‘Critical Pedagogy and Participatory Learning for Social Transformation: The Role of Higher Education’ Conference

http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ges/news-and-events/conf1.php

Nov 27-28th, 2008
Monash University

in partnership with:

Faculty of Arts, Monash University

oases Graduate School
Integrative and Transformative Studies Program
Borderlands Cooperative

Research Centre for Cosmopolitan Civil
Societies at University of Technology Sydney

In the lead up to the Conference, we will be submitting our idea’s on the proposed themes. We INVITE anyone interested to contribute to this blog with their ideas to the following:

Critical pedagogy, participatory and transformative learning

How are ideas of critical pedagogy, transformative and dialogic learning being interpreted and put into practice in university, TAFE and other tertiary contexts?

How do we step out of the role of ‘expert’ and make the relationship between ‘lecturer’ and ‘student’ more equal – indeed, ‘participatory’?

How do we not only enable participatory learning but also generate democratic, critical and transformative knowledge in-the-world?

How do we encourage collective learning and learning for social action and active citizenship?

How do we enable learning that makes personal and social transformation aimed at a sustainable society possible?

Popular education

How are ideas and practices of ‘popular education’ being interpreted and put into practice in higher education in Australia?

How are universities, TAFE colleges and other institutions of higher learning engaging with adult learners in and beyond the classroom into their communities?

How are universities, TAFE colleges and other institutions of higher learning engaging with (members of) disadvantaged groups in and beyond the classroom into their communities?

Community-based education

How is ‘community-based education’ being interpreted and practiced in institutions of higher learning in Australia and elsewhere?

How might we shift the conception and practices of ‘internships’ and ‘placements’ away from an overemphasis on ‘individualised’ professional development and towards a more integrated and balanced understanding of personal/social/ecological/spiritual transformation, including practical responses to community needs and priorities?

How are learners enabled to contribute ‘useful’ knowledge for community groups?

This is an article by one of the Critical Pedagogy Conference organisers, published in the New Community Quarterly Vol. 5, No. 2, 2007.

Participatory Learning in University Development Studies

Bruce Missingham, Monash University

International Development and Environmental Analysis Program

Introduction

This paper reflects upon my attempts over the past four years to bring participatory and dialogic approaches to learning and teaching into a university postgraduate class on international community development. Clearly, the participatory and democratic ideals and strategies of community development challenge us to step away from conventional and hierarchical lecture and tutorial-based approaches, and try to match content with method. With the ideas of participation and democratising development so central to the theory and practice of community development, how do we bring these ideas and approaches into the university and the classroom? How do we democratise the community development curriculum? How do we empower students in ways that are transferable and applicable in their later community development work?

We don’t have to look far to find relevant theory, methods and applied examples. Popular education (associated most famously with Paulo Freire) and participatory learning and action (Pretty et al. 1995, Mukherjee 2002) are widely practiced in non-formal education and NGO programs throughout both the developed and developing world. Despite a long standing – but marginalised – interest in critical pedagogy in many universities (Shor 1987, other papers in this special issue), the higher education sector has proved particularly resistant to the ideas and innovations of participatory learning and popular education (Crowther et al 2005). Recently, however, there has been some resurgence of interest in participatory and dialogic approaches to learning participatory development in university contexts (see, for example, Taylor and Fransman 2003, 2004).

As a lecturer in Monash University’s International Development and Environmental Analysis Program over the last five years, I have continually grappled with issues of how best to help our masters degree students acquire the knowledge, skills, capabilities and experience necessary for professionals in the international development, community development or environment sectors. When we decided four years ago to introduce a new subject on community development, this provided an opportunity to rethink the relationship between what we teach and how we teach it. The core approaches of international community development that I wanted to include in that unit included asset-based approaches, valuing local knowledge and culture, dialogue, participation, empowerment, organising and networking (see appendix). It seemed to me that the knowledge and skills needed to apply those ideas in practice could not be taught by our conventional educational tools such as lectures, tutorials, and essay-based assignments – indeed, as Freire and others have said, it would be contradictory to do so.

