Pecha Kucha Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Script for Pecha Kucha NEEB Sept 2014 JL 1. So What’s Changed is the title of the participatory action research project I want to share with you today and also the name of the Team of volunteers who worked together on this participatory... more

Script for Pecha Kucha NEEB Sept 2014 JL

1. So What’s Changed is the title of the participatory action research project I want to share with you today and also the name of the Team of volunteers who worked together on this participatory evaluation of a community organisation.
2. This is a picture of some of the members of the community organisation, developing partners, meeting the Mayor during one of our events.
As you can see we are a diverse group of people, a mish mash, as the mix of people and their experiences is diverse, we are from a range of cultures, abilities, sexualities, genders, ages, social backgrounds, classes, economic circumstances, politics, faiths etc
3. What we do share in common is our wish, in the words of Spock, to live long and prosper.
Prospering means different things for different people and is not just about economics but a whole range of things and therefore we wanted to know if the people who worked with us were prospering as a result of doing so, from their perspective, from the bottom looking up!
4. We knew that reading and writing was difficult for many of our members for a whole host of reasons, some to do with past experience, economics, dyslexia / disability and for many the fact that English is not their first language
5. As many of our members come from a range of countries and places around the world so English is for some their 3rd or 4th language making writing and reading in English a problem
6. And we didn’t just want a tick box exercise cos we have all been there and we knew first hand that this would not work for us as it never had before when we had taken part in others peoples research as this was often the favoured method used
7. You see we are more of a hands on sort of group, we like getting stuck in, doing practical things together, making messes and figuring things out as we go along, which is what we have done on so many of our projects on the journeys we have shared together. This is henna hand painting some of our members do at community events
8. We use practical approaches to education which reflect and build on our lived experiences and enable us to learn together through further shared experiences, such as when we did our permaculture course in when people began growing things in their back yards, volunteering in local garden projects and when we attend gay pride together often with members who are not open about their sexuality among their own communities for fear of being ostracised, so we learn from each other all the time.
9. We decided that we would do some participatory video and we democratically chose the films we would make together in order to learn how to use the cameras, how to edit and critique our films. The picture shows a few of the ideas for films we came up with and the two we eventually democratically chose together which were, how to be a mummy or daddy in an ideal world and what the world is like for us when we experience discrimination and sexism.
10. We made both films and then critiqued them and we thought everyone would rush out and make their own participatory videos but we didn’t reckon on our getting stuck in the mud!!
In fact we got so stuck we stopped being productive for a while, while we waded about trying to think / feel what to do next…………….
11. I think it was divine inspiration that helped us on, I took this picture sitting on the loo in a Church in Hartlepool, it is one of the most inspirational places I know and I don’t mean the Church!!
12. This is a photo by an amazing artist called Ana Mendieta, part of her Tree of Life Series, it reminds me of the paragraph I found in a book on participatory video production which talked about bodymapping
13. We took the bodymapping process and expanded it to include the past, the present and our hoped for futures and then developed a template as a way into our lived experience of being members of our organisation and we went from there.
14. Members drew round each others bodies and used pictures and words to illustrate the answers to the questions asked in the bodymapping process.
They then filmed each other talking us through their bodymaps.
We also held a focus group to gather peoples thoughts and feelings about being part of the So What’s Changed process cos we wanted to know if what we were doing together was working out ok for everyone and if there was anything we were missing/
15. We used a thematic analysis and we got a bit bogged down trying to figure out all the different aspects of peoples experience as can be seen from this mind map of all the different categories we ended up with as part of this analysis process. We knew this wasn’t working for all of us and we knew we needed something more than just the bog standard approach to analysis.
16. We tried to find a model that would represent the level of participation, the sharing of power and the problematisation process we found ourselves in but when we couldn’t find one that was 3D I developed our own based on the centre being the point of greatest sharing across all the dimensions of power, participation and ownership of the problem.
17. Then we got stuck again, this time in the slough of despond, a term borrowed from an image on a tarot card. Somewhere from which there is no easy way out, you just have to go through it and come out the other side. We knew there had to be a better way to represent the thoughts and feelings of the people taking part but we didn’t know how……at times like these I often have to remind myself that from the frustration comes the growth.
18. And we knew that what we wanted would probably not come from within the regime but from outside of it, somewhere on the edges where the radical is always situated. It came in the form of the Listening approach by the radical feminist Carol Gilligan in which we began to form I poems taken directly from the spoken words of the people who took part, these led us into formulating you, it, we and they poems which were much better at illustrating the person, the groups and the communities lived experience, of taking part in this PAR process.
19. But I would like to leave you with a criticism of our approach that came to me from the words of one of the women who took part when she described not speaking the words but showing us the picture, sharing with us a painful time without wanting to use words but taking that all important step to share her pain in the way in which she felt comfortable to do so. You can see a tiny picture of a prison in this picture. For me the old adage is true a picture can paint a thousand words
20. So my question then is this, if as Paulo Freire said the conscientization process, or to put it another way, the awareness raising process, in which we engage as community psychologists, is through dialogue, then why is this………………….
Given that only 30% of communication is verbal and 70% is non verbal and why do we not value the non verbal communication to the same extent as the verbal communication?
For me the sea of the unconscious is a place of gestation and potential growth and so often we never consciously know how or why we shift, as sometimes we cannot see the wood for the trees……. we simply know that we can be different and by letting our light shine we can change things together.
21. For we all share far more similarities than we ever do differences!!