Capstone Chronicles 2: Finding a focus
This post outlines ideas and experiences which have shaped my Ma International Development thesis to date under three key themes:
- Reflexivity: the mirror as well as the magnifying glass,
- Community: familiarity as a strength, not a weakness, and
- Articulation: visiblising ideas and processes.
Reflexivity
The mirror as well as the magnifying glass
As a teacher, I am no stranger to professional reflection — for us though, this is usually focused how students are engaging with our teaching. Practicing reflexivity by engaging in a Most-Significant Change story process (Dart et al., 2003) shifted the focus onto my role as teacher and as development practitioner as situated within my professional, cultural, relational and spatial contexts. I had never viewed my students, in Freirean terms, as empty vessels to be filled, but I failed to see my own role and that of the school in initiating students into the world that is without helping them to discover that it is socially constructed and changeable (Ajayi, 2015).
Situating myself reflexively in this way helped me to understand my own colonised mind and how this shaped my work in education and development. This shift in thinking, along with key critiques of education and knowledge for development from Rutazibwa (2018) and Narayanaswamy (2013), led to my focus on capacity-building as the foundation of my thesis. Questions from these scholars such as whose capacity is deemed to be lacking, why and by whom? As well as if we are ‘building’ capacity, to what end and for whose benefit? led me to a post-development framing in my thesis to try and better understand whether capacity-building can exist in a decolonial and solidary space, as sharing rather than shaping.
Articulation
In exploring post-development through scholars such as Rahnema (1996) and in realising the growth focus of development (Horner, 2020), I quickly came to understand that words and terms in the development discourse could not be taken at face value. As part of my reflective research report in Learning and Participation, I explored the importance of skills for articulating processes, learning and ideas to make them visible to others through my ‘Critical Multiliteracies Framework’. My thesis is an application of this need to visiblise and articulate by telling the stories of existing processes of knowledge construction and problematise sender/receiver binaries.
Community
In a Learning and Participation tutorial, we discussed Burkey’s framework of participation (Burkey, 1996) in our learning circles. First, we were to prioritise the points of the framework in importance for ‘a development context’, then we were to do the same for our own circle community. The second conversation was much longer and more thoughtful, and the order of priorities notably different. Having often been self-conscious of ‘being too close’ or not being objective in making decisions around communities I was embedded in, this activity solidified for me the benefits of being invested. Chambers’ ‘new professionalism’ provided academic and professional license to use love and trust as professional strengths rather than weaknesses (Chambers, 2017).
Engaging a group of former students, colleagues and friends at my former workplace, as the critical reference group (Robinson-Pant, 1988) has shaped my approach to co-design and participatory data collection and analysis through a praxis of love and solidarity (Chambers, 2017; Freire, 2005).
References
Ajayi, L. (2015). Critical multimodal literacy: How Nigerian female students critique texts and reconstruct unequal social structures. Journal of Literacy Research, 47(2), 216–244. https://doi.org/10.1177/1086296X15618478
Burkey, S. (1996). People first. Zed Books.
Chambers, R. (2017). Can we know better? In Can We Know Better? Practical Action Publishing Ltd. https://doi.org/10.3362/9781780449449.006
Dart, J., Davies, R., & Jane Dart, J. (2003). A Dialogical, Story-Based Evaluation Tool: The Most Significant Change Technique. American Journal of Evaluation, 24(2), 137–155.
Freire, P. (2005). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Horner, R. (2020). Towards a new paradigm of global development? Beyond the limits of international development. Progress in Human Geography, 44(3), 415–436. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132519836158
Narayanaswamy, L. (2013). Problematizing “Knowledge-for-Development.” Development and Change, 44(5), 1065–1086. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12053
Rahnema, M. (1996). Towards Post Development: Searching for signposts, a new language and new paradigms. In M. Rahneam & V. Bawtree (Eds.), The post development reader (pp. 377–404). Zed Books.
Robinson-Pant, A. (1988). PRA: a new literacy? In Source: PLA Notes (Vol. 24).