Learning, Not Teaching

Dr. Peter Taylor’s Visit to PRIA

October 2010

Dr. Peter Taylor till recently was at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in Sussex
heading the participation group. During his time at IDS, Dr. Taylor introduced a unique
Master’s programme which focuses on how to teach participatory research. Three years
ago Dr Taylor was the guest editor of the GUNI Report on Higher Education in the
World, and has worked to promote and engage community-based research in institutions
of higher learning. Dr Taylor’s work assumes significance given the status of research
and teaching in the social sciences/social work disciplines, which have a strong bearing
on rural and social development. In ten to fifteen years from now, in countries like India
and some other Asian countries, most students will know nothing other than machines
because they would not have had any learning opportunities in the social sciences/social
work disciplines.

Historically the roots of participatory research and participatory action came from the
word ‘action’, that is, from the world of practice. Over the last 30 years many academic
institutions, research programmes and research training institutions have been
incorporating methodologies and perspectives of participatory research. But institutions
of higher education, universities in particular, continue to maintain an intellectual and
social distance from the larger society around them. This has reinforced an elite
perception of the intellectual work that is carried on inside universities and academic
institutions.

PRIA for nearly two decades has been working with a variety of universities and
institutes of higher learning to build partnerships and initiatives, bringing academic
practitioners and educationists to frame research questions with the lens of
practice/action, and we have been partners in the global alliance in community-based
research which is basically trying to legitimize as well as give strength to universities
 and academic institutions to define their identity, at least in part, in relation to the
community.

Dr. Peter Taylor:

I first heard about PRIA when I was in Vietnam in the mid 1990s. I discovered materials that PRIA had
produced about community-engaged methods and participatory methods which were being used by
facilitators and by those engaging with communities in Vietnam. I thought, this is a really interesting
organization, I wonder who they are and what they are doing. In time I got the opportunity to meet Rajesh
[Tandon] and know the work of PRIA. This is however my first visit to PRIA.

Today, I’ll share a few thoughts in a quite unstructured way about my own background and work. It is
interesting how one comes to be in a particular place in a particular time. I moved to Canada, where I never
expected to go, about a year ago to join IDRC. You never know where you will end up! My original
working area was in agriculture and I think that’s why I have a love of the practical, because ultimately for
me change is about seeing people actually do things differently, behave differently, learn differently, and
create and share knowledge through practice. That’s what I have always been interested in – working with
people, like those who work on farms and with farms. I discovered I had a love of practical things. I think
that is what has ultimately brought me to here. But somewhere along the way, a big turning point for me
was when I first went to Africa (to Botswana) as a schoolteacher teaching agriculture. I had this realization
that my knowledge of agriculture of Botswana compared to my students was absolutely minimal. I knew
almost nothing at all about their lives, about their practices, about their understandings of agricultural
production and systems, and their culture, and of course they knew everything about that. So what did I
have to bring if it wasn’t actually about the subject matter that I was supposed to be teaching? The
realization for me was that if I was going to offer anything, it wouldn’t really be about the subject matter; it
would be much more to do with facilitating learning and helping them [my students] become aware of the
knowledge that they already had, about valuing that knowledge. This was quite difficult in a school that was
offering the Cambridge overseas certificate which is a curriculum produced in Cambridge in the UK and
shipped all over the world. Somehow this was the idea of elevated knowledge, being sent around the world
from the UK. Students had to study Shakespeare and H.G. Wells and Jane Austen and talk about their
experiences of going on a plane (when the nearest plane they had only ever seen was at 35,000 feet passing
over their heads) and learn all about these agricultural techniques which had been produced in Kenya and
were being sent all over Africa, quite inappropriately. I thought there had to be something more to education
than this; it awakened the great interest in me in learning. This is why I became interested in what we can do
as co-learners to help support learning of others, what we can do to help people in any particular situation
become aware of the value of their own knowledge and to construct it together. I ended up working in an
university. And of course universities yet again replicate this situation where knowledge is held in the hands
of a few and then is provided to others. This is still a very strong model which is held in most universities
around the world.