Theoretical and disciplinary underpinnings

Two key bodies of literature have been particularly useful for me in terms of justifying and informing approaches to participatory learning in teaching community development. The first is the vast literature about the theory and practice of international community development and participatory development; the second is work on popular education and critical pedagogy. There is a lot of overlap and interchange between the two areas.

Participatory Development

Participation has become a dominant and pervasive discourse in the theory and practice of international development and poverty alleviation. Thirty-odd years ago in the early 1970s, ideas of participation occupied the margins of development discourse and practice and participation was being used to criticise the top-down blue-print approaches of mainstream development. Since that time it has moved from the margins to the mainstream and now virtually all international development programs and projects require participation as part of the process of planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluating their work (Nelson and Wright 1995, Hickey & Mohan 2004). 1

Participatory development aims at democratising development – that is, at giving control over development decision-making and resources to the intended beneficiaries. At the project level, participation has come to mean local people participating in planning and setting the project priorities, objectives and processes, taking control over resources provided for the project, contributing to the work of implementation and participating in monitoring and evaluating the project (UNDP 1997). At the community level, participation is often most effective through the vehicle of community organisations that can represent and be accountable to community members. Working with people to help them strengthen – or create – community organisations, lies at the heart of community participation strategies (Eade 1997, Krishna & Uphoff 1997).

Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), a set of methods for enabling and facilitating community participation in development, particularly at the local project level, has become highly influential. PRA entails working with local people to enable them to collectively compile, systematise and analyse local knowledge and information (in other words, research) with the goal of using and applying that knowledge in collective planning and implementation of local development activities. It brings together a set of methods that mostly hinge on group facilitation and group preparation of visual material such as maps, charts, matrices, cards etc. but also includes semi-structured interviews and focus groups. PRA now encompasses a wide variety of effective techniques for working with groups of local people and, as such, offers a very useful repertoire for community development practitioners, but as Chambers (1997) has acknowledged and others have criticised (see Cooke & Kothari 2001), without a fundamental reversal of roles and attitudes which sees development workers facilitate but not dominate, it will be unlikely to live up to its goal of empowerment.

The theory and practice of participatory development and community engagement approaches such as PRA provide much of the content of the subject, the knowledge, skills and behaviours that students need to learn and practice. The other body of work I have found particularly useful is the theory and practice of critical pedagogy, especially as applied by development NGOs in non-formal education and training and in the radical community engagement of popular education (Arnold 1991).

Critical pedagogy

Critical pedagogy provides both a persuasive critique of conventional education in institutions such as schools and universities and theories and strategies for a participatory and transformative educational practice (Darder et al. 2003, Freire 1972, Shor 1987). As Nina Wallerstein (1987: 33) writes,

Freire’s central premise is that education is not neutral: whether it occurs in a classroom or in a community setting, the interaction of teacher and student does not take place in a vacuum. People bring with them their cultural expectations, their experiences of social discrimination and life pressures… Education starts from the experiences of people, and either reinforces or challenges the existing social forces that keep them passive.

For my purposes here, Freire’s approach to critical pedagogy can be summarised in terms of the key principles of dialogue, starting from the lived experience of participants, problem posing and “generative themes” (Wallerstein 1987).

Dialogue involves mutual respect between educators and learners. It requires educators to step down from the conventional position of power and authority that educational institutions place them in and positioning them as co-learners working with learners/participants. Everyone in a group has some knowledge they can contribute and gaps in other areas and everyone seeks to learn collectively. It aims to position students as active subjects acquiring and constructing their own critical knowledge, rather than as passive recipients of knowledge determined by powerful institutions.

