Document(s) 12 of 16

Introduction

How can we move toward the institutional and field practices that reflect the radical social and political change inherent in participatory practices? How do we, as practitioners, incorporate participatory action into our everyday (and often institutional and bureaucratic) lives, in the same way we expect villagers to incorporate participatory action into theirs? Are we prepared to challenge our own status quo institutions and power brokers, as we expect others to challenge theirs? Can we "walk the talk"?

We have to take care to ensure that critical and thoughtful practice takes precedence over fashion. It is easy to label something participatory to please funding agencies, ease our consciences, and impress our peers. We can fool our peers some of the time, the funding agencies much of the time, and ourselves all of the time, but it is very difficult to fool the people in the communities and villages within which we work. They know when we speak one way and act the opposite. So do our co-workers and our students. It is not easy to engage in development communication practice that is participatory. Participatory development challenges inequitable relationships of power. We cannot claim to practice it in the field if we do not practice it in our offices, in our classrooms, in our communities, and in our homes.

Training for Participatory Development Communication

How many of us participate in the kinds of grassroots organizations that we hope our training programs will help to spark — organizations such as food co-ops, worker's cooperatives, credit unions, community gardens, advocacy groups, and other grassroots social and political change organizations? Maybe we claim that we do not have the time, or that our official positions prevent us from working in the trenches. If that is the case, where do we gain the experience and the "school of hard knocks" credentials required to understand the complexities, dangers, facilitation skills, and subtle human relations techniques of participatory action? Without the learned wisdom that comes from experience, how can we even begin to design training programs for others?

When we think of communication training, we often think only of technical training. For example, if we are working with video, we tend to think of training that addresses video camera and video editing techniques. In the field of development communication, most of our training programs focus on technology. The human, social, political, economic, and development process elements involved in development communication are often given little, if any attention. The production of media products tends to take precedence over development communication process.

The shift to thinking about development communication as a tool for empowerment and social and political change is new, and we are only beginning to keep track of the lessons we are learning from practice in the field. When we discuss participatory development communication training, the questions that guide our program planning have little to do with technology. Instead, we discuss issues such as conflict resolution, techniques for dealing with "not-so-participatory" petty bureaucrats, politicians, and local gatekeepers, and strategies for gaining an understanding of cultural dynamics and community politics.

Participatory development communication training requires significant attention to human relations practices such as group facilitation and group dynamics. Learning contexts need to be flexible and participatory. We know that learning contexts (place, time, character, relationship dynamics, etc.) help to determine the quality of the learning experience. We also know that learning recall occurs more easily in contexts that are similar to the original learning context. This information is particularly important for training in participatory development communication.

If our training programs are based on bottom-up, teamwork, participant-driven approaches, the program value learner initiative, and learner determination of content, then the learning context will, in and of itself, provide many of the important learning moments. Top-down, instructor-as-expert learning approaches lack the human relation processes that encourage learner understanding of participation. In other words, the training experience must reflect the field.

Field-based training for participatory development communication is far superior to classroom training. Even the technological training that accompanies participatory training is best done in the field. Learners learn best through practice, field experience, reflection on field experience, and learner-initiated requests for instructor demonstrations and content delivery. As trainers, we must try to respect learners' struggles to understand the relationship between theory and practice. We can create a context that helps bring learning moments to the fore, but we cannot "teach" those critical learning moments. We must enable learners to experience those moments in their own way, in their own time.

Field experience and reflection on field experience is the most useful methodology. Learners can sit in a classroom to learn the camera and sound techniques appropriate for interviewing, or they can develop their own camera and sound styles in the field. Tapes can be played back and critiqued among peers, and learners can use these reflective periods to gain insights into the human dimensions of their work, such as alternative interviewing and facilitation styles, as well the technological dimensions such as camera positions, lighting considerations, and audio requirements. The instructor can use these opportunities to inject terminology and new techniques into peer discussions.

