Teaching communities to learn

There are four flaws in prevailing paradigms for community health education. One, they are built like school curricula, essentially linear and formal. Two, education is delivered rapidly and in concentrated doses in workshops spanning multiple days. Three, a cascade process that trains trainers first leads to tremendous dilution of skills and knowledge by the time content filters down to the community. And four, it is assumed that every member of the community must be trained before significant behavior change can happen. This places impossible burdens on education programs, with audiences too large and trainers too few, reducing education to a mechanical and hurried dumping of information.

I developed the Minimally Invasive Curriculum (or MICKEY briefly) as a response to this system. Mickey acknowledges that people’s knowledge needs are driven by their experience and predicaments. A Kenyan youth’s first question about HIV might be Can I get HIV by ritual washing of a dead body of an infected person? Each session in a Mickey curriculum is self-contained and built around a single community question. Each session is also part of a thread of related antecedent and precedent questions, somewhat like a subway map. A collection of these threads makes up the tapestry of the entire Mickey curriculum.

A community may enter the curriculum with any question, and then navigate back and forth along the threads and thus explore the entire tapestry.

TRANSLATION AS A LEARNING TOOL: In bilingual communities, as are common in many developing countries that have been colonized, translating a curriculum from the colonizer’s language (say, English) to the local language (say, Kiswahili) is an intensely immersive process that requires deep enquiries into vocabulary, meaning, context, and significance. I used translation from English to Kiswahili as a self-learning pedagogy that eliminated external trainers and empowered communities to teach themselves. This process was used to create trainers, completely eliminate the wasteful cascade methods used earlier.

As a Macarthur Population Fellow in India, I developed a non-verbal, sign-language independent reproductive health curriculum for deaf Indian youth.

At age 19, I worked as a shoeshine boy on Delhi streets to write about their hardships. My impersonation stories won me a national award by the time I was 22.

1998-2000

Developed a reproductive health curriculum for deaf Indian youth that communicated complex biological concepts and systems without recourse to words or sign language. At that time, there was no Indian Sign Language.

2000-2008

Wrote The Continuum of Enquiry, a monograph suggesting how people’s questions and information needs might change as their perception of personal risk from HIV changed.

Developed Splash!, a pedagogy for community education that promoted behavior change through dialogue among groups of highly networked individuals, and relied on diffusion and magnification media to propagate the change to the wider community.

Developed dialogue processes for low-literacy populations to create deep understanding of invisible entities that can harm health. The process uses local analogies to explain micro-organisms, the infection process, and viral replication through RNA transfer.

Developed MICKEY, or Minimally Invasive Curricula, a non-linear HIV curriculum in which communities educate themselves by translating course material from one language to another. The course has no starting or ending point and is driven by community questions.

A spreadsheet formula for identifying networked individuals for peer education in African communities.

Magnet Theatre uses half-told stories and dialogue with the audience to deepen the understanding of HIV risk, and improve the quality of community’s questions.