Learning to listen: Foundations of teaching and facilitating of participatory and community based research

Abstract

This chapter by Budd L. Hall was published in Learning and Teaching Community-Based Research: Linking Pedagogy to Practice, edited by Catherine Etmanski and Teresa Dawson. Hall looks back on how he learned and later taught participatory and community-based research (CBR). It draws on his early work in Tanzania in the 1970s, where the evaluation of a health education campaign exposed the limits of conventional survey methods. The chapter outlines five learning objectives: knowing who we are, learning to listen, the centrality of values and commitment, openness to multiple ways of creating and representing knowledge, and the meaning of action. It uses exercises like the Power Flower and poetry to help students listen better. The chapter concludes that CBR is a set of principles rather than a fixed method and that its results should belong to the community.