Such a dialogue is most meaningful when it starts from the lived experience, needs and aspirations of participants. Therefore, popular education respects community members’ culture, ways of life and aspirations. Dialogue is a cooperative process of analysing and learning about the world. It aims to help learners develop a deeper critical understanding of their place in society, especially the sources of inequality that constrain their own lives. Therefore, in dialogue the educator poses problems that stem from key social forces shaping participants’ lives – the social, economic, and cultural contexts that impact on individual lives. Freire (1972) calls these key problems “generative themes”. The aim is for participants to take charge of their own learning, to raise generative themes and pose problems to the group themselves. Popular education aims to enable learners to acquire critical knowledge and take action in order to make a difference in the world.Freire’s critical pedagogy has been a significant strand in the emergence of participatory development (Chambers 1997). There has been constant interaction and cross-fertilisation between participatory development and popular education as both are concerned with social justice, community education, collective action and social change. To a certain extent they come together in approaches to adult education and training in international development contexts, such as the dialogic approaches of Hope and Timmel (1995), Vella (1989, 2002) and ActionAid (1996) and Participatory Learning and Action (see Pretty et al. 1995, and the journal Participatory Learning and Action).

Having briefly introduced the intellectual background to the subject, for the remainder of the paper I discuss in greater depth how I have tried to implement these ideas and principles in the classroom.

Negotiating the curriculum

One way that I have tried to bring popular education approaches into the university classroom and democratise the learning process has been through “negotiating the curriculum” (Carr and Kemmis 1986) at the start of the subject. This is not without its contradictions and dangers of falling into “facipulation” (Chambers 1997), but it serves to involve students in a participatory and dialogic process in the very first session, set the scene for the ‘participatory learning and action’ approach and introduce participation as a core theme of community development.

The process is straightforward; after individual introductions, I ask students to write down what they would like to have in a subject on international community development, then collate all of their responses on butchers paper or a white board. Only then do I hand out a basic unit outline with a handful of topics that I argue are essential, such as a session on historical background, community organising, asset-based approaches, gender and development, PRA/PLA and networking. Usually there is a lot of overlap between students’ expressed needs and my proposed outline, but the process always opens up into a collective negotiation about a few topics and priorities. Every year this process of negotiation has lead us, as a class, to alter the unit structure in creative ways that had not occurred to me previously. For instance, this year, some students with a little experience and lot of interest in monitoring and evaluation suggested that, instead of tagging on a session on M & E near the end, it should be introduced early and then revisited within each topic where possible. Thus, we introduced participatory M & E early on and then examined the monitoring of community organising, gender strategies and networking, to name a few.

Another way in which I negotiate the curriculum with students is by handing the running of participatory workshops in the last four sessions of the subject over to them (i.e. almost one-third of class contact time). Students form their own groups and choose a topic for their workshop session. This in itself brings a great deal of diversity and creativity into the subject as students negotiate and follow their particular interests or passions. It also gives them a chance to plan and facilitate a participatory workshop on their chosen topic. Consistent areas of interest have been community development and health, Aboriginal health, migrants and refugees and conflicts and disasters. Sometimes student groups have thrown themselves into the chosen topics with the enthusiasm and creativity of new converts and engaged us with exciting workshops on microfinance, slum sanitation, theatre for development and fair-trade.

Reversals of roles: Students as ‘experts’

A common principle of participatory development holds that the development worker is not an “expert” bringing the benefit of her knowledge and authority to the community, but rather should see local community members as the “experts” on their own local conditions, resources, knowledge, culture, values, priorities for change etc. From this perspective the development worker establishes a relationship based on dialogue, partnership and facilitation. Similarly, critical pedagogy advocates avoiding “banking education” by similar reversals. The teacher steps down from the role of expert and acts as a co-learner and facilitator, engaging the learners in dialogue starting from their knowledge and expertise. This is one of the most powerful reasons I have found for abandoning conventional ‘stand and deliver’ lectures. Lectures (and most conventional tutorials) devalue and silence the knowledge, experience and expertise that students bring and marginalise opportunities to draw upon that knowledge as a learning resource in the classroom.

For example, about one-third of students studying international community development at Monash University are international students from ‘developing countries’. They bring first-hand knowledge and experience of poverty and development in their home countries. Some are already development professionals in government agencies, multilateral agencies or NGOs with a great deal of experience and expertise ‘on the ground’. Others come with internship experience or undergraduate development project experience. The Australian citizens who join the program are most usually young people who have travelled overseas and become interested in development issues through their travels. Many have previously joined international volunteering programs and gained some experience that way. In other words, virtually all students come to the course with first hand knowledge and experience relating to development.

