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"There were eight children, completely nude. The pigs and cows were living with the people. There was no difference between the animals and the children. It was so striking, the contrast between the exuberant jungle outside and the conditions inside that tiny house, lit by one candle. Everything was silent as we looked at each other. One after another we began to cry. We were so sad to see with our own eyes the poverty of our people."
This volunteer in Central America was part of a literacy campaign that sent college students into the countryside to help their own people. When Joan read her words (in Valerie Miller's book "Between Struggle and Hope: The Nicaraguan Literacy Crusade") as she lay in her hammock in her village on another continent, she knew that young woman had faced what she was struggling with every day. How was she to teach literacy to people who must endure such conditions?
Three Peace Corps Volunteers in Joan's area had ET'd because the literacy program hadn't gotten off the ground. And Joan could see why. What kind of sense did reciting the alphabet and learning to recognize "ba be bi bo bu" make to these people? Joan was determined to try a new approach.
With her
counterparts in the village, Joan designed a new set of lessons
that related directly to the people's experience. She encouraged
the few participants to talk about their lives and question if it
was really fate that kept them in such poverty. Her most
dedicated students flourished under the new program, and with
Joan's help, they wrote some moving stories. But still,
attendance remained low. And after six months, some of her old
students who had participated so actively had lost most of the
literacy they had gained in the program. It seemed to Joan that
they were back to square one. What had gone wrong?
Abraham Maslow was a
humanistic psychologist who believed that people strive for
"self-actualization" in order to reach their highest
human potential. This involves releasing an inner tendency for
good, an increase in understanding of others and of self, an
awareness of inner growth, an increase in autonomy, and finally,
a greater potential to change and shape one's environment. All
these are active and expressive behaviors: exploring,
experiencing, choosing, enjoying, transforming and doing. They
are not just coping, but embracing possibility.
Maslow developed his model of a hierarchy of needs to show that such self-actualizing behavior cannot be expected until other vital needs are satisfied. Our primary needs are for survival; then we can think of safety, love, and self-esteem in that order, before self-actualization is possible.
Figure Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
In addition, Maslow suggests, a person's position in the hierarchy may change from hour to hour, day to day, year to year. Even a wealthy person cannot concentrate on her work if she has had no breakfast, and a person who is comfortable with himself and has no particular need to work on his self esteem may suddenly find he must concentrate on personal safety.
According to Maslow's theory, learners concerned so intimately with simple survival cannot devote their energy to inner growth and a greater understanding of their circumstances until their basic needs are satisfied. Perhaps Joan's students were too hungry and exhausted to concentrate on literacy, whether it was presented to them as nonsense syllables or as stories for reflection. What do you think? (For an alternative view, read Freire's The Pedagogy of the Oppressed and see example #8 in this chapter.)
IS THERE A BETTER WAY?
If Maslow's hierarchy helps us understand what went wrong with Joan's literacy program, how could she design a program to satisfy some of the participants' basic needs while at the same time teaching them literacy skills?
Literacy and numeracy programs that are tied to income generating activities sometimes hold participants' interest better than other types of programs because the skills they learn are immediately useful. For example, if students are taught to write and recognize numbers in order to keep a simple account book they can start right away to improve the financing of a small business endeavor. Often, illiterate street vendors can already do simple arithmetic very rapidly in their heads and only need to do a few lessons before they can see a difference in their accounting practices - and the possibility of getting a loan.
In the same way, reading and writing can be geared specifically and immediately to the economic needs of the participants. For example, women who wanted to organize a sewing cooperative would spend a little while each day reviewing words on shopping lists, brainstorming ideas for posters and reading with pride the finished product advertising their services. As they became able to recognize a few words, their interest in literacy increased, for they could see its value in meeting their basic needs.
Figure
Even people
living in abject poverty, who cannot dream of starting a small
business, have used specific literacy skills to meet their
survival needs. "Now that I can read what the landlord marks
in his book," said one new literate, "I can check to
see if I am really paying the right amount."
Maggie was an older
Volunteer with a lifetime of teacher training experience behind
her. But her high school math teachers in the Central African
Republic were a challenge and a half. There they were, listening
to each other's model lessons and taking copious notes, all
negative, and using them to tear each other's presentations to
shreds. Even though they knew they would be next up on the firing
line, the teachers spared no ammunition.
"You looked ridiculous when you contradicted yourself up there," the teachers told one sheepish presenter. "Just a minute ago you said that infinity divided by zero was infinity, and now you say the answer is zero. Your students will lose all respect for you if you come so unprepared."
Maggie
sighed. Yes, the teachers could be better prepared. But their
habit of fierce criticism of each other was only making them
defensive, and it wasn't improving their presentations a bit. How
could she get them to go easier on each other - and themselves?
"Feedback" is
information about how a person's behavior affects others.
