Purpose: Approaches to build farmers' analytical capacities are said to trigger wide-ranging changes. This article reports on the communication process between participants and non-participants in one such approach, related to the technical and management skills learned by participants and the changes these participants subsequently made, and the outcomes in terms of non-participants' learning.
Design/Methodology/Approach: In this study, we analysed the following: (1) participants' learning and changes in social practices; (2) communication between participants and non-participants regarding technical and management skills and changes in social practices; (3) non-participants' learning and changes in social practices. The case study was a management advice to family farm project in three villages in Benin.
Findings: Most participants learned management skills, which led them to reassess their objectives and to reduce traditional social practices they now considered unproductive. Even in the case of frequent communication, non-participants found it difficult to learn management skills, which hindered their experiential learning. Non-participants consequently had difficulty understanding why participants changed their social practices such as reduction of their traditional gift giving, leading to limited well-argued discussion about these changes in practices between participants and non-participants.
Practical Implications: This study shows that, due to the limited learning process of non-participants communicating with participants, there is a need to design and test approaches to achieve capacity-building while including more participants at a similar cost, and to stimulate explicit discussion at village level about the changes in values and social practices that these approaches may trigger.
Originality/Value: The article analyses both participants and non-participants' experiential learning, and looks at the two sides of the interaction between the communication processes and non-participants' learning. 相似文献
Historically, the progressive ideas of innovative schools have influenced the professional practice of North American educators
since the latter part of the 19th century. Indeed, since the beginning of an industrial society, and now with the birth of
globalization and a knowledge economy, there has been a need for public schools to sustain their capacity for innovative self-renewal.
Yet, much of the classic literature on change in schools leans implicitly towards overcoming resistance, or the building of
short-term capacity enhancements to implement specific reform mandates. Insufficient attention has been paid to understanding
the internal and external conditions that are necessary for all schools, particularly those in urban areas, to build and sustain
sufficient resilient capacity to self-renew as contextually specific challenges unfold and intersect over time. Building on
data from the 1970’s and 1980’s, this article focuses on the resiliency of two innovative and activist urban secondary schools
located in New York State and Ontario, Canada, during a decade of standardized educational reform (1990–2000). A picture of
rapid capacity derogation emerges as a result of the particularly inflexible forms of contextually indifferent standardized
reform imposed in the 1990’s. However, the data suggest that, although much eroded by the cumulative negative impact of socio-economic
and political forces over time, the resilient self-renewing capacity of these innovative schools, when coupled with teacher
activism, can delay, and even defeat, unwarranted standardization in a bid to ensure the survival of their progressive vision. 相似文献
