Building Transformation: Training in Participatory Community Engagement

This 6-session online course will cover the basics of what you need to design and implement a participatory community engagement project that combines physical and forum theatre techniques, interactive social research, and creative approaches to effecting and measuring positive change.

This course enables participants to understand how to use practical tools – integrating theory and practice. Arts for Action’s pedagogical approach puts participants at the centre of their own learning and uses a variety of tools to encourage creativity, sharing, reflection, learning and new thinking.

Course content includes:

• Historical and global perspectives on theatre for development, protest and political theatre: power analysis and social change theories of Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. Principles and practice of Forum Theatre, how these meets physical theatre practice and provide conceptual frameworks for designing communication and community engagement actions.

• How to apply Jacques Lecoq Pedagogy: especially integrating push/pull dynamics, image theatre, mask/counter mask and interactive techniques into the processes of ‘identifying the problem’ and ‘defining change objectives’. Drawing upon practical examples of projects in Myanmar and Bangladesh, participants will explore self-transformative practice and transpose this to narrative, workshop and project structures. Practical steps to implementing social change theories through participatory methods are offered.

• How to apply physical theatre and drama-therapy techniques to enable projects to go beyond the binary of oppressed / oppressor, and indeed communicator / recipient. Through employing games, play principles, reflective and adaptive practice, a ‘whole-human – whole-process’ approach can facilitate truly equitable ‘participation’ in the research process, problem analysis, story or message development, performance, communication actions, evaluation and the full project cycle.

• Systems and power structures in social change contexts: examples of how to work within these, and how to work outside. Boundaries, risks, depths and blurred lines between performative and authentic self and action. Power analysis is taken into practical project tools and participants will design their own community engagement project applying the techniques learnt.

• Humanitarian, Development, social change or community practitioners who wish to use creative, theatre-based techniques to enrich their practice.
• Theatre practitioners who would like to effect transformation.
• Project managers and other staff responsible for programme delivery.
• Communication, Community Engagement professionals.
• Researchers and academics using participatory or arts approaches
• Volunteers and activists
• Anyone who seeks empowering ways of facilitating change and strengthening the capacity of groups to dialogue, learn, heal, address issues of concern, mobilise themselves or achieve positive changes in their lives and structures in which they live.

The course is suitable for advanced or beginner practitioners, the level of learning will be self-determined.

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