With a flexible and open style and a field-based approach, an instructor can cover all the material that might be covered in an expert-based classroom session, but do so with the assurance that the learners will actually use what they learn in field situations. In addition, much more field-relevant content will be covered. For example, in field-based training session in Bolivia, one of the authors noted that university students in a local communication program gained an appreciation and understanding of participatory development communication quickly, and were able to suggest creative methods for transcending the interferences of local gatekeeping officials in order to engage in dialogue with the peasant populations. As a result, the students were able to create an effective "Fogo Process" intervention that enabled two geographically separated communities to share community development strategies, animal rearing techniques, and cooperative enterprise ideas.

In contrast, learners who had only classroom-based experience, tended to want to create slick videotapes focusing on the "problems" of the rural poor. As the field-based learners discovered, these tapes were viewed with cynicism, and sometimes strong anger by the people depicted in them. "Why are they only showing the negative parts of our lives?" the participants asked. "Why don't they show our youth club, our new football field, or the health care centre we built?" Field-based learning moments like this are incredibly rich and cannot be replicated with classroom techniques.

Instructor experience and qualifications are also important for creating useful field-based learning contexts. At the risk of stating the obvious, instructors with no experience in participatory development make poor participatory development communication instructors. As obvious as this seems, it is not uncommon to see highly skilled video production technicians with no development experience hired to train extension workers and community development workers in "participatory development communication." Despite their technical skill, these people can do more harm than good, especially when the cumbersome, and often inappropriate, cultural baggage of "correct" production techniques for mainstream television are brought to the village level.

The best instructors may have only minimal technical skill, but possess a great deal of field experience in participatory development. An instructor's technical skills can be learned in collaboration with trainees, and this can provide the context for a mutually supportive and beneficial learning environment. The fewer preconceptions the instructor has on "correct" production techniques, the better. Production techniques are almost always culturally defined, with no objective basis other than cultural and professional norms. The instructor must, however, come to the learners with a thorough understanding of human relations, group dynamics, conflict resolution, group facilitation, and team problem-solving approaches to learning. Such instructors may be difficult to find, and they will likely not be found in professional media institutions or training schools.

Summary of Working Group Discussion

Our working group's assignment was to make recommendations regarding the training needs in participatory development communication and related research activities.

From our discussion, it was quite clear that prescribing specific methodologies and activities would be a mistake. Canadian participants felt especially uncomfortable about recommending specific actions for use in a context in which they were outsiders. As a result, our discussion group recommended that development communicators ask themselves a variety of questions before planning or initiating participatory development communication training.

The following questions were derived from our development field experience. Participatory development communication training requires continuous reflection on practice and results. These questions come from our reflections on the lessons that we have learned in the field. We believe that asking these questions at the beginning of a participatory development communication project, will sensitize practitioners to the wide variety of issues that need to be considered carefully before training programs are planned. The most important talent of a development communication professional is the ability to ask critical and appropriate questions. To paraphrase Voltaire, judge people by their questions rather than by their answers.

The questions were categorized into six different types:

• key question;
• critical questions;
• questions about issues with practical considerations;
• questions about practice;
• questions about setting training objectives; and
• questions about trainee selection.

What are the existing indigenous communication efforts, systems, and training mechanisms?

This question is key. In answering it, training planners might discover that there are existing programs or mechanisms currently in place and capable of delivering, or assisting with the delivery of, the desired participatory development communication training program. Answering this question might lead to the discovery that there are indigenous techniques and training opportunities providing better programs than new programs that might be brought in from the outside.

This question enables us to assess the current context of participatory development communication and reduces the risk of "re-inventing the wheel," and delivering inappropriate programs. It enables us to identify potential indigenous partners and collaborators, and it helps us recognize indigenous development communication activities that might go unnoticed.

