Purpose
This program aims to be an empowering experience for its participants.
With the support of your Book Club group, you delve into the pivotal works of significant authors on environmental, political, and economic issues. Week by week, as you discover their thought process, you structure your judgment on the studied topic by answering a series of questions and refining your arguments with other students in your group.
There are three direct advantages to the Book Club:
- Group synergy opens unforeseen avenues for members’ curiosity, enabling them to share their challenges and progress in a precise and effective way.
- 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 of us fosters quality, friendly relationships that may last a lifetime.
All that is required is to be open-minded and respectful. What matters is not your previous academic achievements but your willingness to ask questions or help answer those others ask themselves.
Organization
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. A schedule relaxed enough to fit into anyone’s busy life.
Whether or not you choose to read the book effectively, you can nevertheless keep up with the required depth and pace of study thanks to the website’s Book Club posts, which carefully summarize all chapters.
At the end of each chapter’s study, a gathering can take place in your private group on the website’s social network or on a teleconferencing platform chosen by the group (Jitsi is a good option).
Learn more about group calls
At the end of each chapter’s study, you will see this note:
=> You are invited to arrange for a group call this week.
Interested members will then have seven days to meet. Note that separate meetings may need to be organized within the same group to accommodate different time zones.
What are group calls/meetings for?
They help gain insights into one’s learning journey by listening to what others say about theirs. They also help the group to become genuinely supportive of its members.
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.