Adjusting the pace of practice
Blog post by Mieke Berghmans and is shared generously by The Ideal Practitioner.
Having been a social change practitioner for quite a while and having been trained as a social andragogue (and thus being ‘dipped into’ Freire, Mezirow, Marie Parker Follett, and other transformative pedagogy theorists) years ago, I fully agree with Joanna’s answer! I am really grateful that this perspective was brought up.
It’s maybe not that surprising that organisational development has shared points of interest with transformative pedagogy. Indeed the thinking of Marie PArker Follett or Argyris and Schon has been highly influential for both the organisational development field as well as the field of transformative pedagogy, adult learning and education.
As for Joanna’s remark about values and how to put them at the forefront of our practice I personally believe that, as Joanna says, both profit as well as non-profit are concerned with values. What is different however is that the profit sector is driven by profit (values are important, but are not the ultimate criterium), the non-profit sector (or many organisations within this sector) is largely driven by values, ideas or principles (like solidarity, emancipation,…) , or maybe its better to say ” a desire for a better world”. Often these principles are ideas like emancipation, transformation, social justice, participation, democracy.
It is exactly this value driven character that drives NGOs to adopt participatory, emancipatory, democratic strategies and I agree with you fully that the different competing demands towards NGOs make it sometimes quite difficult to embody these values.
What challenges does such an “ideal” social change/development practitioner face in trying to live up to that ideal in the real world?
I think that time and timing is an important factor that makes ‘putting the values into practice’ quite a challenging mission. I have often come across participatory processes where long and constructive participatory discussions are suddenly cut off because a director, facilitator, staff member decides that ‘ there has been enough talking, we need to do something now, we need to start seeing results’. All the ownership that was created, the expectations that were raised, the issues that were discusses … are then suddenly brushed of the table and suddenly ‘it’s business as usual’. This issue of timing can of course be related to competing demands of the different stakeholders (where the donor is often presented as the one who wants results soon); but I think it also has to be linked to ‘human nature’ (impatience, the need to see results, the urge to ‘do something’, the incapacity to continuously deal with unpredictable processes).
Maybe one of the qualities that the ideal social change practitioner needs to have is to be able to adjust the pace he wants to adopt to the pace that the process (the stakeholders, the participants, the …) requires.
HI, MY NAME IS MIEKE BERGHMANS. AFTER HAVING FINISHED MY MASTER’S IN PEDAGOGICAL SCIENCES (SOCIAL PEDAGOGY) AND A MASTER’S IN CULTURE AND DEVELOPMENT STUDIES, I STARTED WORKING IN THE DEVELOPMENT SECTOR ABOUT 12 YEARS AGO. HEAVILY INFLUENCED BY IDEAS OF EMANCIPATORY AND TRANSFORMATIONAL PEDAGOGY, I FIRST WORKED AS A CAPACITY BUILDER FOR A LOCAL NGO IN ZIMBABWE. LATER I BECAME A PROGRAMME OFFICER (FOR THE PROGRAMME IN DRCONGO) AS WELL AS CAPACITY BUILDING EXPERT AT THE HEADQUARTERS OF A BELGIAN INTERNATIONAL NGO. A FEW YEARS AGO, I DECIDED TO TAKE A BREAK FROM NGO PRACTICE TO DO RESEARCH. THAT IS HOW ENDED UP AT MY CURRENT JOB. I AM NOW A PHD STUDENT AT THE LABORATORY FOR EDUCATION AND SOCIETY AT THE KULEUVEN (CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY LEUVEN) IN BELGIUM. THE PRELIMINARY TITLE OF MY RESEARCH PROJECT, WHICH WILL BE COMPLETED IN SEPTEMBER 2018, IS “ANALYZING BENEFICIARY FEEDBACK PROCESSES IN THE LIGHT OF THE QUEST FOR ACCOUNTABILITY BETWEEN INGOS AND THEIR BENEFICIARIES: A PRACTICE-THEORY INFORMED EMPIRICAL STUDY”.
Columbia Embury
www.wright.edu
www.wright.edu
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