Critical Questions

• Why are we involved in participatory development communication?
• Within what topic areas do we want to train or conduct research?
• From where do our resources (money, support, labour, etc.) come?
• Which is more important to us: participatory development communication process, or product?
• What ethical issues should we consider when deciding the "who, what, where, when, and why" questions related to our interventions?
• What kinds of research can be attached to our training activities, particularly those that value process over product, or participatory-action research over quantitative research?
• How can we improve our abilities to be self-critical and reflective with regard to our development communication practices?
• How can we change our tendency toward "top-down" thinking, especially when so many of us work within "top-down" bureaucracies and institutions?

• What duration is best for participatory development communication activities and projects? Should our programs run for weeks or decades? How does program duration correspond to program evaluation?
• How do we work together and build collaborative partnerships across organizational and cultural lines, with regard to program process, content, and adaptation of content and process to context?
• How do we maximize our cost-benefit ratio? To what extent should a grassroots, participatory development communication program involve the mainstream mass media to maximize the cost-benefit ratio?
• What media (in the largest sense of the word) are already available?
• How do we deal with:
  • intercultural differences?
  • intracultural differences?
  • power issues?
  • conflicts?
  • conflict resolution?

• How do we (can we) facilitate a grassroots, participatory approach and work with gatekeepers?
• How can we transcend prior "top-down" learning, attitudes, and values of facilitators, planners, gatekeepers, evaluators, funding agencies, and other stakeholders (including ourselves)?
• How do we ensure "sustainability?" What do we mean by "sustainability," and from whose perspective do we describe it? From the perspective of the participants, or of the funding agencies and evaluators?
• Given a context of resource restriction, how can we make participatory development communication more cost-effective?
• Should we compensate participants, and if so, how?
• What are the criteria for selecting trainees and participants?
• Who is going to do the training and research? Grassroots leaders? Indigenous (largely urban-based) NGOs? Western consultants? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each of these cohorts of trainers? What are the intercultural and intracultural issues we will face?
• How will we deal with gender issues with regard to participatory development communication programming, training, and research?
• How will we generate demand for training? Is there an existing demand for training? If not, why are we proceeding?
• How do we explain the "participatory" approach to participants? How do we explain the potential dangers of this approach to participants, especially with regard to disturbing power balances and the status quo?
• How can trainers and facilitators learn about local community dynamics and power structures?

• What, exactly, do we expect to happen as a result of our interventions? For example, do we hope to:
  • enhance participatory communication capacity within communities or nations?
  • enhance basic education?
  • enhance "development?"
  • create opportunities for empowerment and social change?
• How important are social and political change goals to our program? If they are not important, why are we using a participatory approach, an approach that always tends to involve direct or indirect challenges to existing power relationships? Are we using a "participatory" approach because it is trendy? Or are we committed to working through the complexities and challenges of a participatory approach?
• Do we give people objectives? Or do we assist people in setting their own objectives? If the latter, how do we relate this to the demands of funding agencies and evaluators who ask us for predetermined objectives and well-crafted "logical framework analyses" and other project planning documents before we begin?
• How do we design evaluation methods based on objectives derived from grassroots, participatory approaches? Should our evaluation methods also involve grassroots, participatory approaches? If so, who evaluates: outsiders, participants, or a combination of both?
• How do we ensure balanced internal and external evaluations?

• Who are the trainees? (This is not an exhaustive list.)
  • rural or urban?
  • local grassroots development workers?
  • teachers?
  • both genders? (Do we take a "Gender and Development" [GAD] approach?)
  • peer educators?
  • community leaders?
  • youth leaders?
  • community development and extension workers?
  • religious leaders?
  • communication "professionals"?
  • literacy educators?
  • health practitioners?
  • media producers?
  • policymakers and government officials?
• Which of our identified trainees can also work as trainers? Are we fully utilizing the resource people and skills available to us?
• How do we recognize and incorporate the different training needs and requirements for diverse groups of trainees?

Conclusion

Document(s) 12 of 16