About three years ago I became engaged with GUNI (Global University Network for Innovation) and they
had a very interesting little project. It was to produce a report on higher education in the world. There was a
lot of debate about what should be the topic of the report – should it be about information technology
(because that’s a very big thing and universities are not very good with information technology) or some
sort of technical things. Finally the idea was arrived at to prepare a report on human and social development,
to see how universities and higher education were responding in a globalizing world. And it turned out to be
quite interesting, because the World Bank and the UN have promoted quite strongly something they call
‘the knowledge society’. Now this is an idea that knowledge is going to be the means by which global
development challenges will be solved. If we just get enough knowledge out there and people have access to
that knowledge, then all the world’s problems will be solved. Of course they were talking about that before
the recent global economic crisis and it doesn’t seem to have really quite sunk in yet, I think, that this is
quite a strange idea. Knowledge is held in the hands of a few, particularly represented through higher
education institutions, and that is then transmitted to others. There is also a lot of discussion about
knowledge becoming a commodity, something which you almost buy and sell – you pay to go to university,
sit at the feet of teachers who transfer their knowledge to you, you receive it, and then you go and transfer
that knowledge to somebody else. People are buying and selling knowledge along the way. This is a very
economic model of knowledge sharing. A group of us thought this seems quite a strange way to keep
promoting the work of higher education. It is not very sustainable in the longer term and there have to be
other ways of thinking about knowledge creation and knowledge sharing, about who has access to that
knowledge. It comes right back to those questions Robert Chambers asked many years ago: whose reality
counts, whose knowledge counts.

Universities are supposed to promote learning but they are notoriously bad at learning themselves,
particularly about how they understand the whole nature of knowledge. One interesting thing is that in
GACER [Global Alliance for Community Engaged Research] there is this famous triangle between the three
functions of the universities – research (producing knowledge), teaching (conveying knowledge) and service
(going out into the community and giving things to the uninitiated, those who haven’t got it yet).
Universities in a kind of benevolent mode go out and provide services to recipients. One of the things that
has come about as a reaction against this idea of commodifying knowledge is the idea that these three
functions need to be reconfigured and looked at as part of a system whereby research is really about people
generating knowledge together, teaching is about people learning together, and this service element is more
a function of engagement, whereby those within universities and higher education institutions and those in
the wider community come together to tackle challenges and address problems together – sometimes which
are identified within the higher education institutions, sometimes which are identified in other parts of the
community – and together these problems are looked at, with each bringing their own particular
complementarity where they have something to offer. I think this idea of reconfiguring these three elements
so they become part of a more integrated system is a very big challenge for universities in particular,
because ultimately universities are very bureaucratic organizations. They have a lot of structures, a lot of
procedures, a lot of protocols, there are a lot of issues around quality and standards, which is fair enough,
but when having those standards means that we become very inflexible and very unable to engage with
other actors in the community, it becomes a real constraint on what universities can really try to offer.

I’ve been involved, as has Rajesh, in a lot of discussions around this, trying to talk with people in
universities particularly about how they can re-imagine the way in which they engage with the communities
where they are located. Unfortunately it is quite a two-way process, because people in universities,
especially mangers in universities often say this is too difficult, it is too expensive, it is too time consuming,
and we have to worry about the league tables. These global league tables are a very pernicious trend.
Universities are vying for where they fit in the league tables; lots of the metrics are around publications in
certain kinds of journals, books and also in the amount of money they get for research. So universities who
are doing high-tech scientific research find themselves high up in the league tables because they have a lot
of endowments and they receive a lot of funds. The basis for these league tables is very much again about
putting a price on knowledge. It is quite interesting that some of the universities, many of the universities I
would say, who are really more engaged with other actors in society actually don’t make it to the league
tables at all, because that’s not where their priority is. What they are actually trying to do is to find ways to
promote engagement, to facilitate co-learning.

And it becomes quite challenging then as to what are the outputs of these shared learning experiences. They
may not easily lend to a book or an article in an internationally peer reviewed journal, which is the kind of
metrics universities want to see. It can be notoriously difficult to get funding for such activities because
those who are providing funds might say, why is the university doing this, why is the university getting
involved in working together with people in the wider community to address common problems, there are
other agencies who can do that. So universities somehow fall between different stools and we’ve been trying
to promote engagement with people around the world who really see this as a big challenge. We are trying
to create awareness that it’s possible to re-imagine universities and you can still have universities as
excellent places for constructing knowledge together, for sharing knowledge, for opening spaces where
different kinds of actors can come in to learn together around very complex problems. But another problem
is that people in the wider community feel very alienated from universities. I know of cases where
universities have opened their doors and welcomed people to come in from the community, but nobody
comes in and then they [the universities] are surprised. Perhaps it’s because they realize that all these years
people have seen this university as some kind of ivory tower with a locked door, a place where people are
afraid to cross the threshold.

