Category Archives: Living Learning

Professors of our own poverty: intellectual practices of a poor people’s movement in post-apartheid South Africa

Cerianne Robertson, Interface

This paper addresses how a poor people’s movement contests dominant portrayals of ‘the poor’ as a violent mass in contemporary South African public discourse. To explore how Abahlali baseMjondolo, a leading poor people’s movement, articulates its own representation of ‘the poor,’ I examine two primary intellectual and pedagogical practices identified by movement members: first, discussion sessions in which members reflect on their experiences of mobilizing as Abahlali, and second, the website through which the movement archives a library of its own homegrown knowledge. I argue that these intellectual practices open new spaces for the poor to represent themselves to movement members and to publics beyond shack settlements. Through these spaces, Abahlali demonstrates and asserts the intelligence which exists in the shack settlements, and demands that its publics rethink dominant portrayals of ‘the poor.’

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Professors of our own poverty: intellectual practices of a poor people’s movement in post-apartheid South Africa

“We are Poor, not Stupid”: Learning from Autonomous Grassroots Social Movements in South Africa

https://www.sensepublishers.com/media/1468-learning-and-education-for-a-better-world.pdf

“We are Poor, not Stupid”: Learning from Autonomous Grassroots Social Movements in South Africa

by Anne Harley

During the course of 2008, six militants from two South African social movements met every month to reflect on what they were learning through the struggle they were engaged in as social movement actors, and what they were learning as participants in a Certificate-level course at the local university. They called these sessions ‘Living learning’. Their reflections were written up after each session, and published in late 2009 as Living Learning (Figlan et al., 2009). ‘Living learning’ was intended partly as a space to reflect on what and how to take back the things that the militants, mandated by their movements to attend the course, had learned in the classrooms of the academy:

For a living learning, the critical question was always how best to take back to our communities whatever we might gain?; how best can our communities benefit from the few of us who are lucky to have access to the course?; how will we utilise the academic skills we can gain?; how do we take this information back? It has always been the task of a synthesis and a breaking down of the University theory so that we can work out properly what we can learn from it – and so we can understand for ourselves in what way it is different from the daily learning of struggle and life emijondolo [in the shacks] or eplasini [on the farms] (Figlan et al., 2009, p. 7).

But, significantly, ‘Living learning’ was also about how to combine the university of struggle and the academic university, and indeed ‘disrupt’ the academic university.

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“We are Poor, not Stupid”: Learning from Autonomous Grassroots Social Movements in South Africa

The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation

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http://thinkingafricarhodesuniversity.blogspot.com/2011/09/ignorant-school-master-five-lessons-in.html

The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation

by Jacques Rancière

The book was published in the early 80s as a contribution to a debate happening in France over education. The debate was over the push by the left to make school a nicer, more welcoming and inclusive place for students. A socialist published a book criticising this arguing that schools should be for education, the issue of how students feel in them is secondary. They are only there to be taught and it is on teaching that people should be focused. Against this Ranciere argued that education does not happen through the transference of knowledge from one subject to another. The teacher is not the holder of knowledge. Rather education is a process of self-education. The learner struggles through problem and through that learns.

While this book is ostensibly simply about education, the argument has obvious resonances with Ranciere’s critique of Althusser and of Leninism more widely where the intellectual/party is the holder of revolutionary knowledge. But this critique can be extended to the entire left, where revolutionaries/activists etc have revolutionary knowledge and they only need to inform people about it.

The book however, although making an argument is structured in a unique way. It describes the emancipatory education of Joseph Jacotot, a French post-Revolutionary philosopher of education who discovered that he could teach things that he himself did not know. The book is both a history and a contemporary intervention in the philosophy and politics of education, through the concept of autodidactism; Rancière chronicles Jacotot’s “adventures,” but he articulates Jacotot’s theory of “emancipation” and “stultification” in the present tense.