Maggie's teachers were giving each other ineffective feedback;
their criticisms were laced with emotionally loaded phrases:
"you looked ridiculous," "and now you say
the answer is..." Anyone would feel defensive under such an
attack.
Effective feedback, on the other hand, takes the humanity of the receiver into account. It is gentle, but not necessarily all positive. Like the inappropriate feedback in the example, it is specific, and mentions particular circumstances, words or actions that the receiver can understand and change, if necessary. ("You are always unprepared" is even less effective than "You were unprepared today.")
Ideally, feedback is solicited, rather than imposed, and involves the sharing of information, rather than the giving of advice. It contains only the amount of information the receiver can use or hear at a given moment, rather than everything that is on one's mind. And it does not concern itself with why people act the way they do; "You were unprepared because you were afraid to ask for help last night," is more intrusive and potentially painful to the receiver than simply, "You were unprepared."
Using these clues to effective feedback, how would you talk to the teacher about the mistake in his model lesson?
Remember, effective feedback is:
It is not:
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When you are the receiver of feedback, how you act and what you feel inside is just as important as the things you do when you give feedback to others. Try to listen without defending yourself, asking questions only for clarification. Remember that the feedback you get is only one person's opinion. Listen carefully and then decide how much of it to accept - anywhere from ten to ninety percent is reasonable, depending on the circumstances. If you are unsure if a criticism is justified or not, check with a number of different people, especially those you can count on to be straight with you. Then decide whether or not you should change your behavior.
ONE SOLUTION TO THE TEACHER TRAINING PROBLEM
Maggie realized that she would have to do more than talk to the teachers about effective feedback; she would have to create an atmosphere where effective feedback was monitored by the participants, rather than by herself alone. In addition, she decided, she would have to model both giving and receiving effective feedback, herself.
Maggie changed the format of lesson critique by setting up small observation and discussion groups that gave feedback to individual presenters. Each group elected a facilitator who monitored the discussion to make sure the feedback followed the rules above.
The facilitator would first ask the teacher who presented the lesson to give a self-critique, and would insist that the teachers mention both positive and negative points about their own presentations. The result was interesting. Teachers were so used to being criticized without mercy that they found it very difficult to say anything positive about their own presentations. And when they mentioned the negatives, they were so accurate that the other group members rarely had anything critical to add. This made the group discussions focus on the positive. Eventually they became support groups, which improved morale tremendously.
Maggie welcomed feedback from the participants on her new methods, for she felt this was the best way to show how the technique should work in practice. At first, the teachers found it very hard to listen to critical feedback, even effective, gentle feedback, without becoming defensive. They told Maggie that it was humiliating just to sit there without saying anything, and that sometimes they needed to explain why they had done one thing or another in their lessons.
Maggie
listened quietly without saying anything. Then she thanked the
teachers for their feedback and told them that she had gained a
different perspective. She agreed that sometimes it is necessary
to clarify why you do something that others may not agree with,
but that other times it was probably good to practice just
listening to another's point of view. In later evaluations,
participants told Maggie, "You listen well."
Back in Togo, Chris had
taken a holiday. Sunning himself on the beach with some of his
old friends from training, he listened to Nancy's story of
frustration with her assignment in the capital.
"It looks like a soft life," she said, "but when you can't really get close to the people you work with, you begin to feel lonely." Things had started out so well, she told Chris. Everyone was so welcoming and easy to work with. She had been facilitating a group that was interested in turning vacant land into community gardening plots. But recently, for no apparent reason, people she thought were her friends had stopped laughing and joking with her the way they used to. Maybe she was just becoming a boring person, she told Chris. In the last group meeting, two of the women had actually put their heads down on the table and gone to sleep!
Nancy had tried asking the group to tell her what was wrong. She was ready to listen to feedback, she had decided. Even if she had done something really awful, she wanted to know about it. But everyone continued to smile politely and say there was no problem. The only thing she could think of that might have offended people was a little discussion she'd had with a few of the group over a beer after work. They had insisted that AIDS had originated in the U.S., while Nancy had read that it had come from Africa. It didn't matter where it came from, she told Chris, the point was to get rid of it. But still she had found it strange that her friends would not listen to the facts.
Anyway,
Nancy concluded, if her friends had been offended by something
she had said or done, the only way they were going to get back on
track in their working group was through open communication in an
atmosphere of trust. If they only would express their feelings,
she told Chris, everything would be so much easier.
Erikson, a psychoanalyst
trained in the Freudian tradition in Vienna in the 1930s,
immigrated to America in the days preceding World War II and soon
had the opportunity to visit both the Sioux in North Dakota and
the Yurok Indians on the Oregon coast. In his observations of
mothers and children, and in discussions with chiefs and
traditional healers he began to put together a theory of cultural
influences on child rearing and personality that would alter
psychologists' perceptions of human nature.