So change is needed not just with the re-imagining of what universities can do but also in the practices, and
the GUNI initiative is very interesting. It has created an opportunity to share the experiences of where
higher education institutions have actually managed (not always successfully but have at least tried) to
engage with other actors in the wider community around problems to which they believe they can bring
their own respective capacities. And when they start to do that you start to see some really interesting shifts
in the balance between those three dimensions of research, teaching and service, because the three elements
really start to feed each other. People work together through research to generate knowledge together; that
feeds into the curriculum; and the curriculum can start to change. They start to introduce interesting
teaching programmes, which actually start to interest a wider group of people in the community because
their relationship with the university is also changing. People start to want to come in and the service can
actually become two-way; it becomes much more of an engagement whereby people in the community
actually start to ask people they know in the university to help them address a particular challenge or a
problem. That’s a major shift. Many universities and higher education institutions are not there at all at the
moment, some of them are beginning to test the water but many are not. A few are really trying in very
interesting ways to do so. I know that PRIA has sought out universities that are trying to do this.

IDS in the UK tried to do this in a small way by introducing a Master’s programme in ‘Participation, Power
and Social Change’, which has been a really interesting experience. It was designed because within the
participation team there was a sense that participation was becoming mainstreamed by many large
organizations. In the process of that there was a kind of dumbing down, a loss of the vitality and values and
principles which really underpin participation simply because it was being taken up as a buzzword. If you
wrote ‘participation’ or ‘participatory’ into your project proposal, you had a good chance of being funded
simply because you had included the buzzword. So there was an idea in the team that from a higher
education institution, an institution which had the possibility to offer degrees, we wanted to practice
something ourselves and IDS offered this Master’s programme for practitioners, people who have worked
on participation with participatory methods and who wanted to consolidate their learning by reflecting on
their experience (some of the students we’ve had have had decades of experience). By reflecting on their
experience, they construct knowledge together with faculty and fellow students about understandings and
practices of participation, and then apply that through a period of field engagements with an organization
using participatory methods. They then come back together and again reflect to construct a set of knowledge
collectively but also individual knowledge through the learning process.

We have so far had five groups of students who have come through from very, very diverse backgrounds –
students from India and also from all over the world. Really remarkable diversity in terms of their age,
gender, the sectors people have worked in. We have had students who have been working in NGOs for years
and have been practicing participatory methods, we had a finance minister from the government of Ethiopia
and an American US Senator. We’ve had people from the private sector, those who have worked in a whole
range of sectors like education, HIV/AIDS, nutrition and agriculture. Very diverse groups, and the
experiences they have brought to the programme have been absolutely amazing. Probably the one element
that we really try to stress, and I think this is perhaps one of the messages just in terms of this idea of
university–community engagement, is the aspect of reflection, because what we discovered is that many of
those who work for NGOs, particularly field workers, many of whom are activists (if you are familiar with
the idea of the learning cycle where you have activists, reflectors and theorizers; I am not sure if you will
recognize that amongst yourselves but it is people who are really excited by action and who really want to
get out there and make something happen, which is of course why those organizations often do make great
things happen), do not have the opportunity to reflect because it is often just not there in people’s busy
schedules and perhaps it is not even seen as a critical dimension of learning. So in the programme we
designed, reflection/reflective practice became a very central aspect and is probably the most powerful bit of
learning that we had from the experience of offering this programme. People really liked the idea of
engaging in concepts and theory. People had been practicing a lot of methods. They also liked the idea of
going back into the field to apply what they were learning and then to come back. But the bit that really
seemed to make a significant difference was the reflection. It was dedicated time for people to really think
about: who am I as a social change practitioner? Very often I am thinking about the people I am working
with, the different groups I am engaging with, the challenges they are facing, but what is my identity?
What’s my positionality? What do I bring to this particular situation? We realized that many students who
came to the programme hadn’t really thought about these because there hadn’t been space to think about it
or perhaps they never really thought it was an important thing to pay attention to. Again, universities are not
great promoters of this idea [of reflection]. They are very strong on objective knowledge and are less
attentive to other forms of knowledge (emotional or spiritual forms of expressions of knowledge). That self-
identity, that self-understanding of who we are as development practitioners or as change facilitators was
something that came out of this experience, which we have also fed back into the global discussions of the
importance of creating space for reflection and shared learning because that really seems to be absent or
missing and is something we try to stress on as very important.

