Designing a
Recycling Cooperative

1. Explain workshop objective 

    

Students have to design a plan for setting up a recycling cooperative where waste pickers will no longer sell their waste individually to middlemen, but will bring, sort and sell it to the cooperative instead. I also posited a series of challenges that their designs had to address.

         

​

2. Coop location and name selection

​

The whole class then decided on the cooperative’s location and name. I always encourage students to pick a location with which they, or at least some members of the group, are familiar.

 

​

3. Group design work

​

Students worked in smaller groups on the governance, external support, economic matters and social issues of the coop. The student handout (link) provided each group with a list of questions to answer to structure their work. 

 

​

4. Collective masterplan

​

Students came together as a large group to combine their findings into a master plan that addressed the most important issues they had identified. They collectively created a poster to visually represent their work.

 

​

5. Debrief

​

Each creative activity needs to conclude with a collective discussion session to draw out students’ learning and connect it to the larger topics of the class. I often do that in the following class, after sending students a short survey with some reflection questions.