Like many ‘toolboxes’ this is a work in progress.  What we have done is to gather some tools and techniques we have found useful in popular education for promoting both personal and social growth.  More will be added later.  We welcome your ideas for others that you have found useful.  If you have any suggestions comments (or criticisms) please contact Tony Webb: webb@pnc.com.au

Below we list some of the tools and details of a short course we are running to explore how we can use these in social change work.

The Toolbox

You can access the tools below by following the links below where you will find details on:

• PhotoVoice (PDF 105k)  - as a tool for making visible and heard the voices of people who are invisible in the community
• Action conversations (PDF 190k) – asking strategic questions in conversational style as a tool for developing community and social action projects and the evaluation of these projects.  This draws together many ideas into a simple framework that provides a road-map for turning social concern into effective social action.
• Measuring the strength of a community (PDF 120k) – a tool for exploring how far we engage the community in our community development projects and programs, the kind of ‘social capital’ we are building, the kind of learning we are promoting and the capacities we will leave behind as a result of our work
• Mentoring and mastery (PDF 195k) – an experiential workshop tool that looks at the stages we go through in acquiring any skill or attribute, where we so often get stuck and the role of ‘mentors’ in helping us through these blocks to personal growth.
• Working with Emotions – two workshops that look at how we frame our own experience of working with shame and other strong emotions in order to better understand their role in social change work. See:
  • Working with Emotions Part 1 (U/C) – working with shame
  • Working with Emotions Part 2 (U/C) – affects, feelings, emotions and scripts
• Informal Action-Research – a look at the critical role of the narratives or stories of people at ‘the sharp-end’ of social problems as the starting point for reframing community interventions. How do these ‘direct stakeholders’ frame the language, activities and relationships that are basis for community initiatives? How do we privilege these rather than the top-down approaches used by many agencies in terms of defining ‘projects’, and ‘structures’ for agency and interagency ‘practices’ and  ‘programs’. (U/C)
• Personal and Social Age – a tool for exploring the stages of personal development (identity) and social development (identification) of an individual, group, community, or culture. (U/C)
• And more (U/C)

A CPE course - Personal and Political Tools for Social Change 

You can reach into this ‘toolbox’, grab one that you think might be useful, and see if it does the job.  However, many of the tools are part and parcel of our practice of ‘Popular Education’ in that they are based on ‘experiential’ and ‘critical/reflective’ rather than ‘technical’ learning.   The aim is not to suggest there is a right way to do this or that but to create experiences for people to explore ideas that might be useful in the struggling to make sense of personal and social change processes.   The aim is to promote critical reflection and discussion with others engaged in the struggle, to reframe the way we make meaning of what we do in this work. 

So, in addition to the links to the individual ‘tools’ we are invite you to take a look at a short course we will be offering through the Centre for Popular Education in 2005.  Personal and Political Tools for Social Change is a 12 week course that will explore how these tools can be used by people who want to turn their own concerns about some social issue into effective action.  It will explore some of the elements of the toolkit above in the context of practical action chosen by the participants.  We are currently asking for expressions of interest in this course.  We plan to then invite a group of participants to register for the first course to commence after Easter 2005. Depending on interest we will run others later.  We are also interested in discussing the possibility of organising these in partnership with other organisations where you recruit people with common or similar concerns about social issues and we then deliver a course that explores how these and other tools might be used to tackle these concerns

For more details about any of the ‘tools’ or the social action course, click on any of the highlighted links above. 

If you would like further information, or have comments or suggestions, E-mail the Coordinator: Tony Webb:  webb@pnc.com.au