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Participatory practice
people to understand and surface their innate knowledge, while at same time valuing that knowledge. The starting point of living the questions is again the everyday stories we tell ourselves. People’s lived experience is both explained and questioned as they recount their experience to others. Telling our story is a meaning-making process and so is the dialogue that will follow it. One of the most illuminating questions we can ask each other is ‘Why?’. In the film Misbehaviour, which is set in 1970, the main character is asked in an interview for a university why Britain had not had a revolution: her reply was: “A better question is why no revolution in Britain has been successful.” We are not given the answer but when we sit with the question, the spiral of understanding begins to unfold. There is some merit in sitting with questions and not necessarily knowing the answers. This encourages an openness to alternatives. As we spiral in and out with the questions, we start to see the bigger picture. The writer Myss (2019) often uses a high-rise apartment block as a metaphor. When we are on the ground floor, we can hear the traffic but, as we rise further up the building, people and vehicles become smaller and the noise decreases. From up here we can see the bigger picture and start to understand the wider structures that impact on our daily lives. This creates a more holistic and less splintered thinking and perspective. This is why Freirean pedagogy is a key element within this book. Its power lies in how it encourages people to question. Such expansion of the mind is what traditional teaching practices of indigenous cultures encourage by using all forms of knowing, including ritual storytelling, dreams and altered states of consciousness. By engaging the right brain, you are tapping into a wealth of knowledge beyond the rational. In the Cree tradition of transformative practice, for example, healing takes place only when unconscious conflict and resistance is brought to a conscious level. Once we are conscious of them they can be worked with. As with feminist consciousness raising (hooks, 1990), the process begins with airing our feelings, perceptions and personal reactions. This then leads to discovering that those feelings, perceptions and personal reactions are socially constructed. Thus, moving from surface phenomenon immediately related to the present, we move into the depths of pain, anger and bitterness related to the past and then outwards to a utopia we can aspire to (Hart, 2000). This is a large undertaking, as what is required is an overcoming of what Graveline (1998) calls the ‘cage of oppression’, which is not a singular experience but an ongoing set of social relations. Knowing how one experiences those relationships on an everyday basis is a group process and through the co-creation of such grassroots knowledge new social movements are born.
Theme 8: Participatory practice as an ecological imperative Everything that is in the heavens, on earth, and under the earth is penetrated with connectedness, penetrated with relatedness. (Hildegard of Bingen, 1982) 31
