Research, Teaching and Learning: making connections in the education of adultsPapers from the 28th Annual SCUTREAConference
The little boy and his antics: redefining knowledge in development worker training
Astrid von Kotze, University of Natal, Durban, South Africa
What knowledge? Whose knowledge?
In the last few months, El Nino, the little boy, has been held responsible for countless storms and floods on one side of the globe, but the devastating drought forecast for Southern Africa, has not materialised. The many scientists whose warnings of the threat of a renewed disaster were splashed across the front-pages of newspapers and issued in stern television reports were wrong, it seems. But something not as yet measurable and beyond our understanding may have happened, and thus the impact of greater global forces on local conditions was averted. Predictions of future occurrences can at best be estimated - not yet foretold with any precision. So, rather than focusing on the scientific accuracy of meteorological forecasts we should critically scrutinise the way in which such data are interpreted and publicised, and who benefits or suffers as a consequence. While urban dwellers were whipped into a frenzy or worry, farmers in the rural areas of Southern Africa noted that some birds had migrated extraordinarily early as a possible foreboding of drought; yet, the modest crop of mopane caterpillars contradicted this early warning signal. They understood the message of possible impending drought to be ambiguous and had two choices: follow the signs of nature and take a chance and plant early, or listen to the ‘official’ forecasts and in anticipation of a failed harvest, not plant at all. Farmers who heeded the El Nino warning were ruined.
This paper looks at an education and training initiative for development workers in Southern Africa that is aimed specifically at rooting the concept of ‘risk reduction’ within all development programmes. The initiative was an experiment in linking research, teaching and learning based on the participatory learning and action approach (Chambers 1994; Pretty, Guijt, Thompson & Scoones 1995; von Kotze & Holloway 1996), experiences in worker culture, and Paulo Freire.
In previous work with oral cultural expressions in worker education programmes (von Kotze 1988;1996) workers poets’ voices made it clear that knowledge is only worthwhile if it is ‘really useful knowledge’ (Johnson 1991) when it serves the interests of the oppressed, that is those most excluded from decision-making. Such ‘useful knowledge’ cannot, as recent experiences with El Nino again show, be based solely on expert systems and scientific processes of knowledge production but must include the information and ways of knowing from different people, especially rural-based women, whose voices may not ‘count’ for much in the corridors of decision-making, but whose perspectives are informed by what Hart has called ‘subsistence knowing’ (Hart 1991). We would like to substitute the term ‘subsistence knowing’ with the term ‘connected knowledge’, as the functionalist economic orientation of ‘subsistence knowing’ does not adequately capture the creative, imaginative and aesthetic aspects of such knowledge. Connected knowledge is produced in a collective process and offers multiple perceptions and perspectives of the living and working environment. It is useful as it has been produced out of necessity in the daily lived experiences of people, but it also connotes meaning beyond the instrumental, purely material as it finds metaphors to express more precisely the historical, social and creative-imaginative connectedness between people and their environment- something explained so poignantly by the humanist scientist Athos Roussos in the lesson he gives to his charge: ‘Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful’. (Michaels 1996:44)
The second influence is dialogue, understood in the Freirean sense as ‘practices that enable us to approach the object of knowledge. (...) Dialogue characterises an epistemological relationship. Thus, in this sense, dialogue is a way of knowing.’ (Freire 1995:379) Research, teaching and learning based on dialogue is a truly collective process; it is partisan both in terms of the educators’ standpoint and the definition of what will constitute ‘useful knowledge’; it is critical in its questioning of the interest positions lurching behind enacted, lived policy. Finally, dialogue is defined as and linked to social action both at the practical and strategic levels.
Thirdly, we have drawn on experiences with various participatory approaches to teaching, learning and research. The dissatisfaction with the biases inherent in the ‘rural development tourist’ approach lead to experimentation with other forms of research and planning (Chambers 1994) and the development of a set of principles underlying interactive participation in which control and decision-making is shared. In terms of our development worker training, we adapted particularly some of the tools for collective investigation to our more directive approach. For example, unlike facilitators of participatory rural appraisal and in keeping with critical thinking and conscientisation, we challenged learners to explore myths and viewpoints that would seek to entrench existing structural relations, rather than seek to change them. In the following, these principles will be explained further.
