and listen and what they noticed.

Information Sharing
This is where you present the content that is the focus of your session. In this case, you might have asked people to read something ahead of time which you will discuss as a group (see resources on Racism 101 page). You might invite someone who knows a lot about the topic to come and talk to the group. You might draw from something happening in your community and use that as a model for how to understand institutional and structural / cultural racism. Think about what you can do to make the content easy to understand and easy to relate to unless your group has been meeting for a while and has the relationships and skills to handle dense or harder to understand material. Think about how to support people to engage with the material and/or how people can contribute what they know about the topic.

Application and Action
Before the session winds up, you are going to want to talk about how to apply whatever lessons you drew from the storytelling and information sharing. You can ask questions like: how does this discussion inform our next action steps? what action steps does this session suggest?

Closing
Bringing formal closure to a session signals that you appreciate the time and thoughtfulness people have brought to the session. You can use the closing to ask each person to share one thing they know now that they didn’t know before, or to identify an action step they are going to take, or to appreciate one thing about the time together… You can also close with a poem or a quote or a song. Again, close in whatever way is culturally meaningful for your group while signaling how much you value people for coming, even if or especially if the discussion is contentious or challenging.