One approach that I have found very effective in highlighting student expertise as a starting point for learning in the class is to conduct an inventory of student “assets,” drawing on the work of Kretzmann and McKnight (1993). I usually do this activity very early in the course as it provides an engaging way to introduce students to asset-based and sustainable livelihood approaches to community development, at the same time as getting to know each others’ “assets”. The basic framework is presented in Discovering Community Power, a workbook from the ABCD Institute (2005); students work in small groups to conduct an inventory of their individual experience, skills and talents, their social networks, clubs and organisations, the institutions (such as universities, hospitals, media etc) to which they have a connection, as well as other local assets that they might be able to mobilise for a particular community development purpose. The outcomes of the activity are always surprising and enlightening about the depth and diversity of what students can contribute.

It is not only important to validate the great diversity and depth of individual and collective experience that students bring to the class, but to find ways to share knowledge and useful learnings with each other. I have found that facilitating participatory workshops is an effective way to draw upon student expertise as a resource but also to challenge students to analyse and apply their existing knowledge and expertise in new ways and thus extend it. One approach that is very effective is to use as often as possible the popular education strategy to start from the lived experience of students/participants and analyse and look for patterns in that experience (Arnold et al. 1991). For example, in examining cross-cultural issues in community development, we discussed students’ previous cross-cultural experience and analysed the insights that could be gained. The class broke into small groups according to whether they had some experience in Aboriginal communities, in travelling overseas and working in or visiting other cultures in the ‘South’, or as international students encountering Australian culture. An important aspect was the challenge to students to develop mechanisms or strategies for overcoming some of the issues or problems they identified. The outcomes in terms of practical ideas from the class were impressive. Students developed a wide range of creative strategies after discussing and analysing their own experience. Giving them a copy of UNESCO’s (2001) Culturally sensitive project design and implementation manual at the end of the session was almost a formality – they had already come up with most of the strategies advocated in the manual.

Student development of theory

As Taylor and Fransman (2003) write, “A basic concept of learning and teaching participation is that individuals participate in generating their own personal theories which are relevant to their own context”. I have found that working with students to challenge them to analyse and develop their own theory is a very effective form of participatory learning, building upon and analysing previous experience and knowledge and engaging them in the production of knowledge, not just its consumption. For example, early in the subject I usually run a short session on “What do we mean by ‘community’ in community development”? We start by brainstorming as a class all of the different examples of community that come to mind and especially the types of community that might be the ‘target’ of community development. Then they divide into groups of four, analyse the lists that the class developed and draft a definition of community that would encompass that list. Bearing in mind that these are postgraduate level students, many of whom have studied some social science, they consistently produce coherent and incisive definitions similar to those found in Dictionaries of Sociology. I could have simply given them a textbook definition at the start of the session, but I feel certain that they have gained a greater critical insight through such a process.

Dialogic and problem-posing education

Problem-posing in popular education generally aims to challenge community members to analyse and engage with the social forces constraining their lives (Freire 1972, Arnold et al 1991). In my own practice in the university classroom, I have tended to interpret the dialogic approach more in terms of Freire’s proposal that the educator step down from the role of expert and approach learners as equals, posing problems and questions to engage them as participants in the process of investigating, analysing and producing knowledge. This is more in line with approaches to participatory and dialogic learning advocated by Shor (1987), Vella (2002), Pretty and his colleagues (1995) and even influential health educators such as Werner and Bower (1982).

Problem-posing and dialogue underpin every session in the subject, especially by the third year when I had abandoned conventional lectures altogether (and other examples in this article also illustrate the approach). But, as Jane Vella (2002) says, to make the problem-posing approach effective, it is critical to provide students with appropriate resources and tools to address the specific problems that are posed. I have also found that problem-posing needs careful preparation, good facilitation and attention to summarising and drawing out conclusions to make sense of the session as a whole.

