Participatory Methodology for Social Intervention: Reflections from Practice

Abstract

Participation is a strong human need resulting from people’s sense of being, having, and taking a place in the world. By promoting participation, we strengthen our transformation possibilities, both at a personal as well as at a collective level, generating growing levels of autonomy and independency to comprehensively improve life conditions. Participatory methodology for social intervention is closely related to all learning-process moments and it guarantees their effectiveness, unity, and completeness to carry out shared learning processes with real impact on the life of learners. The absence of a comprehensive methodological formulation leads us to exhaustion, to activism, to perform isolated and poorly effective processes and, in the worst case scenario, to invest human, economic and physical resources in projects of disincentive or low social impact. If we focus our concern only on conveying content in a pleasant way using the latest “educational technology” or techniques or “dynamics” without a comprehensive and participatory methodological process, we are promoting conformism, passiveness, and silence of learners, when they are exactly the individuals with whom we must achieve openness and confidence in a higher degree.