[Ailist] AI summit with the illiterate people

[Malcolm Odell]

Hi Parashu and Cheri,

Short answer: Interviews can work well with illiterate people.  We 
just need to drop our own dependency on the written word and join 
them in their culture of story-telling and oral tradition marked by 
their excellent memories and dramatic skills.  More below.

Meanwhile, a digression: It's good to be back in touch via the  once again!
(You may have noticed that I have been virtually a total drop-out for 
ages now.  It seems when I switched to the 'AI Digest' I just never 
seemed to get plugged into the conversations like I had over the 
preceding years.)

Now, more about working with illiterate people:  Here I am in 
Tanzania conducting a series of APA training programs for Africare 
around community participation and mobilization for a new hydropower 
project on the Malagarasi River near Lake Tanganyika.... and your 
conversation about an AI summit for illiterate people is very close 
to home.  Many rural people we engage with are illiterate, as they 
were in Nepal.

In my experience here, in the eastern hills of Sierra Leone, and in 
communities in southern Sudan -- and of course -- back in Nepal, we 
have never had any problems with interviews among such folks.
Indeed, as  you both know, illiterate people really do have a 
heightened capacity for storytelling - and that's the key to the 
interviews.  We asked poor illiterate women by the thousands to tell 
their stories and just that simple request released floods of amazing 
stories, both in one-on-one interviews and in small and large groups.

Perhaps what gets in the way is ourselves and our diminished oral 
storytelling and memory capacities, and our severe dependency on the 
written word.

Case in point:
In rural Sierra Leone, as in Nepal, when we got out the flip charts 
or the notebooks, we were immediately building a wall between 
ourselves and illiterate people.  My local Sierra Leonean IRC team 
members always loved to organize village meetings around a flip 
chart, and even posted or distributed agendas.  And then they 
wondered why only the literate leadership seemed to be taking the 
lead in discussions.  Clearly, they felt inferior when looking at 
things they didn't understand, especially when the educated among 
them did understand.

So, on my next round of training, I asked our team members to do 
everything from then on without any paper, markers or flip charts. 
For our larger meetings, we had always divided into groups - as in 
any Summit.

All Discovery was through oral story telling, interviews, 
introductions of partners, etc.

Dreams were acted out as role plays or skits -- or drawn as pictures 
(we did let people draw pictures, and there markers and flip chart 
papers did not cause any problems - everyone can draw, even those who 
are shy and have never held a pen before - and then they don't 
hesitate to stand up before a crowd and tell a story about their 
picture, with considerable pride; shyness vanishing before our eyes.)

Design of action plans were all discussed and agreed upon in their 
groups with one person serving as 'raconteur' reporter.

Delivery of action plans was through presentation to the rest of the 
group in the form of a drama/role-play/skit/song/dance that 
demonstrated how they would implement their plans together.

Result: Our community sessions became totally energized and everyone 
participated enthusiastically. Drama, song, dance, and storytelling 
flourished.

I see no reason why such an approach would not be totally successful 
with your planned Summit.  We have to learn their ways and leave our 
pens and paper behind.

Just to confirm, I will copy this to Keshab Thapaliya and Mukul 
Acharya who both were part of the WEP/WORTH women's empowerment 
program, are both very knowledgable about how we used APA with 
illiterate women, and are also literacy specialists.

Does this help?  Any more questions?  Let me know.

Appreciatively,

Mac

At 10:36 AM -0400 3/21/09, Cheri Torres wrote:
>Parashu,
>Help me understand why people who are illiterate are not able to interview
>others?
>
>In my limited experience (and it is limited), cultures where reading and
>writing are not stressed often have a heightened capacity for storytelling
>and memory and/or for pictures/images/metaphors that express the wholeness
>of their experience (the thing us literate people often have difficulty
>creating from our more verbal stories).  I think people can be curious about
>people and their world's without being literate.
>
>So then a question arises, for me. Could the issue be something other than
>literacy? Is it possible that some small groups of people share a group
>story and they have collective experiences. The idea of individual stories
>doesn't make sense because the self-as-separate doesn't make sense? Perhaps
>even talking about their experience doesn't make sense because it requires
>them to objectify the people and their experiences, which may be foreign. It
>suddenly occurs to me that the concept of time is central to every AI
>interview I've ever written or participated in.  What happens if a culture
>doesn't experience time in western terms? What if all time is now?  It may
>then require quite different language and conceptualizing.
>
>Perhaps a question that would support AI around the world is how has AI been
>adapted for use in different cultures that hold quite different paradigms
>for what it means to be in the world. And what kinds of outcomes have
>occurred from their practice of AI?
>
>You've certainly given me food for thought this morning!
>Cheri
>
>
>
>On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 1:25 AM, Parashu <parashu at wlink.com.np> wrote:
>
>>  Dear All,
>>  Namaste from Nepal !
>>  I need to do summits (with a certain purpose of research) with the people
>>  of rural parts of Nepal where most of the people are illiterate . I have to
>>  interview as many people as I can and the best way to do is to do the
>>  summits (I think). Even in summit, there can be very few people who can
>>  interview others. Does anybody have any experience of doing summits with
>>  such people? Or is there any references/books/articles regarding this
>>  subject? Do you know if the book "The Appreciative Inquiry Summit"(By Jim
>>  Ludema and .......) available in the internet? We don't have any books of AI
>>  in our market.
>>  parashurt at gmail.com
>>  parashu at wlink.com.np
>>
>>  Appreciatively
>>
>>  Parashu Ram Timalsina (PR)
>>  Secretary General
>>  Nepal Appreciative Inquiry National Network (NAINN)
>>  977-1-5529844 (R)
>>  977-98510-19145 (Cell)
>>  _______________________________________________
>>  The Appreciative Inquiry Discussion List is hosted by the David Eccles
>>  School of Business at the University of Utah. Jack Brittain is the list
>>  administrator. For subscription information, go to:
>>  http://mailman.business.utah.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/ailist
>>
>
>
>
>--
>Cheri B. Torres, Ph.D.
>Collaborative-by-Design
>Asheville, NC
>828-225-5088
>_______________________________________________
>The Appreciative Inquiry Discussion List is hosted by the David 
>Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah. Jack Brittain 
>is the list administrator. For subscription information, go to:
>http://mailman.business.utah.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/ailist


-- 
Malcolm J. Odell, Jr., MS, PhD
Community Development Advisor
AFRICARE
440 R Street NW
Washington, DC 20001, USA
603-770-6006
202-328-5385
<macodell at verizon.net>
<www.africare.org>
<www.macodell.com>
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