Episode 6 (Part A): Unearthing Community Conversations: Freire’s Critical Pedagogy

Hey listeners, I'm Izzy, my pronouns are they and them. Welcome to the Critical Conversations for Social Work podcast. This is Joella. Before we start, we'd like to acknowledge the country that we're recording this episode on today and pay our respects to the Tourable and Yaguro peoples and their elders past, present and emerging by committing to always remembering that this always was and always will be our original land. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) ♪ To be I would see by the back ♪ ♪ For break the hell with the ink and strut ♪ ♪ For a place that's made ♪ (upbeat music) - Hello everyone and welcome to Critical Conversations for Social Work podcast. Before we start, I would like to acknowledge the First Nations people of this land, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and also acknowledge the contribution that they have made to this region. My name is Teddy. I prefer my pronouns to be he or him. Today I will be having a Critical Conversation with Peter Westby. Hi Peter. - Good to see you. - Good to see you. - Hello, Teddy. - Would you like to introduce yourself? - Yes. - Peter Westby and I would like to acknowledge I'm on Ginnebada Country, Malaney about 100 kilometers north of Brisbane. And so that's where I am and we look across at the Glass House Mountains and the Aboriginal stories there guide us to take live into our responsibilities. So I'm very grateful for that story. How do I introduce myself? I'm an older man. I'm in my 50s Ted. I've been a community development worker for 33 years. - Wow. - And I was an academic also for 15 of those years working with QT as an adjunct associate professor in community development. But now I work as a consultant with a cooperative, a 25 year old cooperative called Community Practices. Oh, and I'm a part time community development worker with hummingbird house, beautiful hospice, which we work with family to have children who are dying. So my work is quite diverse. So really curious where our conversation will go today because we're not quite sure. - Yeah. I was like, yeah, I've got lots of experience. - Yeah, a lot of experience. But you know, you know there's a saying, you know, you might have 34 years of experience, but there might be just one year of experience repeated 34 times. Unless you are reflecting and growing. So experience without deep reflection does not mean you are growing in your practice. I think this is important to remember. - Yeah, we keep reflecting, keep growing, keep doing better for the future practice. - Yes, exactly. Peter, can you tell me like what do you do now and the pathology you worked from? Can you tell me a little bit more about it? - Yeah, this is such an interesting question, pedagogy. I thought long and hard about this when you asked me and I thought I might start with a story, Ted, of some work I was doing at QUT in the country of Nepal. Because it illustrates the key pedagogy or the influence of my pedagogy, Paul O'Flairé, Pa' Law Flair, a Brazilian who wrote a very famous book in 1970, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed." And his work has influenced many, many people in thinking about how do we learn, how do we support people to understand the political, economic, social, cultural, spiritual forces, shaping their lives and to think critically. So Paul O'Flairé is the guy I want us to keep coming back to in this conversation. And anyway, I was in Nepal two and a half years ago and I was invited because there was a non-government organization using Paul O'Flairé's work to do community development in the best way I know. And very quickly, the methodology of this NGO is to place two community educators in a village for three years. The first three to six months, these community educators are not allowed to do anything except be with the people, work in the gardens, go to meetings, help them cooking in their houses, listen to the women tell their stories, go and listen to the young people tell their stories, listen to the elders tell their stories. So three months of listening. And from a Paul O'Flairé perspective, what you are doing, what the community educator is doing is first listening for generative themes, the key themes emerging from different parts of the community. So that's important for this pedagogy. You listen, you always start with the people. What are the stories of the people? What are the key themes of the people? You're also building relationships, obviously. So you have people who start to trust you. Now, when I went to Nepal, I went with the CEO of this non-government organization. We drove several hundred kilometers and we arrived in one of the villages where these community educators had been working. And on the day we arrived, there was a gathering of 30 people, villages. And I was invited to sit and just watch and listen. And what I observed was a role play, a little theater piece developed by the two community educators and some villages around the experience of domestic violence in the village. So the villages were sitting in a circle and they watched a role play of domestic violence and acted. Now, Paula Flair, of course, this codification. You listen to the stories, the generative theme, and then you build a code. And a code is a picture or a theater piece or a poem or a small film, anything that it becomes a stimulus for dialogue. And so the community educators then facilitated a community dialogue around domestic violence. So they would have asked, it was in another language. So I couldn't understand all the details, but they were asking, what do you see in the role play? Is this something that happens in this village? And how could we stop this happening? What could be done