Unlike Freud's followers, who believed that deviant behavior - that is, deviant from the upper class Viennese norm - was the result of neurosis, Erikson pointed out that what seemed deviant in one society often made sense in a different cultural context. Everything in the environment molded a child, Erikson said; the history of the society, its geography, the goals and aspirations of its members, the way its children are touched and fed and carried about, the way people think and talk, the imagery they use, the myths they have developed.
Because of environmental influences on personality, "normal" or expected expressions of emotions in one culture may be very different in another, and this difference may be the result of the ways children grow up and what their society expects of them. At the same time, all human beings are alike in feeling basic emotions. Anger, for example, occurs in all societies, but its modes of expression may vary as much as its music or cuisine.
In Nancy's group, anger was expressed in a way that in the American context might be labelled "passive aggressive." Instead of loud arguments, or swearing or other outbursts of temper, adults resorted more often to pouting, or stony silence, or lethargy, or even tearful pleading or extreme obsequiousness, especially to superiors.
Such behavior was not considered particularly unprofessional or "childish" as it might seem in an American context. These forms of passive resistance are approved ways of expressing anger in Togo that have developed in response to a traditionally hierarchical society with its clear lines of authority, its constant injunctions to children to be silent and immobile, the cultural necessity of living together in very close quarters, and the expectation that group solidarity and smooth relations should over-ride what some individual person may feel inside.
Figure
In the light of these cultural differences, Nancy's expectation that real progress would be made when people simply expressed their true feelings was perhaps unrealistic. Americans are open because of our social context: our tradition of individual liberty, our historical rejection of British and European hierarchies and formalities, our pioneer and cowboy mystique and more recently, because of the human potential movement which encourages communication through self-expression.
As Nancy had guessed, her Togolese friends had been insulted by the touchy subject she had brought up over beer. It was not the first time that Nancy's objectivity had made them uncomfortable. At first, they had shown their displeasure by simply not shaking hands with Nancy as often as they had before. But Nancy, thinking that their greater informality was a sign of intimacy as it was at home, paid no attention to the signals of her colleagues that the relationship was in trouble.
This lack of response from Nancy further fanned the flames, and the group began to show their resentment by ignoring Nancy's attempts to lead discussions, even, as she had pointed out, by going to sleep during meetings. What in an American context might have been expressed as open resentment and active discomfort, here was manifested by more subtle, passive methods that were perfectly normal in the cultural context.
Although Nancy's group eventually got over their hurt feelings and began working together again, Nancy remains confused and a little put off by their behavior. She is a person who needs close sharing of real feelings and the openness and trust valued by her own society. Even though a talk with her APCD helped her become aware of the reasons for the cultural misunderstanding, Nancy cannot completely accept the differences between the two societies. This should not be seen as a failure on Nancy's part - it is a realistic example of how difficult it is to straddle two cultures.
ISSUE: Although adults need to (and will) communicate their feelings in the ways they have been taught by their culture, these expressions of feelings may be conditioned by a strong tradition of hierarchy. Children may speak in whispers when questioned by adults, for example, blue collar workers may bow excessively in the presence of their bosses, women may quietly accept restrictions and indignities from their fathers and husbands. Such culturally acceptable behavior is in direct contradiction to NFE values which insist that adults treat each other as equals, and that true respect is based on the breaking down of hierarchies. How
can Volunteers deal with this contradiction in their work
and daily life: how can they simultaneously show their
respect for the culture and teach the equality they
believe in? |
This final story is not
about a Volunteer at all, but about a development worker born and
raised in a traditional society in the developing world. Speaking
the local language and feeling close ties with her roots in
village society but having successfully struggled through the
educational system and completed her higher degrees abroad, Ayawa
is the mixture of North and South, traditional and modern, that
inspires the title of "world citizen." And as a
development worker successfully applying NFE values and methods,
she has few equals. For it is easy enough to expound on NFE as a
system of education or as a set of humanistic values; it is quite
another thing to believe in these values so strongly that change
inevitably happens.
There once was a village whose people had been inflicted with guinea worm for as long as they could remember. Now guinea worm is one of the most horrible diseases that a person could contract. A worm grows inside the body until it is sometimes a foot in length, and then it finds a place to make its way out, and slowly, slowly, emerges in all its hideousness, making the person so weak and disgusted that he falls down by the side of the road and is unable to move.
The people of this village were visited by many officials from international aid agencies and told that their problems came from the dirty river water they drank and bathed in. They listened to the officials, though they did not believe them, and accepted the offer of a new well that the officials said would cure them of this terrible affliction.
