The
Technology of Participation
I remember
when classroom technology consisted of blackboards, chalk, pencils and notebooks.
Learning meant being able to transfer what the teacher would write with chalk on
the blackboard into your notebook with your pencil, whether it happened to pass
through your brain or not. My first memories are of blackboards, white chalk,
and erasers which you took outside and clapped together to clean them at the
end of class. Improvements in this technology were experimented with through
the years, such as yellow chalk and green boards. Multi-colored chalk came
along later, but was generally reserved for special occasions or projects, or
only for the use of skilled teachers. Whiteboards with erasable markers were part
of the evolution as well, as were flip charts and magic markers.
These are
the tools we had to work with in the early days of facilitating groups for
effective decision-making and action. Most group process in the 1960s and 1970s
consisted of brainstorming lots of ideas and writing them all down on black or
white boards or flip chart paper and then trying to get a group of people to
intuitively bring the ideas into some sort of order. Most meetings called
together to arrive at a consensus on decisions or actions ended up lost in the
massive amount of data they had generated, often running out of time to process
the ideas or decide what should be done with them.
It was
Linda’s and my years on the staff of the ICA that exposed us to and gave us the
tools and training that allowed us to found the FOOD FOR ALL nonprofit and
later to start our home-based business Participation
Works. When ICA took on the bicentennial Town Meeting ’76 project to conduct five thousand local community
meetings across the United States, our staff and volunteers literally had to
invent ways to facilitate large and small groups of citizens to articulate a
vision for their communities and then determine proposals for action. It was in
this crucible of working in communities that the Technology of Participation (ToP)
was born and evolved.
We began our
business using the same tools we had known all our lives: chalk boards, flip
charts, markers, masking tape. Then we added a little creativity, imagination,
and trust in the wisdom of regular people. And, the willingness to experiment
with group methods enabling people to arrive at consensus and take action for
the common good. I guess I would say we used the tools at hand and discovered
they could be adapted in creative ways that allowed us to see that there truly
is a ‘technology of participation.’ These methods have been refined and re-refined
over the last thirty-plus years and are now taught all over the world. They
have even been trade-marked as Technology
of Participation (ToP).
Probably
the most innovative technological invention used by ToP trainers and
facilitators is what came to be known as “the sticky wall.” This is a large 3-foot
high sheet of rip-stop (sometimes called parachute) fabric mounted on a flat
wall and sprayed with 3M spray mount (the same adhesive used on post-it notes).
What this material makes possible is that any size piece of paper can be slapped
up on it without tape and it ‘sticks.’ Hence the name “sticky wall.” Invariable
people who attended one of our sessions for the first time would ask with
puzzled looks on their faces: “What is that material and how does it work?” I
often told them “it is a magic wall and you are welcome to come up and examine
it.” We even found that when a fabric sticky wall was not available, we could
pick up cheap plastic table cloths, spray them, and just throw them away after
a meeting.
No comments:
Post a Comment