“Dialogue Education was born in the favellas of Brazil, the villages of Tanzania and the streets of Bangkok. It was called many things in many languages, but the central theory was respect for adult learners and their experience and the basic recognition was that the colonial processes of education did not apply” (Jane Vella, 2002, Dialogue Education at Work, p. 227).
Although Dialogue Education has subsequently been applied to a wide variety of topics and contexts, it continues to be used by numerous individuals and organizations who work in community development, both in the Global South (i.e. the “Two-Thirds World” of Asia, Africa and Latin America) and in excluded communities here in North America. These include: Habitat for Humanity International, Freedom from Hunger, the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee, World Vision, the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, LISC and many others.
At the 2006 Dialogue Education Institute in Montpelier, Vermont, about 14 workshop participants and I had an opportunity to discuss how Dialogue Education has informed our work of community development. What follows are some of my reflections on three questions that explored in that conversation:
As you read, I invite you to note any additional insights and questions that you have and to continue the dialogue on line with me via the Voices in Dialogue listserv.
- How does Dialogue Education differ from and inform other approaches to learning and mobilization that have been used in community development?
- What makes Dialogue Education particularly useful in these contexts?
- How do we ensure that this Dialogue Education continues to be an alternative to the “colonial processes of education” and that it doesn’t become just another apolitical methodology?
1) Dialogue Education: Another Tool or a Toolbox?
The community development toolbox includes many popular / adult non-formal education approaches that can be used for conducting community research, analyzing power dynamics, community mobilization, capacity building and evaluating projects. These include:
For some, Dialogue Education is simply another useful technique or tool in this toolbox; however, for others, Dialogue Education serves primarily as a means of applying any of the above techniques. For example, you could create a Seven Steps of Design framework that would include a Learning Tasks where the participants would use a Community Mapping technique to note the location of their houses and sources of drinking water. Or you might use Appreciative questions within a community mobilization meeting design as a way of honouring the previous experiences of the participants and to create a positive energy for the next phases of the planning. Alternatively, specific principles and practices of Dialogue Education will surely inform how practitioners use other approaches.
So, is it a tool, or the toolbox itself? Hmm….I’m not so sure it matters, provided that you use the right approach for the job at hand and as long as your choice of How supports the goals of the community. But what do you think?
2) Dialogue Education’s Utility in Community Development
In deciding what tool to use, it might be helpful to reflect briefly on what makes Dialogue Education particularly well-suited for community development work.
A) Dialogue Education supports Inductive, Experiential and Deductive Learning
Many of the approaches that I listed above are excellent for drawing out the learners’ experience and knowledge to then develop a common theory of knowledge (Inductive Learning). They also include a lot of good Experiential Learning exercises (e.g. Simulations, Case Studies, games) that can provide the learners with an opportunity to experience a situation during the workshop and reflect upon it collectively.
However, in my experience, development practitioners often lack ways to teach new content (Deductive Learning) in a participatory manner. As such, when they need to teach or train on a topic (e.g. HIV/AIDS) they either:
a) Fall back on the monologue of lectures and presentations -- and then throw in some “energizers” to wake the participants up for the next round of lectures and presentations;
or
b) Assume that all knowledge can be drawn out from the participants through inductive learning activities.
In the former approach (a), the facilitators risk inadvertently reinforcing the power dynamics of the old monologue mode of experts imparting information to passive recipients.
In the latter approach (b), they risk drawing out what might be incorrect information (e.g. that you can get HIV/AIDS from a handshake) or they can waste a lot of time “fishing” for the right answers with the “bait” of leading questions. (Think how often you read in facilitator’s guidebooks that you should “get the participants to say X”). And of course, if this fails to catch the right kind of fish, the facilitator can always go back to “Option a” and tell them the right answer!
While this kind of “facipulation” may be interactive and participatory, it is not respectful of the learners’ time and capacity to learn, nor does it do much to shift the power from the facilitator to the participants. Instead, I’d recommend following the axiom of “Don’t ask what you can tell; tell in dialogue”and present new information to the learners in manageable chunks, and then invite them to go deeper and make their own meaning of it through Praxis.
As well, the Four A/I learning cycle--Anchor (Inductive), Add (Deductive), Apply (Implementation) and Away (Integration)--can also provide a straight-forward framework to include Inductive, Deductive and Experiential learning in one learning task.
B) Dialogue Education provides structure for participatory learning
Another common problem that I’ve seen in community development training workshops is the assumption that participatory learning means that the facilitator should not do any advanced planning and structure. Instead, they should just show up and do whatever the participants want to at the time.
While the intention of honouring the decision making authority of the participants is good, it often results in ambiguous learning results, participation for participation’s sake (not Engagement), poor time management and confusion over roles.
That does not mean that we must always “march” the participants through our design. There are always times when you need to set aside your design in favour of an unplanned discussion or even an entire new task. But my general guideline is to only do so if my improvised approach can better help meet the agreed upon Achievement-Based Objectives or to address an emergent learning need. And as always, being responsive and flexible to a learner’s needs should be tempered by the principle of maintaining Accountability to all the learners – and not just the most vocal ones who want to deviate from the agreed upon program.
C) Respect + Safety = Inclusion
Most community development practitioners are very aware of the challenges of cross-cultural communication, and understand the need to respect others who may have different cultural and religious assumptions. Still, Dialogue Education’s focus on Respect and Safety are helpful reminders of how cultural differences must be attended to in the nuts and bolts of a learning event.