This overview of the book is from The Commune.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

http://www.pedagogyoftheoppressed.com/about/

About Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed

To the oppressed,
and to those who suffer with them
and fight at their side
– dedication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed

First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. The methodology of the late Paulo Freire has helped to empower countless impoverished and illiterate people throughout the world. Freire’s work has taken on especial urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is increasingly accepted as the norm. Continue reading →

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Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Education for Critical Consciousness
Pedagogy of Freedom - Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage
Pedagogy of the Heart
We Make the Road by Walking

“Willingness to listen, learning rather than masterminding and dictating over the poor”

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http://german-development-cooperation.org/files/coalface.pdf

“Willingness to listen, learning rather than masterminding and dictating over the poor” – From facilitation to animation and living learning

by Gerhard Kienast

The Pietermaritzburg-based Church Land Programme (CLP) is a rare example of an NGO which had the courage to radically shift its strategy when it found that it was based on the wrong assumptions. Disillusioned by the results of its interventions for the transfer of church-owned land to communities living on it, the organisation embarked on a new mission. Searching for a way to ‘build the critical voice of the marginalised’ it discarded the typical relationship between NGO workers and grassroots people. Walking with social movements like Abahlali, it has helped to create alternatives to the prevailing concepts of development and capacity building.

CLP began its journey in 1996 as a joint project of the Association for Rural Advancement (AFRA) and the ecumenical NGO PACSA (Pietermaritzburg Agency for Christian Social Awareness). Its original objective was to make church land available to landless people and to tap into government sponsored land reform programmes. The idea was that transfer duties and tax would be waived and grants by the Department of Land Affairs (DLA) be used for agricultural inputs. The NGO compiled inventories of lands held by all major Christian churches, helped develop their land policies and acted as a mediator between churches, government and communities.

In retrospect, CLP director Graham Philpott is very sober about the outcomes: “It was a lovely theory but the practice was very different! In one case where a church was willing to donate land, it took 8 years to complete the transfer.” He also remembers a public ceremony with the Bishop and the Director General (DG) that ended in scandal. “It emerged that DLA got the land wrong and instead of giving it to the poor local community it was transferred to members of the elite. When the community reacted angrily, the DG even abused them and called them ungrateful.”

Despite of some success in other areas, CLP came to the conclusion that facilitation alone would not be enough to protect poor families, especially women-headed households, from being sidelined. In a 2004 discussion document for the churches the NGO appealed: “The gulf between an agrarian reform that is in line with biblical morality, and government’s market-oriented land reform is too big to ignore in good conscience. As we have done in the past, the Christian church in South Africa assumes a prophetic role and speaks for the interests of the poor.”

CLP stepped out of the spaces of church and government. Instead of focussing on church-owned land it started to deal with struggles around land in general. Philpott explains: “We are no longer focussing on technical issues but on justice. Our work is now about systems of transformation, not systems of delivery. – Of course, in doing this we continue to use our contacts. The church must come along. It can lend a moral voice and support justice.” At the same time, the organisations became aware that merely ‘speaking for the interests of the poor’ was not very helpful either.

CLP reflected on its own practice and that of civil society in general. In a 2007 brochure titled ‘Learning to walk’, the organisation shared its analysis and how it changed its praxis. With Stephen Greenberg and Nhlanhla Ndlovu CLP argued that developmentalist ideology and practice has led to “the co-option of the majority of civil society into systems of domination and exploitation”.

This is also manifest in the way many civil society organisations interact with grassroots people, “so that while claiming the opposite, NGOs in fact ‘teach’ and impose on people, rather than supporting and assuming people’s own capacities for learning, analysis and action for genuine transformation.” As an alternative, CLP decided to adopt the concepts of Paulo Freire, which have become known as ‘animation’ or ‘training for transformation’ (see text box).

Text box
“At all stages of their liberation, the oppressed must themselves as people engage in the vocation of becoming more fully human…To achieve this… it is necessary to trust in the oppressed and their ability to reason. Whoever lacks this trust will fail to bring about, or will abandon, dialogue, reflection and communication, and will fall into using slogans, communiqués, monologues and instructions. While no-one liberates themselves by their own efforts alone, neither are they liberated by others.“
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p 41-2

“We concluded that our first priority must be to strengthen the constituencies. Real transformation can only happen if those who suffer speak for themselves.” According to ‘The Community Workers’ Handbook’, “most real learning and radical change takes place when a community experiences dissatisfaction with some aspect of their present life. An animator can provide a situation in which they can stop, reflect critically upon what they are doing, identify any new information or skills that they need, get this information and training, and then plan action. … By setting a regular cycle of reflection and action in which a group is constantly celebrating their successes, and analysing critically the causes of mistakes and failures, they become more and more capable of effectively transforming their daily life.”