differently? Anyway, the pedagogy of that two hours is of course dialogue. And the key to good dialogue are good questions. So the community educators are asking critical questions. What do you see? Why does this happen in community? How do we stop it? How do we build a safer community, et cetera? Now, I could observe this was quite difficult. There were some people getting angry in the dialogue, but then the villages were intervening. And then I obviously the dialogue finished and there was some food being shared. And I met the educators afterwards. And we talked about this project that he emerged. And it's very exciting. It's so, for me, this is a good example of the pedagogy that comes out of my, out of Pula Flair de, that invites communities collectively. This is important collectively to be in dialogue around difficult things that are impacting or shaping their lives. Does that make sense, Ted? Yeah, I'm talking about like at the beginning, you're assessing, listening, observing, like role playing, tell important things to them. And you met lots of challenges. What have you found the most challenges when doing community development? Well, just to be clear, what's important is there's no intervention for three months. The first stage is listening. Because we must also build relationships. And we must bring, because this is pedagogy for community development. So community development is a collective practice. you also have to bring people to the world. together and people come together when they feel one they trust you, they trust the others in the group and the reason to come together makes sense. You know, like the issue, what people want to come together to deal with the issue, although food also helps. But these are the three things. Yeah, interestingly though, this NGO does not supply any incentives for people to come to meetings. None. So I make a joke about food, but this organisation does and which I think is very good. Now, as I said in the intro, Ted, I work for Hummingbird House, which is a hospice. When I started that job 15 months ago, I said exactly the same as this NGO. I said, I want three months, where you have no expectations of action. I want to just meet families. I want to hear their stories. I want to listen for the key themes that are emerging. Now, after three months, I did invite 10 families to come together to talk about a key issue, which in their world was the difficulty of NDIS, the national disability insurance scheme. Yeah, I facilitated three to our conversations using friarian practice. Now, these two conversations, the pedagogy that I used was the adaptation of friar in what's called collective narrative practice, which means in collective narrative practice, narrative stories. But we very purposefully said, we're going to listen to two types of stories. The first story is people's story of pain, distress, the difficulties around NDIS. We call that the first story. People find this story very easy to tell. It's very difficult. We make a lot of bureaucracy. We feel like our children's needs are not taken seriously. This is the pain. We feel isolated. We feel alone. But the second story, the first question is manual about they share their difficulties and issues they met in their life. Yeah, that's right. We call that the first story in narrative practice. Now, the trick with friarian narrative practices don't stay in the first story. You've also got to get to the second story. The second story is what practices, skills, and ideas have you learned about how to survive and make change in your world of NDIS. Now, when families sitting in a circle start hearing the second story, you start to see the sense of power increase. It's like we unearth and this is a word Paul Affair talks about. We unearth the skills and the resources that people have developed in their struggle to survive. Now, once we unearth these resources in the second story, then we really have a good energy to do collective action moving forward. I think those two stories are really illustrate the pedagogy. In the first story, what Paul Affair called "do the listening" find the generative themes and then codify the themes in a theatre piece or a movie or something that becomes a stimulus for dialogue, particularly around difficult issues. In the second story, the group dialogue is not so much a stimulus or a codification, but working through what we call the first and the second story framework. And this is a really powerful story, way of generating people's energy and analysis together. So that's a little bit of an idea of the pedagogy that the saying, I was going to say, the key saying in a pedagogy that's informed by Frayer, is start with the people but don't stay with the people. So you start with the people. You always start with their stories. You always start with their lived experience, but you can't just stay there. People are coming together because they want to make sense of their experience. In dialogue with others, their perspectives change, their habits, their assumptions shift. They hear another story from someone else and they go, "Oh, I didn't know that." Or the theatre piece challenges their assumptions. So we start with the people but we're trying to push people to start thinking differently as well. We can start with them. We cannot stay with them. Does that mean our minds or our thinking influence there? Yeah, that's a very good question because we all have opinions. Well, if I'm working with people who have lived experience at NDIS, I don't have that experience. I don't have that experience. So my job is to facilitate a collective conversation. My job is to ensure everyone is heard in that collective conversation because every collective conversation always has an interesting dynamic of what I call the mainstream and