Manufactured Risk and Virtual Risk
The advent of El Nino may be somewhat unpredictable; the focus on the hazard is not. El Nino provides a useful scapegoat by directing attention towards ‘hostile nature’ and away from the real causes of risk, human action. It provides governments (and international sentiments) with the opportunity to reassure a concerned public that thanks to scientific methods and knowledge experts they are well prepared to deal with any possible risks and will take the right decisions on behalf of people most in the frontline of attack, and the country as a whole. Headlines instill fear by reminding the public of what nature can do to us and how vulnerable we all are to the impact of natural hazards. But unlike the claim that ‘poverty divides, smog unites’ ( Jansen & van der Veen 1992), hazards do not strike all people equally: the smog hits those most who have no escape route into cleaner air, and whose poor living conditions have already made them susceptible to chest diseases. These are also the people who have no insurance policies, whose social support systems have collapsed and whose economic base is, at best, tenuous. Risk is calculated by weighing up the hazard against the degree of susceptibility or resilience: if I am too poor to buy meat I might avoid being infected by BSE: in this case my poverty is my resilience; on the other hand I might have to take the chance and buy a ‘special offer’ in order to eat at all - and be even more susceptible to getting sick.
The emphasis on a natural phenomenon as the cause of a threat is a convenient shift in gaze away from those most at-risk, and those who are to blame. Furthermore, the focus on risk management obscures the fact that in a modern risk society risks are man-made hybrids. (Beck 1992:11) The world is marked by what Giddens calls ‘manufactured risk’: ‘Risk created by the very progression of human development, especially by the progression of science and technology’. (Giddens 1998:28). The fear of being sucked into uncontrollable developments emphasises the desire to control. In an environment threatened by nature, scientists are called upon to find a solution to tame the hazard, and educators and trainers are called upon to design and deliver (technical) training that enables people to cope with the perceived threat. There is a whole battery of research concentrating on various technologies, tools and methods for calculating and managing risk. ‘Risk assessment’ has become a subject in courses for emergency managers being trained in how to prepare operations according to emergency plans as much as insurance brokers. The irony is that recent emergencies such as the BSE, Chernobyl and Rwanda show, that when society itself has become the laboratory ‘with nobody responsible for the outcomes of experiments’ ( Beck 1998:10) no amount of technical information and bureaucratic machinery allows us to predict, forecast and deal with the event. Risks are a kind of virtual reality, real, local and global, but not-yet-existent - a threat that controls our imaginations and makes us fearful of the future, but not yet an empirical observable ‘enemy’(Newman 1995).
As long as risks are seen as synonymous with hazard, and defined as being ‘out there’ (part of nature) there is no one who can be held responsible, and no one will be accountable for the effects of a hazardous impact. This is what Hannah Arendt called the most tyrannical of powers (..), when ‘risk becomes another word for ‘nobody knows’‘ (Beck 1998:15). In the uncertainty of ‘maybe’ we look towards the scientists as the source of assurance, as providing us with certainty and a plan of how to hold off the hazard. Not surprisingly, the majority of disaster management/reduction training reflects this attitude of creating a false sense of security. Knowledge is largely pre-defined, generic and unconnected to local contexts. There is an abundance of technical information, dispensed by ‘subject experts’ and scientific analysts in a language that is accessible to peers only. The process of teaching is a classical example of the ‘banking style’, and learning is assessed on the basis of reproduced information. Learners are regarded as lay people with a knowledge and skills deficit, despite their intimate experience-based knowledge of local conditions. And in much the same way as ‘dispensing knowledge’ those trained managers of ‘hazard induced risks’ return to offer emergency aid as an act of humanitarianism and charity, in a cover-up of bad policies and practices in the face of human-manufactured disasters.
Research as Dialogue
Dialogues with many different members of rural communities across Southern Africa on the one hand, development workers employed to improve the living conditions of such communities, on the other, revealed that people who live on the basis of connected knowledge have a very different perception of risks from those who make and implement policy decisions. They know that risks have everything to do with the way in which people elsewhere make important decisions that effect their livelihood security, and how their own socio-economic status entraps them in often unsustainable and unhealthy activities. Asked to comment on why droughts seem to have become more severe these days rural people will give a perfect definition of risk as a combination of hazard and vulnerability. They describe how drought is a hazard that has to do with human agency as much as the weather. They will tell how socio-political and economic conditions forced them to draw on natural resources in an unsustainable way, and how the deforestation and encroaching desertification are consequences of their own short-term perspective and actions that render their environment ever-more vulnerable, in the long term. It is not the drought, but the poverty that has become worse. People are less able to cope with stress and threats to livelihood security such as those imposed during times of drought because they have no time to recover from one shock, before having to confront the next. And their own ‘risk policies’: large numbers of children and herds of cattle are under threat from globally directed market-oriented development plans.