‘Learning to walk’ tells the story of how CLP started to use this methodology during interventions around church land or farm killings; in meetings with church leaders and farming groups. In order to allow for learning, the NGO adopted an activity called ‘accompaniment’. The principal worker would be accompanied by a colleague whose role was to observe and raise questions in preparation for collective reflection sessions. This produced many insights, especially around the power dynamics during meetings. One of the first lessons was that CLP’s introduction to the community (by the church hierarchy or a local politician) could already lead to a situation where its role was scripted and to being drawn into processes driven by local elites.

The organisation learned that “from the first intervention in any place, it is important to be principled, clear and consistent and, where necessary, to challenge others’ presumptions” about its role; “that the animator will not work where access to the people of a place is denied through the control of undemocratic leadership, and will work in open, democratic and participatory ways.” Again and again, CLP experienced how important it is to listen to what people actually say, and to encourage them to tell their story. “This requires creating opportunities … and is based on an assumption that those who suffer are intelligent, creative and resourceful.”

Another crucial lesson was learnt at a workshop of an emerging network of church-based and grassroots rights activists from different rural areas. CLP encountered a “mindset – often created by the practice and patronage of NGOs – that fixates on securing external funding … we were struck listening to language from some participants that persistently pointed to an expectation of ‘salvation’ by outside agents”. The animators resolved that “it is necessary – and tough – to disabuse people of this notion so that they turn to themselves for their own liberation”.

When people developed action plans, they were subject to a ‘rule’ that these had to be completely independent of outside resources. This exercise proved to be very useful and productive. When the network was faced with another human rights violation in the area, mobilisation and action happened independently of any NGO contact person. Such experiences have convinced CLP that it is indeed making progress in its efforts to ‘build the critical voice of the marginalised’.

Over the last years, the organisation has worked intensively with social movements like the Rural Network, a movement fighting for the dignity, rights and land of people living in rural areas of KwaZulu Natal, and the shack-dwellers movement Abahlali baseMjondolo (see article in this reader). Graham Philpott explains: “By being present in movement spaces we are trying to strengthen their struggles, affirm the leadership and bring in other institutions that can provide support.”

Since 2007, leaders of both social movements have enrolled at the University of KwaZulu Natal’s Centre for Adult Education and graduated with a Certificate in Education (Participatory Development). In parallel, CLP convened monthly sessions where the activists could reflect on the connections between their daily experience, being militants faced with real threats of landlessness and repression, on the one hand, with that of being academic students engaging with written experience.
The framework for these sessions was kept very simple so that it would not in any way predetermine the agenda or topics for discussion. CLP staff facilitated and took notes. Discussions created an exciting synthesis that community leaders coined as a “living learning”. Its main theme was “how best to take back to our communities whatever we might gain? How best can our communities benefit from the few of us who are lucky to have access to the course?” Apart from the feedback to the regular meetings of the movements it was decided to publish a booklet, which “could also be there for those ‘smarter’ people to learn from the fools’!”

Clearly, this was tongue in cheek. Although some community leaders entered varsity with a shiver, they would not let anybody undermine their self-esteem: “From what we have seen, there are many at University who think that they are there to learn what to come and ‘teach the poor’ when they are finished studying. It is clear that they imagine they are our educators. They assume we are empty enough and stupid enough for others to learn what they decide, and that they will come and think for those of us who are poor and cannot think. But now we are having our own living learning – and so there is a confrontation brewing about who’s teaching who.”

At least the Church Land Programme has no problem with being taught by shack dwellers and rural poor. Walking together has created a lot of mutual trust and esteem, and CLP is proud of Abalahli’s praise for their “willingness to listen, learning rather than masterminding and dictating over the poor”.