Chapter 2 Flashcards
What are the defining features of participatory communication?
Resistance to top-down, prescribed styles of learning. Participatory communication defies singular definition.
What is the point of view of Shirley White?
It is a complex and dynamic phenomenon, seen from the eye of the beholder, and shaped by the hand of powerholder.
What is the point of view of Jan Servaes?
Each society must attempt to delineate its own strategy to development, based on its own ecology and culture. Therefore, it should not be attempt to blindly imitate program and strategies of other countries with a total different historical and cultural background.
How can be seen development?
Development can be seen not as a universal goal, but as an integral, multi-dimensional, and dialectic process that can differ from society to society. Development means is different in different contexts, it should be up to people in those communities to define their needs and the scope, pace and nature of change, rather than external experts.
What is the point of view of Paulo Freire?
The individual must form himself rather than be formed. An emphasis on self-determination and local autonomy helps to ensure both that the local community is engaged in the process of change and that the aims, design and implementation of any development projects are fully appropriate and sustainable.
What is the particular role of media and communication in this context-specific, bottom-up, vision of development?
Specifically the role of communication should be, not to disseminate information in order to change individual behaviours, but to facilitate the inclusive expression of communities’ needs. Such as process involves communication that is both horizontal and dialogic, rather than vertical and monologic. In other words, communication is understood as a means of facilitating an ongoing, inclusive and multidirectional exchange between equals, rather than as a one-way of delivery of information from one-to-many.
Why the process of communicating is particularly important in this approach?
Communication is not seen simply as a tool for achieving a particular objective, but as a means of empowering all members of the community to have their voices heard. Who gets to speak, about what and under what conditions are all questions that need to be considered. If communication is to play a part in enabling communities to express their own needs, then it is vital that it doesn’t reinforce existing power relations. Participatory communication must be an inclusive process in which the subaltern – or those who are most oppressed – are able to speak.
What are the difficulties encounter with a particular vision of development?
If we start with a particular vision of development as being culturally specific and locally determined, then the role for communication and media is to facilitate inclusive local expression of needs. But while this may be an appealing vision of media and communication’s role in development, it leaves us with a number of difficult questions to answer.
What are the difficult question to answer?
Who should take responsibility for ensuring that the process of communication is inclusive and empowering? Allowing those in already established positions of power within the community to lead the process will surely reinforce existing inequalities. Does genuine participatory communication not, therefore, require the intervention of an external facilitator or change agent, just as in the M4D approach? But to what extent is this at odds with the idea that process of change must emanate from the local community? Precisely what role should the external facilitator play and how can they avoid or at least ameliorate the inevitable inequalities in knowledge and power between themselves and the community?
What if inclusive community participation does not result in consensus over what to do?
Local elites are likely to be most able to set the agenda of development projects and benefit from them. In which case, the role of the external facilitator must surely be to challenge existing power relations within the community in order to ensure that it is the most marginalized elements of the community not result in tension and discord? Actively empowering women to play a greater role in community decision-making, for example, may well be desirable for inclusive development, but if it goes against local norms and directly challenge the dominant position of men in the community then it is likely to promote conflict.
Should we accept such conflict as an evitable consequence of promoting structural change through participatory communication?
Or is this not a risk worth taking, especially when the outcomes of a participatory approach can be unpredictable and difficult to control? If individuals are unwilling to participate in such activities for fear of the consequences, is it ever acceptable to coerce individuals into participating? And while participatory communication may emphasize the importance of local knowledge and aspirations, might there not be limits to how far some indigenous beliefs and practices are valued? Is there a danger of romanticizing community knowledge?
Who is Paul Freire?
Has been hugely influential in this field. Freire was a Brazilian adult educator who developed a critical philosophy of education – referred to as pedagogy of the oppressed (1970) – based on his experiences of working with poor, illiterate communities in Brazil in the early 1960s.
How his pedagogy can be applied to development communication?
His radical pedagogy was originally developed for education, the basic principles can be directly applied to development communication. It is worth outlining these principles in some detail here as they are often oversimplified or diluted.
What is the starting point of Freire’s argument?
Belief in the existence of an unjust social order which produces both the oppressed and the oppressors. One of the principal mechanisms for maintaining this unjust social order is the existence of a particular false consciousness.
What is a false consciousness?
Described as a structure of thought which blinds the oppressed from critically recognizing the causes of their oppression.
What is the consequence of false consciousness?
The oppressed instead of striving for genuine liberation, can aim only to become oppressor themselves because they have been conditioned to accept that their only ideal is to resemble the oppressor.
What is the further consequence of false consciousness?
The further consequence is the fear of freedom or the fear that transcending their current circle of certainty on pursuit of a more authentic existence may lead to disorder or destructive fanaticism.
How to challenge unjust social order?
Seek to advance critical consciousness as a process of conscientization.
What are the two key dimensions of this pedagogy?
Praxis and problem posing.
How Freire does uses the term praxis?
To refer a process of reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it. This process makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation
Within this process what are the two elements always working together?