the margin. Some people start to feel very confident. Their ideas are good. They're confident to speak. They're used to telling their story. But some people in a collective conversation don't have the confidence. They might start to feel like what they have to say isn't important. Exactly. So our job as a facilitator is to ensure those people are included to feel strong enough to tell their story. And then of course our job is to ask good questions. After everyone shared their stories, a question would be what is similar in our stories? What is different in our stories? What is it that is making it so difficult in our lives? So people start to build an analysis. The other problem is the way bureaucracies do not honor the legislation or ignore their own rules. And this is actually what we're trying to do. Now we're not trying to influence their thoughts. This is a very risky issue. Yeah. And hello, Fraa. One of the key words in this pedagogy is called conscientization to make people conscious. There's been a lot of discussion in the literature because one of the challenges is some people would say, for example, if somebody says, I am poor because God wished me to be poor. Then poor, I phrase writing, that would be what we call false consciousness. Like it's not you are not poor because God made you poor. This is false consciousness. And the assumption is that you and I have true consciousness, because we understand that the person is poor because of big social, economic, political forces, not because of God. But what right do we have to disrupt that person's consciousness? And so I would suggest it's not the job of that facilitator. It's the job of the collective conversation to disrupt that. But we really have the heart of the difficulty in this pedagogy, because we cannot assume we know better than people. But we do have, if we're a facilitator and educator, we also have a lot of power, a lot of influence. That's why a code. Remember I used the idea of a code, the theatre piece, a role play. So you're not telling people have to think, but the role play should get people thinking. So poor, Fraa, for example, if a poor person, I work to a lot in South Africa or Uganda, people might be saying, we don't have water in our village. That is because we don't deserve to have water in our village. We still have to go to the river. Now, poor, no, Fraa would create a code. And in that code would be a picture of the villagers walking to the river for their water. But he would give another picture of people in a rich neighbourhood turning their taps on in their house, getting water whenever they want. We would put these pictures next to each other and just ask the people, what do you see? This is the stimulus for dialogue. Well, they start to see, my picture, we walk to the river. In this other picture, the people have water. whenever they want, they turn the tap on. And then the facilitator says, "Well, why do you think these two pictures are different?" And then people start to analyze, "Ah, it's because they are wealthy and we are poor." "Ah, maybe it's because the mayor has decided that neighborhood will get water, but this area will not." So they start to question issues of economics and power decision-making. And this is what Frez Pedagogy is wanting people to do. It's not that me, the community development worker or me, the facilitator, tells people what is true. We create the conditions and the stimulus for dialogue. Peter, I got a curious question. You talk about the things, we can start with them, but we cannot stay with them. When is the time, the right time, where you'll leave them? When we should leave them. That's a good question. Well, in this work in Nepal, I think I said to you, the villagers are placed, the educators are placed in a village for three years. Yeah, it's a long time. Well, the experience of that non-government organisation is it takes three years to get a community organised that has enabled it to start overcoming some of the challenges that they've been stuck with for many years. So in this little story, domestic violence, but there were other challenges. And after the three years, you should have established a community organisation in that village that is governed by the people of the village and they can now manage their own development concerns in a participatory, dialogical way. So my experience is for good community development. You need at three years, at least, in a process. Because you're also trying to train and support local people to do this work eventually. And what brought you to be interested in this category? Yeah, that's a good question. When I was young, I was 19, 20 years old. I learned about development work. I read about it. I was taught by someone. And I thought, I think this is what I want to do in my life. And I moved into the inner city area of Brisbane, West End, Jagadah Country. And I started learning how to do a community development, mentored by some more experienced people. And I think like many good practitioners, I learned on the job. I just started doing it with someone who mentored me. But then I started reading books that would help me make sense of the work. And I was given Paul O'Fair's Pedagogy of the Appressed, which was in written in English in 1972. And it's the first time you read this book, it's very patriarchal. It uses the language, you know, he, always he. And yet, I thought it was a very powerful book. And I started to understand what we're talking about today. And I fell in love with Paul O'Fair because he also, you know, his philosophy is dialogue. That is the key pedagogy dialogue. We learn through dialogue. We learn critical thinking through dialogue. And there's a very beautiful African-American woman called Bell Hooks, who once stood up and challenged Paul