I’ve just been attending an evaluation conclave, the purpose of which was to bring together very diverse
groups of people who are involved in evaluation in South Asia. A particular reason for doing this was
because there was a sense that evaluation is not very well recognized as a field. It is something that is added
on to other areas; it seems something that maybe you do at the end of a project; or it is seen as somebody
else’s job. There was a lot of discussion about the true dimensions of evaluation, learning and
accountability. Donors particularly are paying more and more attention to the accountability issue. We had a
lot of discussion on this quite scary phrase, ‘value for money’. When donors and funders are giving funds
for any kind of development-related activity, what’s the value that they are getting or seeing for key
stakeholders. Now if I think about my own country, in the UK, DFID is very concerned that the British
taxpayers get value for money. The overseas development aid that UK is giving around the world has been
provided for a long time with the view that it is hopefully contributing to change. Now there is another
agenda. It’s not just about contributing to change; it should be money well spent and we should be able to
see the impact.

This word ‘impact’ – of what’s being done – how do you demonstrate impact? I think parallel with this
discussion is also an awareness of moving away from seeing development as a linear path; it’s actually a
complex system which is adapting, and changing, and emerging all the time. You have tools like log frames
which are designed to create a linear pathway – you have your inputs, results and outputs, you have
indicators by which to measure all of that in a certain period of time – but does that really fit with the way
that change actually happens? So there was a lot of discussion about having a theory of change, having a
collective vision about what it is you are working towards and what needs to be in place in order for that
change to be realized, and what are the assumptions that are there which actually sort of govern how that
change is arrived at. If we take that kind of view, then log frames are really not very helpful at all, even
though DFID still insists on using log frames.

If we have to get away from this rather mechanistic approach to evaluation, what other alternatives are
there? And this is where the learning agenda comes back in again because if we are not learning together
then how can we understand the nature of these complex systems that we are working in. We will not be
able to mitigate things going wrong and identify risks, but by actually accepting that things are going to
change (regardless of what we do they are going to change anyway) perhaps we can work with other actors
in the system more purposefully, more intentionally to actually observe the kinds of changes which are
happening. Some very interesting methods are coming up like outcome mapping, appreciative enquiry, and
more significant change techniques. A lot of participatory methodologies, which have come from the
participation field, are now finding their way into evaluation. Of course there is still a whole lot of
discussions about randomized control trials, which I also find quite scary; there is a belief among some
Newtonian scientists that this is the only way to go. But I think what’s interesting now is that there’s a real
reaction which is saying that, okay, if you want to evaluate a machine to see whether that machine is
working, then these kinds of rational, logical, deductive ways of measurement are fine, in fact they are
really ideal. But if you want to understand the kinds of changes which are going on with people in social
contexts and very complex systems of change, then those kinds of methodologies are really not helpful at
all. So we need to combine quantitative and qualitative methods, mixed methods and also recognize that
participatory methods can actually contribute, for example, to quantitative research (you can generate
numbers every effectively through participatory methods).

The purpose of this conclave was to raise these kinds of issues and get them all out in the public domain, for
people to share their experiences with each other and again to make it a co-construction of knowledge where
people were actually bringing their challenges and sharing their successes (and also sharing things that had
not worked out very well) to try to learn together. One of the messages that came up strongly was the real
need for the identification of evaluation as a field in its own right, so that it’s quite identifiable, with ways of
working that are communicable to other actors so that people really understand more about what evaluators
are and what they can do, and also to give evaluators themselves more power to actually negotiate with
those who are requesting evaluations so that it becomes more of a collective learning enterprise.

I guess you will see the strand to this slightly rambling talk has actually been about learning. I started out
with my desire to support learning as opposed to teaching, and through my own journey, my life and
professionally I’ve been very fortunate to work with other organizations like PRIA committed to promoting
learning. Even though sometimes you feel the forces that work against learning get stronger, I think it is
very important to maintain belief and that will to promote learning and collective knowledge creation, in
universities and in other fields, more broadly in the development field.