Figure
The aid officials came and installed the new well with a shiny new pump and went away happy that the villagers would no longer have to suffer from guinea worm. The villagers used the new pump for awhile, but when the rains came it became rusty and finally it broke down completely. The villagers were sad, because they liked the gift that the officials had given them, but since it was no longer of use to them, they went back to the river and carried water to their huts as before.
When the officials came back the next year to evaluate their progress in their clean water campaign, and found the pump hardened with rust, they shook their heads and said to each other, "These people do not accept responsibility for their own development. They are dependent on foreign aid like spoiled children who imagine that they only need to ask and everything will be done for them." And the officials went away, sad to discover that their money had been wasted and that their project had been a failure.
A few years later, Ayawa came back from abroad where she had been working in village health projects. She had read about this village in the agency's annual report, and since it was close to her own natal village, she decided to go and see what she could do.
Ayawa knew that the way to convince the village chief of the importance of her mission was to see him very early in the morning. She arrived the night before, slept on a mat in a hut of a friendly villager, and before the first cock crowed, she was knocking at the chief's door. Ayawa accepted the chief's elaborate greetings, offered her own, and finally came to the point; she would like to talk to the villagers about the problem of guinea worm. The chief agreed, and a meeting was arranged for later that day.
The villagers assembled and the chief told them to listen carefully to what the visitor had to say. Ayawa told them she had heard of their trouble, and asked if any of them knew where the guinea worm came from.
"The water in our village has been afflicted with an evil spirit," the villagers told her. We are extremely unlucky to have to suffer this terrible fate. But there is nothing to be done."
"You are right," said Ayawa. "There is an evil spirit inhabiting your water supply. And the next time I come I will show you what it looks like."
Ayawa went home to the capital and borrowed a microscope from the college, returned to the village, and showed the villagers the tiny guinea worm larvae in the river water.
The villagers were very excited. Here was a development worker who knew something. They told Ayawa, "With your help, perhaps we can get rid of this spirit. Please tell us what to do."
Ayawa suggested that they look at all the water sources in the area of the village to see if they could find one free of the evil spirit. Together, they went around examining the water with the college microscope. The people could see for themselves that every source carried the guinea worm larvae.
Some of the villagers were discouraged. "You see, the spirit is everywhere. There is nothing we can do." But others said, "What about the well that the other officials brought us? They told us the water was better for our health, but we did not believe them. If we could get the pump working again we could examine the water and find out if they were right or not."
After much discussion, the villagers agreed this would be a good idea. They asked Ayawa to petition the aid agency for money to fix the pump, for it required new parts that were only available from overseas. But Ayawa refused. "You have everything you need among your own people to get this grant," she told them. You have your traditional village committees, you have a chief, you have some literate community members who have been to high school and can write in the language the development officials can understand. It is up to you to do it yourselves."
Figure
Finally the villagers were convinced. They put together a grant application, and a few months later had received their aid. Soon the pump was repaired. They tested the water, and sure enough, it was free of the evil spirit. The villagers were happy, but still cautious. "We will be careful to use only this water for a few seasons," they said, "and see if our health improves."
The
journal of Ayawa's small aid organization shows a graph of the
change in the incidence of guinea worm in this village. In the
first year the number of cases diminished from 928 to 534. Three
years later only seven cases of guinea worm were to be found. The
villagers were so grateful that they again petitioned the agency
for money, this time to buy educational materials so that they
themselves could teach their children and grandchildren about the
importance of clean water. Never again would they have to suffer
from the horror of guinea worm.
Freire is a radical
Brazilian educator who was jailed in the 1960's for his literacy
methods that were then considered unorthodox and dangerous
(though after some years of exile he was named Minister of
Education). Freire speaks about a state of magical
consciousness in which uneducated people often view the
world. When people do not understand the true cause and effect
relationships behind events, Freire says, they resort to magical
explanations to ease their uncertainty. Because they feel more at
the mercy of the natural world than in control of it, they
stubbornly insist that they have no choice but to submit to a
superior power.
But, Freire insists, all human beings are capable of reflection and are able to look at their lives objectively and critically. All people are capable of leaving magical consciousness behind and attaining a state of critical consciousness, in which they are active transformers of the world rather than objects that suffer the whims of fate, or the gods, or the evil spirits.
How do people attain critical consciousness?
Figure
* Through DIALOGUE, an empathetic communication with someone who sees critically. When villagers and an outsider are linked by love, hope and mutual trust, says Freire, they can join each other in an educational endeavor.
* Through a MUTUAL SEARCH FOR UNDERSTANDING, characterized by joint questioning, testing, and decision making.
* Through ACTION, by which villagers are able to transform their world, thereby becoming fully human.
* Through REFLECTION, a critical, objective re-ordering of their former perceptions.
This cycle of action, reflection and search for new information is nonformal education in its best sense. It is rare. But it represents an ideal we all can strive for.
Figure
