The Art of Technique

White, Shirley A. The Art of Facilitating Participation:. Minneapolis: Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd, 2000. Print.

Overview of the essays in Part 2: The Art of Technique.

Shirley White's book 'The Art of Facilitating Participation', is the result of White facilitating a regular discussion group that stemmed from the prodding of her graduate students. This means she is metaphysically facilitating a book of essays on facilitation by students and practitioners in the field of facilitation. Her role in this book comes out quite clearly in the way she introduces the essays written by those in the discussion group. Though she has talked to many people on this topic and heard many stories of the same (or at least similar) lessons learned by so many students, she mentions the work of each of them as unique learning experiences and is honored to help share these stories with others.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section's essays are described in the last post; in this post I will focus on the second section: The Art of Technique. The word choice is intentional, and explained on p.22. Technology is vital, but technique and the application of technical proficiency is arguably more important. The 'art of technique' is the 'thoughtful articulation and interpretation of the need for technology, and the culturally sensitive way people are involved in assessing, acquiring, and applying that technology to benefit their development'. “Technique must serve the content of development and be the art that effectively promotes learning and effective communication.”

The first essay in this section is an interview between a young Colombian interested in participatory development and a widely recognized Colombian facilitator who has dedicated his life to participatory development: Orlando Fals Borda.. This is followed by Colverson's essay on her experiences using PAR (Participatory Action Research) with campesino women in two rural Honduranean communities. The next essay witnesses how successful an agricultural program in Nepal can be at implementing a participatory model. Galper proceeds this with an essay on the topic of empowerment via teaching basic statistics for understanding the processes the NGO is using to make decisions and how information from surveys are translated and used.

Three African writers team together to emphasize the benefits of training rural development facilitators via Participatory Rural Communication Appraisal (PRCA). This process is focused on built-in field work. Next, Renuka Bery proposes the discovery principle which states that learning by discovery stimulates individual development and thus, 'contribute to the mot important issues in their societies. Finally, we move into access to media technologies. “The importance of access to communication technologies and public media cannot be overstated as an important force in a community's development. Hochneimer discusses community radio and the issues surrounding community-based journalism, themes that are 'pertinent to any media system, and important tools for community building' (p. 27). Richardson follows with his essay on the considerations inherent to establishing a 'FreeSpace' network in Canada; his example has apparently led to a rural internet access to the poor in Peru, Mexico, and the Philippines. 'Communication relationships are no longer restricted by space., but access to communication resources is another matter.' (p.28)


Reflection

This book has inspired me to consider facilitating a forum, (at least initially) informal, on international development experiences of MIT students. The important qualities of this gathering would be student-sprouted and informative. This of course requires prior interest and students who would immediately view this as a valuable use of their time. If started correctly, with a precedent on student interest and informal yet useful exchange of ideas, (as well as possibly output), this could be a worthwhile pursuit. The output of such a gathering could be one of new ideas and opportunities horizontally traveling from one student to another. I am especially interested in having a space where international development can be delved into and researched without feeling the reigns of power often associated with the grants, paperwork, and rules that tends to define and limit access to development work by students. Of course, the fact that it does not yet exist leads one to believe that there may be a low enough percentage of students with this type of experience that such a gathering only has merit on the graduate level.

Stepping back we can see clearly that White is cleverly showing us what she means by effective facilitation by the actual form in which the book is produced. The book is facilitation at its best. However, it also is facilitation between presumably similarly-minded people with similar recent international exposure in the field of development. Each of them is interested in understanding the role of communication in development, so admittedly the students are not an accurate representation of the complexities in international development caused by vast formative discrepancies. Still, she is contextualizing the facilitation role to the academic environment, and the result seems to be an interesting collection of hope-giving accounts. It is possible that sometimes White goes overboard and says things like 'Kathy had become one of them...erased any apprehension they might have had' which is simply an overexaggeration.

I like how the author writes the book so that one can quickly find what essays they are interested in reading, and leave the rest. This is accomplished by dedicating one to three paragraphs to a brief, but long-enough description of right at the beginning. Doing something similar to my work might be an interesting approach to facilitating its applicability as a useful document to someone.