Purpose
Have you ever wished to fully understand and convey key concepts in regenerative economics, the building of democracy, and environmental health? The One Home Planet Book Club helps you do just that.
What matters is not your previous academic achievements, but your willingness to be part of an open-minded and respectful debate.
If you are an expert already well-versed in some of the questions studied, you may become a great asset to the progress of others and eventually find a qualified audience to introduce them to your work, aside from the study program itself.
If you have no particular expertise, your role is even more important. Socrates famously kept saying that all he knew was that he knew nothing. What he meant was that genuine knowledge is structured by actively questioning what is yet to be known. In that sense, we are all called to play a decisive part in any discussion.
Organization
The three main advantages of studying with a regular group of people are obvious:
- Back-and-forth discussions within the group open up unforeseen avenues for students’ curiosity.
- Group members owe it to one another to be more accurate, focused, and regular than they would be if working independently.
- Helping each other every week to understand broad issues that interest all concerned citizens fosters quality, friendly relationships that may last a lifetime.
Each Sunday, Book Club members receive two questions (see, for instance, Doughnut Economics, Chapter 6, questions 1-2, 3-4, 5-6) to reflect on and discuss during the rest of the week.
The weekly schedule is relaxed enough to fit into anyone’s busy life. Besides, all books are carefully summarized chapter by chapter on the website. This way, whether or not you choose to read the book itself, you can keep up with the study’s required depth and pace.
Not only do you easily keep pace with other group members, but you can all meet in a private group on the website’s social network. You can also arrange for group calls at the end of each chapter study. The latter is, in fact, an essential aspect of your book study (click below to learn more).
Group Calls
What are they for?
Group calls help gain insights into one’s learning journey by listening to others’ feedback. They also help group members to become genuinely supportive of one another.
A group call, in other words, is not a time for confronting arguments—this is done in the discussion threads—but rather to share one’s challenges and progress in the book study.
How should they be facilitated?
To avoid “cross-talk,” it is best that the call host keep all participants muted at first and wait for them to “raise their hand” to speak, one at a time.
The first half of the meeting should be dedicated to each participant’s feedback; the second half to interventions on what a particular participant or the group as a whole said.
Though everyone is invited to speak freely and spontaneously, there is no obligation to do so. By the same token, those who share their thoughts must be mindful of allowing others to do the same, according to the meeting’s planned length and group size.
On a practical note…
- Jitsi Meet is a good teleconferencing platform option (totally free, encrypted, with nothing to download). Check their easy User Guide.
- Group calls are for private groups only. No mention of them should appear in the website’s discussion threads.
- Separate meetings may need to be organized within the same group to accommodate different time zones.
- The host needs to know each participant’s email to invite them.