So, for example, the problem-posing approach is very effective in engaging students in a workshop on community organising. Prior to the workshop session, students read ‘Investing in organisations’ from Capacity-building: an approach to people-centred development (Eade 1997) and a case study of local organising in Reasons for Hope (Krishna & Uphoff 1997) to introduce them to some theory and practice. After a brief introductory discussion about the importance of community organisations as institutions to enable participation, I pose the key question of the workshop, “What are the aspects of an effective organisation?” I ask students to start with our own direct experience and analyse an organisation that they have been involved with, whether an NGO, church group, professional association, student association. Then I ask them to analyse what makes it an effective organisation and try to identify at least two or three aspects. After this, I ask students to work in small groups of four to consolidate their individual reflection and broader reading in community organising by developing as a group a list of ‘key capacities needed by an effective and viable community development organisation?’ (this is adapted from Gubbels & Ross 2000). In doing so in a recent workshop, the class identified all of the key capacities needed by an effective community organisation that are presented in the literature (for example Fowler 1997, Gubbels & Ross 2000).

‘Learning by doing’ goes hand-in-hand with the problem-posing approach and is a key aspect of the approach to dialogic education advocated by Vella (2002) and in participatory learning and action (Pretty et al 1995). An emphasis on learning by doing in the classroom helps us move away from lecture-based approaches with students passively listening and reading PowerPoint slides, to an approach where students are more actively engaged in tasks which challenge them to learn and practice skills. It also forces us to think more clearly about what skills, knowledge and behaviour will be useful for students to acquire and be able to apply.

Learning some of the techniques and skills of Participatory Rural Appraisal provides a good example; I give prominence to PRA as it dovetails with asset-based community development and its principles of valuing and drawing on the knowledge and priorities of local people fits well with the overall principles emphasised in the subject. To introduce participatory mapping as a key approach in PRA, students map their own neighbourhoods individually and compare the kinds of information that they have been able to encode. Then, in groups, they examine and analyse examples of community maps produced in actual PRA fieldwork. In the session on wealth and well-being ranking, I briefly introduce and explain the approach and then ask students to actually apply the method with a set of household data from my own fieldwork in a village in rural Thailand (these PLA training approaches are from Pretty et al 1995). In introducing matrix ranking, I set the students the task of pair-wise ranking two alternatives meaningful to them as they were identified earlier in discussions about an NGO Help Educate Children. This task-based approach has proved very effective and engaging for the students, partly because it introduces some of the key methods and strategies, but it invariably provokes students to reflect on the purpose and usefulness of PRA techniques while they are actually doing them. They also quickly see the possibility for adaptability and diversity in the way the techniques are interpreted and applied, again because all of the small groups in the classroom invariably do things slightly differently.

Participatory games and theatre

One of the surprising insights for me in exploring participatory learning in the university classroom over the last few years has been the importance and effectiveness of games and ‘energisers’. Using games and enjoyable physical activities to energise participants and lighten their mood is a given in the literature and manuals on training and participatory workshops (Chambers 2002, Pretty et al 1995, McCarthy 2004). But this literature rarely discusses the multiple levels and ways in which games and energisers contribute to engaging participants in learning and relating to each other. In other words, their significance and usefulness in participatory learning goes far beyond simply waking sluggish participants up and generating some physical energy.

I usually include two energisers within each three-hour workshop, usually to commence the session and after the ‘half-time’ break. Some of my favourites are fruit salad (Chambers 2002), conductor and orchestra (Boal 2002), follow the leader (McCarthy 2004), building a tower, and “where do you stand?” (Hancock and Blaby 1989). Another good recent source is the manual produced by International HIV/AIDS Alliance (2002). Such games and physical activities introduce a sense of fun and informality into the classroom, helping to ease tensions and relax participants as they prepare to contribute and participate in new ways often unfamiliar within university classrooms. They bring emotion – usually laughter and fun – back into the classroom, but I think this also paves the way for other emotions to surface in the workshop. They help to break down self-consciousness, shyness and other psychological and emotional barriers to students contributing wholeheartedly and speaking out in class.

Furthermore, games can be very effective in breaking out of conventional expectations about university classrooms and the roles of academics and students. They are an enjoyable way of handing over leadership roles to students as a forerunner for the more serious topics to follow. Run well, many games and energisers provide opportunities for bringing even the shyest and most reserved students to the centre and creating non-threatening opportunities early-on for them to act in the role of facilitator. Finally, energisers and games serve to get participants interacting in playful but often challenging ways, thus helping to create and build relationships in the classroom and a collective sense of support for everyone’s participation. They help to create a sense of community and solidarity.

