Designing for New Members of Parliament
by Ann Blyberg
Executive Director ~ International Human
Rights Internship Program
Institute of International Education
In the fall, I designed a learning program on a Human Rights
Perspective to Budgeting for new Members of Parliament in
Sudan. The group, already starting around 30 people, expanded
by “popular demand” to 45-50 (44 stayed the
full three days). The program design used a Dialogue Education
Approach. I faced the problem you raise—how do you do Dialogue
Education in a larger group? I focused a lot on small group
work, of course, and I tried to limit sharing with the whole
group to a few people each time. However, I didn’t do the
teaching myself, but involved two other people—neither
of whom were trained in Dialogue Education, but both of whom
have experienced something akin to this same program before.
The participants were not used to a participatory approach,
so it’s difficult to separate out how the results were
the effect of that reality, and how much was the size of the
group. The two teachers reported being exhausted at the end
of each day, trying to keep the program on track (participants
had lots of comments, some on the mark, some wandering well
off!).
However, I have also been told that the energy level was
high throughout, as was the involvement of the participants.
This would argue that it can work—although perhaps not
as maximally as might be the case with a smaller group. I did
not have as many kinesthetic exercises as I might otherwise
have had—in part because I knew that would be precedent-setting
for most participants, and because having a large group get
up and move around a lot could make time-control out of the
question! The UN mission in Sudan, which requested the program,
did not have the budget to bring in more than two teachers.
That is definitely one recommendation I would make—keep
the number of teachers proportional to the size of the group.
The larger the number, the more teachers, to make it more possible
to break the group up into more workable sizes.
