Tracing the Link Between Transformative Education and Social Action Through Stories of Change

The following article describes how one organization, the Coady International Institute, met multiple monitoring, evaluation, research, and learning objectives while still staying true to its roots in transformative adult education. The Learning from Stories of Change (LSC) methodology brought together stories-based techniques with aspects of the Most Significant Change and the SenseMaker frameworks. The combination of methods was designed to facilitate reflection and a degree of participatory analysis in an online environment that reached over 400 graduates in 64 countries. It produced a rich set of data that provided key insights into program design and confirmed the transformative adult education model—particularly, that increases in knowledge and skills must be accompanied by changes in attitudes and motivations in order to make the leap from concepts to practice. This leads to individual behavioral changes that will in turn initiate positive social change in communities around the world.

Exploring Audience Engagement and Critical Narrative Intervention With the Celling Sex Film

Young women who trade sex experience high rates of stigma that exacerbate existing health inequities. The products of participatory visual methodologies show promising potential for challenging stigma. In total, 15 young women who trade sex created individual brief videos to share their experiences. Following a participatory analysis, the videos were edited into one composite movie to highlight key messages. Eight facilitated screenings (cohosted by participant filmmakers and research team members) were organized with diverse community and health organizations. Audiences were led through a series of interactive writing, drawing, viewing, and discussion activities. Sessions were audio recorded, transcribed verbatim, and inductively analyzed to assess the impacts of the film on audiences. Audience reactions were categorized into four overarching themes to describe main impacts: consciousness raising, commitments to practice and organizational change, effectiveness of the approach, and limitations. Audience responses demonstrated that facilitated screenings can challenge harmful stereotypes and help viewers consider pathways to enact positive change in their personal and professional lives. However, changing deep-rooted patterns of stigma takes time, dedication, and accountability.

Visualizing DEPICT: A Multistep Model for Participatory Analysis in Photovoice Research for Social Change

As a critical narrative intervention, photovoice invites community members to use photography to identify, document, and discuss issues in their communities. The method is often employed with projects that have a social change mandate. Photovoice may help participants express issues that are difficult to articulate, create tangible and meaningful research products for communities, and increase feelings of ownership. Despite being hailed as a promising participatory method, models for how to integrate diverse stakeholders feasibly, collaboratively, and rigorously into the analytic process are rare. The DEPICT model, originally developed to collaboratively analyze textual data, enhances rigor by including multiple stakeholders in the analysis process. We share lessons learned from Picturing Participation, a photovoice project exploring engagement in the HIV sector, to describe how we adapted DEPICT to collaboratively analyze participant-generated images and narratives across multiple sites. We highlight the following stages: dynamic reading, engaged codebook development, participatory coding, inclusive reviewing and summarizing of categories, and collaborative analysis and translation, and we discuss how participatory analysis is compatible with creative, interactive dissemination outputs such as exhibitions, presentations, and workshops. The benefits of Visualizing DEPICT include feelings of increased ownership by community researchers and participants, enhanced rigor, and sophisticated knowledge translation approaches that honor multiple forms of knowing and community leadership. The potential challenges include navigating team capacity and resources, transparency and confidentiality, power dynamics, data overload, and streamlining “messy” analytic processes without losing complexity or involvement. Throughout, we offer recommendations for designing participatory visual analysis processes that are connected to critical narrative intervention and social change aims.

Bonded: Life Stories from Agricultural Communities in South-Eastern Nepal

In the Terai region of South-Eastern Nepal, there persists a form of agricultural bonded labour called Harwa-Charwa, rooted in agricultural feudal social relations. The Terai has a long and dynamic political history with limited employment opportunities and high levels of migration. This paper is an external qualitative analysis of over 150 life stories from individuals living in an area with high levels of bonded labour. These stories were previously analysed during a workshop through a collective participatory analysis. Both the participatory analysis and external analysis found similar mechanisms that trap people in poverty and bonded labour. The disaggregation by age in the external analysis could explain why child marriage and child labour were very important in the collective analysis but did not match the results of a baseline survey in the same geographical area that found only a few cases. The respondents were aged between 15 and 65. Child marriage and child labour had shaped the lives of the adults but have since decreased. Methodologically, the different ways of analysis diverge in their ability to differentiate timelines. The participatory analysis gives historical insights on pathways into child labour, but although some of the social norms persist this situation has changed.

Participatory analysis and evaluation of IPM practices against sucking pests of Bt cotton

Farmer’s participatory demonstrations were evaluated during kharif seasons of 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 at four villages of Panchmahal district, Gujarat to introduce IPM practice and to evaluate their effectiveness through demonstrations. Farmers identified several constraints of which, increased infestation of sucking insect pests viz., aphid (Aphis gossypii Glover), leaf hopper (Amrasca biguttula biguttula Ishida) and whitefly (Bemisia tabaci Gennadius) were the most important. IPM practice consisting of one spray application of Beauveria bassiana (2 x 108cfu) @ 4 g /l water, two spray applications of thiamethoxam 25 WG @ 0.01 per cent (0.4 g /l water) and one spray application of acephate 75 SP @ 0.075 per cent (1 g /l water) following threshold level (5 sucking pests /leaf) was found effective and economical for the management of sucking insect pests without any adverse effect on the natural enemies in Bt cotton. The application of this practice also resulted higher seed cotton yield as compared to farmers practice.

TOWARDS A DESIGN OBSERVATORY: THE CASE OF SCHOLARLY DESIGN RESEARCH IN PORTUGAL

The DesignOBS project was created to collect, map and interpret data about the Portuguese Design Ecosystem, providing supportive information for decision making. This study takes advantage of a participative Design perspective to define and test an observation process via a case based on Design doctorates undertaken in Portugal. It emphasises the need for additional participatory analysis and curation by experts to evaluate and develop more reliable information about the discipline. Moreover, it develops recommendations that can enhance the communicability of Design doctorates.

Visual Participatory Analysis: A Qualitative Method for Engaging Participants in Interpreting the Results of Randomized Controlled Trials of Health Interventions

This article contributes to the field of mixed methods by introducing a new method for eliciting participant perspectives of the quantitative results of randomized controlled trials. Participants are rarely asked to interpret trial results, obscuring potentially valuable information about why a trial either succeeds or fails. We introduce a unique method called visual participatory analysis and discuss the insights gained in its use as part of a trial to prevent risk and reduce the prevalence of diabetes in Bangladesh. Findings highlight benefits such as elucidating contextualized explanations for null results and identifying causal mechanisms, as well as challenges around communicating randomized controlled trial methodologies to lay audiences. We conclude that visual participatory analysis is a valuable method to use after a trial.