“Respect” as we discuss in the Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach course, “must be felt as well as given.” It is not sufficient for me to think that I have demonstrated respect for someone. It must be felt by that participant in the terms of their own culture. In a post-colonial context where people have been told (and may now believe) that their culture is not as worthy as the Western/White culture, affirmation of the value of their local culture is critical.
My favourite example of this is Linda Gershuny’s chapter in Jane Vella’s Dialogue Education at Work. In a workshop with teachers in Haiti, Linda and her colleagues used a warm-up where they printed several Haitian proverbs on strips of paper, and cut them up into three pieces. They then asked the participants to select one fragment, match up the pieces and describe what that proverb meant for them in their own situation. This was a great way to start the workshop with a validation of the learners’ own cultural framework and worldview.
Safety--which takes into consideration “anything that would keep a participant from fully taking part in the learning process”--can involve a wide array of not-so-obvious factors in a cross cultural learning context, including:
- how you sit (tuck your feet under you in Thailand!);
- whether you make eye contact (yes in White North America, no in some indigenous cultures);
- the importance of your first contact with the learners (greet everyone personally in Tanzania before you start the workshop!);
- how fast you speak (especially if the participants are working in a second language)
- whether you have men and women learning together in the same workshop (Not advisable in some West African Muslim communities, I’m told).
By encouraging us to think of these issues from the perspective of the learner and her culture, and to design with their Safety in mind, Dialogue Education provides some useful reminders about how we can make our learning truly inclusive.
In a workshop that I facilitated in Mozambique two years ago, for example, I discovered that two of the participants from Angola spoke only Portuguese, and unfortunately, my Portuguese was non-existent (somehow my English LNRA had failed to pick this up, and no one had thought to tell me. Go figure!). So, in order to provide safety for these learners, we agreed that they would sit next to a bilingual speaker for elbow translation, that they’d do small group work in Portuguese-only groups, and that a bilingual participant would provide periodic summaries of the conversation in Portuguese for all to hear–which in turned helped all the bilingual participants to synthesize their learning in their own language.
D) An Antidote to“Auditory Privilege”
Throughout the developing world, you encounter schools and universities that have relied primarily on rote teaching and lectures as the predominant means of learning. As such, I have sometimes encountered scepticism about how well Dialogue Education can work for people who have graduated from these kinds of learning institutions: “This is so different from how people here normally learn! How long does it take for participants to get used to learning this way?” “In my experience,” I reply, “about three tasks”.
Certainly there are cultures where auditory / oral learning approaches are more common, but I am not aware of any research that suggests that people in different cultures don’t learn through a variety of learning styles (VAK) and domains (CAP). And while it may be that these teaching styles have been used to meet the needs of non-literate learners, I wonder if the predominance of these learning formats even in educated circles isn’t also a function of:
- Deliberate colonial policies that were intended to restrict the level and quality of education that “natives” could obtain so that they would fulfill certain, less privileged, socio-economic roles;
- A reliance on expert-driven academic and ecclesial models of learning;
- A lack of resources for education due to cutbacks to education funding (themselves a function of Northern-imposed, Structural Adjustment Policies);
- An unnatural selection process that occurs as non-auditory learners are knocked out of an educational system that does not meet their needs.
As such, Dialogue Education’s emphasis on catering to the needs of different Learning Styles and Learning Domains is a helpful reminder to those of us working in community development that we need to be inclusive of a broad array of learning approaches in all of the learning tasks that we create.
Moreover we know that learning is most effective when it is active and affective, and if you gradually introduce more active techniques through the design (à la the principles of Sequence and Safety), people generally do warm to the approach and find it a welcome change to most of the workshops they have attended.
NB: At the same time, as our colleagues in Laos have been pointing out recently, we must be careful not to replace this Auditory Privilege with another word-based format that excludes people who may not be formally literate. Please see the Annex for a list of excellent suggestions by Jan Disselkoen on how to use Dialogue Education in non-literate/oral cultures.
E) “Learners as Subjects” (decision makers) within a workshop.
As we note in a recent version of the Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach course:
The notion of “learners being Subjects” of their learning stems from Freire’s observations that educational systems often treated the learners as “Objects” or passive recipients. Moreover, this objectification in the learning process was part of wider agenda to deliberately domesticate or even oppress the poor.
A liberatory approach to learning, in contrast, would invite the learners to be the “Subjects” of the learning process. As they made decisions, and critically analyzed their social context, they would develop the skills and confidence to extend that liberation process to other areas of their life and to work for social change.
This decision making power is manifest in a Dialogue Education-influenced learning event at three levels:
- Their input into the Learning Needs and Resources Assessment (LNRA) provides the facilitator chance to build on their experience and to cater the program to their needs.
- The myriad of small decisions that we invite the learners to make for themselves during the learning event – when to speak, whom to work with, how they want to present the insights of their conversations, etc. These decisions in themselves may seem insignificant, but in aggregate and compared to a typical monologue approach to learning, they represent a significant shift in the power.
- And perhaps more importantly, in Dialogue Education’s acknowledgement that the learners already are the Subjects of their own learning when they walk into the workshop. They come as decision makers in most areas of their lives already, and they will ultimately decide what they think about and will do with the new content. This is a process that you have been engaged in via your own “inner dialogue” as you read this article: “Hmmm…that’s interesting…that’s similar from what I’ve experienced and heard before…that’s complete nonsense! By inviting the learners to externalize this thought process and deepen it through a dialogue with their peers, we are affirming that they are already decision makers and we are being honest about what role we as facilitators actually play (Argh! The death of the professor!).
I would even go so far as to argue that unless a community development workshop is providing opportunities for the participants to be Subjects during the workshop, you can’t expect them to fill their role as Subjects in the wider community development process. Which brings us to the final question…
