Sustainable Agriculture and Food: Four volume set (Earthscan Reference Collections)

Participatory Learning for Sustainable Agriculture 121

individual members. Many assume that simply putting together a group of people
in the same place is enough to make an effective team. This is not the case. Shared
perceptions, essential for group or community action, have to be negotiated and
tested. Yet, the complexity of multidisciplinary team work is generally poorly
understood. A range of workshop and field methods can be used to facilitate this
process of group formation.
In order to ensure that multiple perspectives are both investigated and repre-
sented, practitioners must be clear about who is participating in the data-gather-
ing, analysis and construction of these perspectives. Communities are not
homogenous entities, and there is always the danger of assuming that those par-
ticipating are representative of all views. There are always differences between
women and men, between poor and wealthy, between young and old. Those miss-
ing, though, are usually the socially marginalized (see Rocheleau, 1991; Guijt and
Kaul Shah, 1995). Rigorous sampling is, therefore, an essential part of these par-
ticipatory approaches, and a range of field methods is available.

Table 7.2 Participatory methods for alternative systems of learning and action

Group and team

dynamics methods

Sampling methods Interviewing and

dialogue

Visualization and

diagramming

methods

• Team contracts


• Team reviews
  and discussions


• Interview
  guides and
  checklists


• Rapid report
  writing


• Energisers


• Work sharing
  (taking part in
  local activities)


• Villager and
  shared
  presentations


• Process notes
  and personal
  diaries
  
  
  • Transect walks
  
  
  • Wealth ranking
    and well-being
    ranking
  
  
  • Social maps
  
  
  • Interview maps
    
    
    • Semi-structured
      interviewing
    
    
    • Direct
      observation
    
    
    • Focus groups
    
    
    • Key informants
    
    
    • Ethnohistories
      and
      biographies
    
    
    • Oral histories
    
    
    • Local stories,
      portraits and
      case studies
      
      
      • Mapping and
        modelling
      
      
      • Social maps and
        wealth rankings
      
      
      • Transects
      
      
      • Mobility maps
      
      
      • Seasonal
        calendars
      
      
      • Daily routines
        and activity
        profiles
      
      
      • Historical
        profiles
      
      
      • Trend analyses
        and time lines
      
      
      • Matrix scoring
      
      
      • Preference or
        pairwise ranking
      
      
      • Venn diagrams
      
      
      • Network
        diagrams
      
      
      • Systems
        diagrams
      
      
      • Flow diagrams
      
      
      • Pie diagrams