Within the community-based drought mitigation training we realised that we would have to begin with raising awareness about the different perceptions of risk that inform the attitudes and behaviours towards drought. From previous experiences (von Kotze & Holloway 1996) we also knew that as learners, Southern African development workers are at the interface between two conflicting epistemological discourses: on the one hand, they have intimate first-hand experience of the lives of the very rural people they work with, and are familiar with connected knowledge; on the other hand, they are deemed to be really ‘trained’ only when initiated into scientific expert knowledge. Development workers attending education and training courses expect a dissemination of such knowledge because that is the convention: those in power, such as teachers, decide on what is worth learning. Previous expose to training facilitated by international professionals has further entrenched such expectations.
We recognised this tension and tried to ease it, from the outset, by directing attention away from virtual realities in a people-less landscape. Instead we made the subjects of the learning and research the focal point. In this way we tried to relocate the focus towards learner participants’ perspectives and narratives, and away from the jargon-wielding subject experts. In line with Freire’s question of ‘How can I enter into a dialogue if I always project ignorance onto others and never perceive my own?’ (Freire 1972:63) we began by showing a film shot in various southern African countries specifically for this purpose. In this film people speak from within the context of their environment about the joys and hardships that are part of everyday life and death during ‘normal’ times, and in times of drought. We then encouraged development workers to respond to the voices in the film with their own narratives and experiences of working under those conditions. To this, we added information from policy documents and reports written by emergency and aid organisations. In this way a multitude of contradictory perspectives resulted in a complex picture of drought that was clearly more closely linked to politics, than the weather. A collaborative analysis of different interest positions and power relations lead to highly charged learning that connected the local with the global, and later directly informed decisions about action strategies.
Another example that illustrates the merger between teaching, learning and research is around the concept of ‘risk’ itself. Listening to voices on the film and participants speaking in various Southern African languages I noticed that their language was spiked with references to ‘idrought’. There are no words for ‘drought’, for ‘risk’, ‘vulnerability’, ‘hazard’ in African languages, but there are metaphors and narratives: there is a time ‘when the sun never sets’, or ‘the time of hunger’, and the sheer endless number of rivers and towns named after experiences of dry, rainless seasons, of intense suffering and shortages of basic necessities bear witness to histories of living with drought. Villagers will tell of many previous droughts in their lifetime, and describe the various strategies employed to survive. But they will never refer to drought (or floods for that matter) as a ‘risk’. Giddens has suggested that the concept of risk does not exist in ‘any traditional culture’: ‘The reason for this is that dangers are experienced as given. Either they come from God, or they come simply from a world which one takes for granted’ (Giddens 1998:27) This perception of risk is one of many present in Southern Africa, and development workers who want to intervene both practically and strategically have to understand that different perceptions of risk lead people to make different decisions and take different actions.
Dialogue is about more than simply a sharing of information. Learners from the various Southern African countries exchanged often quite detailed information, for example about regionally specific strategies to mitigate the impact of drought. But such exchanges have to result in new insights in order to qualify as knowledge. Out of an activity investigating livelihood practices arose a critical examination of the different status, life chances and oppression of children in a household. Learners came to realise that they themselves act as oppressors in their own households with regard to children who do not have direct kinship relationships. The exploitation of the children’s labour power was not balanced by the relative social security that household membership offered. Children cannot be regarded as a uniform category in household surveys, but must be desegregated and appraised individually, and with regard to different indicators.
As educators we attempted to create the conditions for a dialogue in which all partners were in pursuit of mutual and common interests, that is those of the people most at-risk. And so, unlike facilitators who simply listen, seemingly neutral, we directed the dialogue, insisting on a ‘subsistence perspective’, one ‘that recognises that all over the world women have become the main carriers of work and responsibilities connected to the affirmation of lives.’ (Hart 1997:134) Descriptions of daily livelihood activities lead to an analysis of who does what within a household, and what happens when the time for carrying water increases from ½ hour to 2 hours, during times of drought. We challenged uncritically held viewpoints, such as the claim that men’s infidelity could be viewed as a form of ‘social support’, and initiated and guided discussions around contradictions, towards consensus.
In the connected learning environments of rural areas knowledge is intimately linked to life experience. Nature and natural hazards are not disconnected from human experience; risk is not an anonymous virtual threat. What we tried to construct was a teaching, learning, research process as a collaborative effort of generating information which was analysed in terms of it’s underlying politics of who decides, who assigns, who controls, who knows, who benefits, in both discourses of technicist and subsistence knowledge. On the basis of new understanding participants suggested actions aimed at reducing risk, both at the practical and at the strategic levels.