Labour and Co-operative Member of
Parliament for Kemptown and Peacehaven

A Second Week

by Lloyd on 08.10.09
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Well what happened to the first (need to catch up)!

In these blogs I intend to outline the structure of the sessions. Comment on the methods used and hopefully include some theoretical readings or thoughts about the inputs and other topics that come out though either the course and my every day life.

The second week focused on listening, communication and planning what we want to focus on.

I’m still unsure about the over all layout of the course as at the moment we are taking part in helping the facilitator guide what we want and setting the agenda together.

Using brainstorming and sharing ideas we collated ideas and put down what and were we would like to see the course going.

There was a clear desire for more learning on framing and re-framing based partly on E. Goffman’s (Frame analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience). There was also a a clear line between wanting to develop facilitation skills and skill in peace building.

I’m happy that these areas are something that people want to look at but the burning desire for me is that we develop an understanding and practical use of methods and pedagogies that can be used in peace building, community development and alternative methods of education.

I have a particular interest in developing a pedagogy of the oppressed (P.Freire) and the pratical methods developed by Augusto Boal (Theatre of the Oppressed). Pleasingly it looks like we will have a workshops on this area. I think that the develoent of ideas though this is really importnat and I hope that we will work on that further.

Working a couple of times with these methods I wonder how we can adapt it not only for exclusive use with oppressed communities and develop an aproach that all can use or will this just end up with a liberal education rather than a liberating one?

I have seen a website called Cardboard Citizens something that my tutor had also noticed. Some of the things that they are doing there look really interesting.

We were also introduced to John Paul Lederach’s model of Approaches to Peace Building and the actors associated with different kinds of actions. This understanding of different levels of work and also and communities that it can effect is interesting although I thought that we could have gone in more depth about this.

There was then an break – which is where I am going to pause for this morning.

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Labour and Co-operative Member of
Parliament for Kemptown and Peacehaven

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