Reflection and action.
What is reflection?
True reflection is necessary for overcoming false consciousness and will always lead to action.
What is action?
Equally action constitutes authentic praxis only when it is based on critical reflection – otherwise action is pure activism.
What is the role of communication in this cycle of action and reflection?
The importance of dialogue. Critical and liberating dialogue among the oppressed is central to ensuring reflective participation in the act of liberation. Any attempts at liberation which rely upon instruction and monologues, rather than dialogue will inevitably transform them into masses which can be manipulated. Propaganda, management, manipulation – all arms of domination – cannot be the instruments of their rehumanisation.
What form should this dialogue take?
A second, related instrument of liberation is a problem-posing dialogue. In this form of communication, open and thought-provoking questions are used to invite participants to reflect critically and collectively on their own experiences in order to unveil the true reality of their oppression and its causes.
What become their oppression once it is revealed through dialogue?
It can become a site of action. In this wat, a problem-posing dialogue is crucial for driving the cycle of praxis – because it both prompts initial critical reflection and because it subsequently maintains a cycle of action and reflection.
What is a key dimension of this form of dialogue?
The rejection of conventional sources of authority. The teacher, for example, is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the student, who in turn while being taught also teaches. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. Equally, in this approach, authoritative forms of knowledge and experience derive from the everyday lives of participants, rather than prestigious or well-known examples or events that are often alien or artificial.
How the problem-posing dialogue does stands in direct contrast with a banking type of education?
A banking type of education in which the role of the teacher is to deposit information into the students’ minds, and the only action of the student is to receive, file and occasionally retrieve such deposits. This form of education is characterized by the authority of the teacher over the student and the assumption that are ignorant and teachers are knowledgeable.
What does Freire argue on the banking type of education?
This style of education not only leaves no room for developing critical consciousness, but that it actively works against it by encouraging students to passively accept their place in the world and the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.
How these contrasting styles of education map in communication and media in development?
Whereas a M4D approach draws very much on a banking type of education, participatory communication should seek to promote a problem-posing dialogue in pursuit of conscientization.
What kinds of media, if any, are appropriate for such a participatory, problem-posing style of communication?
The tendency of mass media, such as television, billboards and newspaper, to favour one-way communication severely limits their relevance. Instead, such critical dialogue is far better suited to media that are widely accessible and do not require certain levels of expertise, resources or (media) literacy. Such media should be able to promote local group interaction and reflection and should be owned and controlled by the community rather than by the government or elites.
What is included in appropriate media?
Appropriate media may include community radio, suitable forms of video and photography, interactive posters, visual aids, traditional folk media and local materials that might facilitate dialogue such as cloth or clay.
How inclusive critical dialogue does not depend on the use of media?
It may in fat be more likely to occur through interpersonal communication. Forms of interpersonal communication traditionally used in the community should be considered central to participatory communication (although they too are embedded in local relations of power). Media may well provide an important supplement to these forms of communication, but should certainly not automatically be seen as the dominant mode of participatory communication.
What is the point of view of Denise Gray-Felder?
Every meaningful lesson or belief I’ve garnered in life came from someone I value explaining the issue to me and involving me in the process of figuring out the solution.
What those interpersonal communication includes?
Storytelling, group meetings, singing, dancing and especially community theatre.
What is Freire’s understanding of development and the associated role of communication?
It is clearly much more radical than the first account of participatory communication. Freire’s approach is also clearly incompatible with the culture of most formal development organizations. A pedagogy of the oppressed does not lend itself to straightforward measures of impact or cost-effectiveness, or to universal guidelines for designing and delivering interventions.
What is one, pragmatic response to Freire’s theory?
Suggest that it may simply be too difficult to bring about the proposed change in the structural forces which it targets.
What is Anna Colm point of view?
Is it even possible to run participatory projects in the current context of international development still very much Western-led and tied to logframes, donors and organisational agendas and structure? In which case, perhaps we should limit our ambitions to more realistic, smaller-scale objectives that can be achieved within existing structural constraints, albeit with a significant degree of involvement from the local community
What are the implications for those who take a different view and accept Freire’s argument?
The implications are extreme. In Freire’s account, any effort to transform the situation of the oppressed which doesn’t directly address the unjust social order is a false charity which serves to preserve that order.
What does genuine solidarity with the oppressed means?
Fighting at their side to transform the objective reality which has made them these beings for another. Those oppressors who genuinely wish to convert to being in solidarity with the oppressed must re-examine themselves constantly because they almost always bring with them prejudices which work against revolutionary change, such as a lack of confidence in the people’s ability to think, to want and to know.
What does require conversion to the people?
A profound rebirth. Those who undergo it must take on a new form of existence, they can no longer remain as they were.
What are the two questions if we accept that one cannot be partially or temporarily in solidarity with the oppressed?
To what extent are you sympathetic to Freire’s theory? If you are sympathetic, do you consider yourself to be on the side of the oppressed or the oppressor?
