“Education is the manifestation of the perfection already within a person.” As I listened to the words of Sanjoy Ganguli, founder of the Jana Sanskriti movement [12] and keynote speaker at a recent conference I attended, I couldn’t help but smile. I’ve always felt that development programs are best when motivated by participants rather than for them. Yet in my day-to-day work on education programs, I still find myself searching for opportunities to better focus on participants’ ideas, needs and desires. The recent Pedagogy and Theater of the Oppressed [13] conference I attended in Chicago presented one such opportunity.
What is PTO?
The Pedagogy and Theater of the Oppressed (PTO) is a set of methodologies based in the belief that if education is to be effective, it should always consist of dialogue between students and teachers or facilitators and participants. Born out of 1950’s-1960’s labor movements in Brazil, PTO is used most widely among populations that are marginalized or underserved by traditional teacher-to-student education methodologies. It highlights the value of participants’ own knowledge and ideas and focuses on their unique ability to find solutions and affect change in their communities.
Ensuring a participant focus
At the PTO conference I attended, I was inspired by the wide array of theater practitioners, teachers and social activists (as well as the high proportion of program participants in attendance!) who utilize PTO games and theater exercises creatively to focus in on the desires and ideas of those they work with. For example, one attendee [14] demonstrated using PTO to help teen girls act out resistance to peer pressure and to improvise new methods for responding to bullies. Others presented on employing PTO to teach subjects as diverse as middle-school science or English as a Second Language, explaining that students’ learning retention is much higher when educators utilize the knowledge that students themselves bring into the classroom.
One of the main programs that I support at IREX, Youth Theater for Peace [15], uses PTO activities to equip youth in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan with tools to lead conflict resolution efforts in their communities. As I shared stories [16]about the ways our participants have used PTO to create change, I came to a deeper appreciation of the many ways this participant-focus that is woven throughout our diverse portfolio at IREX.
Be it through the Iraqi journalist blogging against gender discrimination [17], or the Muskie fellow working to provide Russian doctors with new approaches toward HIV/AIDs [18], our programs endeavor to support people in finding their own solutions for their communities, as only they truly can. While just a handful of IREX programs use the PTO methodology specifically, a strong organizational culture emphasizes that our work should not be an end to itself, and our programs use a wide variety of methods to equip participants themselves with the tools to improve their communities.
What tools do you use to stay focused on your participants’ ideas?