O'Fair in a public meeting. She said, "Polo, I like your work, but it's filled with this patriarchal language." And he accepted her critique. He accepted her critique. He listened to her. And his later work is not patriarchal. And I thought, now I know this man doesn't just write about dialogue. He actually lives dialogue. He was critiqued and he responded. He didn't get defensive. And, you know, when you read someone's work and you discover that they don't just write, but they also live in dialogue. You have even more respect and love for his work. His pedagogy, just to say, is also underpinned by words like love and humanity. He's very strong on critical thinking. But he says that the real dialogue also has-- we have to have love of people. Like, if you're going to live in a village for three years and you're going to listen to the stories, you have to love those people. Otherwise, they will not tell you their stories. They will not tell you their real hard stories. You need to build a relationship, you trust. You love them. They trust you. They will tell you what happened. The key things, important things. Yeah. Then you can work together to stop the problem. Exactly. Ted, you know, and Freyadeh and Bell Hooks. And Bell Hooks has-- I really recommend people discover her work. She's has one of the strongest critics of white patriarchal capitalist domination systems. She's deeply committed to transforming a system of domination in our lives in the world. But she also, like Freyadeh, unapologetically uses the word love. How do we have a pedagogy that is critical, is strong, but filled with love? Now, there's a question for us to really kind of explore, not necessarily in our 30 minutes, but it's not to-- it's to channel our anger, because we're people are rightfully angry. Women in the village of Mapore are angry at the domestic violence. But a pedagogy of love also invites the people we disagree with or the oppressors into change, into transformation. As Gandhi said, there are no enemies. There are only opponents. And we need to persuade our opponents. I think this is important to meditate on. So I hope I've explained pedagogy. Yeah. And can you tell me why is pedagogy important to our social work and human services? Well, I guess you and I have not tried to define pedagogy. And maybe I will need to listen to the podcasts to understand more of myself. But for me, people in poverty, whether we call it economic poverty, political poverty, social poverty, spiritual, poverty for me, indicates that people are stuck. There's some form of stuck. Like people don't know how to move forward. They're caught in a cycle. It's not their own faults, forces. Now, how do people get unstuck? How do people move forward? Well, pedagogy is crucial for this, because people must unlearn some old habits and learn some new habits, new habits of thinking. Think of the feminist movement. I mean, the heart of the feminist movement was women coming together and questioning old stuck assumptions and developing new ideas and doing that often collectively. So pedagogy is so important in social work and human services, because we don't want to just keep trying to fix people's problems in one-off ways. We want to engage collective processes of learning and unlearning so that people can start thinking differently, which will inform their analysis, which will inform collective action. So pedagogy is, at the heart, a community development approach to social work and human service. If someone keeps turning up at a neighborhood center wanting emergency relief, social worker can keep giving them emergency relief, but a pedagogy is needed to say, well, we're happy to give you this emergency relief, but would you also want to sit with us and tell us your story so that we can start understanding your lived experience and then we're listening for generative themes. Remember, going back, and then we can start bringing people together with shared experience to do collective work. So if we don't have this kind of pedagogy and practice, people will just keep coming getting their emergency relief. Just like you said before, like you show people two different pictures. Yeah, we create a new stimulus that might re-imagine their lives and re-understand their social political economic conditions. This is not easy. As my men and my mentors, Tony Kelly said, never underestimate people's attachment to their own problems. people get very attached to their problems because problems also come with rewards. So don't underestimate people's attachment but pedagogy can shift that. But what's important from community development perspective is this pedagogy has to be collectives in dialogue, okay? It's not the practitioner in a one-on-one dialogue. It's bringing people into groups, ideally seven, eight, ten, probably no more than twelve. Small groups, that's the pedagogical moment. And just the other quick answer to you Teddy is people very often too quickly want to do action. Pedagogy, a practice of people learning, slows people down. So let's pause. Let's think and learn a bit more before we plan an action if that makes sense. Yeah. Is there anything further you want to add? I think just to repeat that pull-of-fair, you know start with the people but don't stay with the people. Dialogue, keep moving, okay? Okay, thank you, Teddy. Thank you, I hope that was helpful. Yeah, I learned a lot from you talking to you today and thank you for your contribution today and really helps me. I hope we can have you to join our podcast again maybe for another conversation. Yeah. Have a great pleasure. Thank you. Yeah. And you. Bye. If you'd like to keep up with any of our socials and to continue listening to future episodes, please follow us on Instagram. That's critical conversations. The number four, SW.