One way I have found of reminding students that fun and games do not mean frivolity has been to explicitly analyse the usefulness of each energiser or activity after doing it. Even though I briefly explain the purpose of every energiser or game beforehand, afterwards I ask participants “Why do an activity like this in a workshop or training session? What purposes do you think it serves?” Concluding a game with questions like this has helped students step outside the activity again and reflect on its role in learning and group work.

Organising and networking for empowerment

There is a radical strand to participatory development which, for me, is associated with the concept of empowerment: working with people to create organisations that can represent them and mobilise people for collective action lies at the heart of community development strategies. Community organisations enable and coordinate mutual cooperation, assistance and pooling of resources; they create opportunities for learning and developing skills, venues for the delivery of services and forums for participatory democracy (Eade 1997).

In the first year of the community development subject, I threw out a challenge to the class: would some of them like to work on setting up an international development student association as their final assessment task? Three students decided to take up the challenge. Over the course of a semester, they consulted with other students in the international development program, investigated how to establish a registered association with the support of the university student union, organised meetings and elections of office bearers, set up a website and signed up a broad membership base. Importantly, the Monash International Student Association took on a life of its own and has continued to sustain itself with new activities, members and office bearers. It is not necessarily a means of empowerment, but it has proved a useful way for the international development students to socialise, build and sustain networks of communication and mutual support. The students continue to organise events and sustain the association.

Conclusion

This paper has outlined a number of strategies that I have found effective in engaging university students in participatory and dialogic learning, including negotiating the curriculum, making students the experts, challenging them to develop their own theory, problem-posing and learning by doing, and games and energisers. Both formal evaluations and informal feedback indicate that the unit has been well received by the majority of students over the last three years. Many students valued highly the opportunity to learn from each other. Students also reported that they learned a lot through having to design and facilitate a workshop themselves, rather than acting as ‘mere’ participants. Another indicator has been the quality and energy of participation: careful preparation and good facilitation ensured that everyone participates and contributes meaningfully. Outcomes have also been a good indicator of success: student workshops have consistently been informative and engaging. One contradiction for me has been that, although invited to negotiate alternative forms of assessment such as project proposals, most students fall back on conventional essays for their major assessment.2

From my own perspective, stepping down from the institutional role of university lecturer as “expert” into the role of facilitator and co-learner has been liberating. Like a community development field worker, I have had to put into practice and extend my pedagogical and facilitation skills – to see ‘what works and what doesn’t’. Every semester and every class is different and offers new challenges, as student backgrounds, priorities and ways of working as a group differ. I have learned as much from students over the last three years as I have from all the books and texts I’ve read.

References

ABCD Institute 2005 Discovering Community Power: A Guide to Mobilizing Local Assets and Your Organizations Capacity, available from Asset-Based Community Development Institute

http://www.northwestern.edu/ipr/abcd.html

ActionAid International 1996 REFLECT Mother manual, London: ActionAid. Available at http://www.reflect-action.org/

Arnold, R. et al. 1991 Educating for a change, Ontario: Between the Lines & Doris Marshall Institute.

Cooke, B. & Kothari, U. 2001 Participation: the new tyranny?

Boal, A. 2002. Games for Actors and Non-Actors. London: Routledge.

Carr, W. and Kemmis, S. 1986. Becoming critical: education, knowledge, and action research London Falmer Press.

Chambers, R. 1997. Whose reality counts? putting the first last. London: Intermediate technology Publications.

Chambers, R. 2002. Participatory workshops: a sourcebook of 21 sets of ideas and activities. London: Earthscan.

Crowther, J., Galloway, V. and Martin, I. (eds.) 2005. Popular Education: Engaging the Academy. Leicester: NIACA.

Darder, A., Baltodano, M. and Torres, R. D. (eds.) 2003. Critical pedagogy reader. New York: RoutledgeFalmer.

Eade, D. 1997. Capacity-building : an approach to people-centred development. Oxford: Oxfam.

