Value for money in training?

In an evaluation of a large initiative designed to help changing social norms on gender-based violence (GBV), I found out that each of the many different organisations involved carried out training workshops. The training participants were mainly for police, staff in health services, religious leaders, social workers and other people who tended to spend no or very little time at universities or other academic venues. That is, the trainees were people who were not used to sitting and listening attentively to complicated presentations. 

Yet, most of the training workshops were organised the "academic" way: The trainer would take the audience, seated in neat rows, through a more or less lengthy set of "power point" slides with plenty of text. Often, the content of the slides was highly theoretical, presenting definitions with plenty of terms people would never use in everyday language. The audience would sit and listen and ask the occasional question, if they dared to. People don't want to look stupid - so if a presenter uses lots of big words the audience are not familiar with, changes are that there won't be many questions.

Arguably, that type of training is a waste of time and money. There is a large and growing body of experience on adult education - and education in general - which shows that one of the most effective ways to acquire new knowledge and skills is learning by doing, by solving problems.

Forum Theatre in Berlin

At the recent Gender is Happening one-week extravaganza by the Gunda Werner Institute in Berlin (Heinrich Böll Foundation - German blog here), Aki Krishnamurty facilitated three workshops which culminated in a public performance. For those who don't know Forum Theatre: it is a method for awareness-raising and social transformation developed by Augusto Boal as the Theatre of the Oppressed: click here for a page by the International Theatre of the Oppressed Organisation; there's also a comprehensive entry on Wikipedia. In a nutshell: professional or amateur actors perform a rehearsed play or a short sketch which demonstrates aspects of oppression relevant to the audience. In our Berlin example, Aki Krishnamurty and her workshop participants had agreed that sexual harrassment in public spaces was a good example for oppression linked to gender inequality.