Fowlder, A. 1997 Striking a Balance: A guide to enhancing the effectiveness of non-governmental organisations in international development, London: Earthscan.

Freire, P. 1972. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin.

Gubbels, P. & Koss, C. 2000 From the Roots Up: Strengthening Organizational Capacity through Guided Self-Assessment, World Neighbors Field Guide, World Neighbors, Oklahoma.

Hancock, K. and Blaby, B. 1989. People interacting: self awareness, communication, social skills & problem solving, Melbourne: Nelson.

Hope, A. & Timmel, S. 1995 Training for Transformation: A Handbook for Community Workers, Revised edition, Gweru, Zimbabwe: Mambo Press.

International HIV/AIDS Alliance 2002 100 ways to energise groups: games to use in workshops, meetings and the community, available at http://www.aidsalliance.org/sw7452.asp

Kretzmann, J. & McKnight, J. 1993 Building Communities from the Inside Out: A path towards finding and mobilizing a community’s assets, Asset-Based Community Development Institute, Evanston IL.

Krishna, A. and Uphoff, N. (eds.) 1997. Reasons for hope: instructive experiences in rural development.

McCarthy, J. 2004. Enacting Participatory Development: Theatre-Based Techniques. London: Earthscan.

Mukherjee, N. 2002. Participatory learning and action: with 100 field methods. New Delhi: Concept Pub. Co.

Nelson, N. & S. Wright (eds.) 1995 Power and participatory development.

Pretty, J. N. et al. 1995. Trainer’s guide for participatory learning and action. London: International Institute for Environment and Development.

Hickey, S. & Mohan, G. 2004 Participation, from tyranny to transformation? exploring new approaches to participation in development.

Shor, I. (ed.) 1987. Freire for the Classroom. Heinemann.

Taylor, P. and Fransman, J. 2004. ‘Learning and teaching participation: exploring the role of Higher Learning Institutions as agents of development and social change’, IDS Working Paper 219.

Taylor, P. and Fransman, J. 2003. ‘Learning and teaching participation in institutions of higher learning: overview’, PLA Notes, Volume 48.

UNDP 1997 Empowering People: A Guidebook to Participation

http://www.undp.org/cso/resource/toolkits/empowering/intro.html

UNESCO (2001), Culturally sensitive project design and implementation

Vella, J. 1989 Learning to Teach: Training of Trainers for Community Development, Washington: Save the Children & OEF.

Vella, J. 2002 Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach: The power of Dialogue in Educating Adults, Revised Ed., San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Wallerstein, N. 1987. ‘Problem-posing education: Freire’s method of transformation’, in I. Shor (ed.), Freire for the Classroom: Heinemann.

Werner, D. & Bower, B. (1982) Helping Health Workers Learn: A Book of Methods, aids, and ideas for instructors at the village level, Hesperian Foundation, Palo Alto.

Appendix: IDA4210

Community Development in a Globalising World

– Unit Outline 2007 (Each session is three hours.)

FOUNDATIONS

• Introduction, needs analysis, and negotiation of curriculum

• Potted history of community development – Perspectives on Social change & empowerment in a globalising world

METHODS AND PRACTICE

• Asset-based approaches and Sustainable Livelihoods

• Analysis, Planning & Appraisal: Participatory Rural Appraisal –

Social mapping, social scoring and ranking

• Intro to Monitoring & evaluating community development (& following wks)

• Grassroots organising: Establishing, managing & supporting Community-Based Organisations

• Health & community development

• Gender & women’s participation

• Partnerships, networking and social capital

• Cross-cultural perspectives & strategies

• Field trip: Jesuit Social Services, community development with housing commission residents, Fitzroy

• Student group-lead session

• Student group-lead session

• Student group-lead session

• Student group-lead session

• Student group-lead session

• Student group-lead session

Endnotes

1 Nevertheless, it also has become a highly contested and often ambiguous concept. Cooke & Kothari’s (2001) book, Participation: the new tyranny?, is a recent example of a long history of significant critiques of participatory development.

2 Some of the other papers in this special edition present some excellent ideas for integrating assessment more successfully into participatory or dialogic learning.