The Heart of Community Engagement

Practitioner Stories from Across the Globe

Patricia Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429614446
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Drawing on first-hand accounts of action research in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, The Heart of Community Engagement illustrates the transformative learning journeys of exemplary catalysts for community-based change. Practitioners' stories of community engagement for social justice in the Global South elucidate the moments of insight and transformation that deepened their practice: how to deal with uncertainty, recognize their own blind spots, become aware of what is emergent and possible in the moment, and weave an inclusive bond of love, respect, and purpose. Each successive narrative adds a deeper level of understanding of the inner practice of community engagement. The stories illuminate the reflective, or inner, practice of the outside change agent, whether a planner, designer, participatory action researcher, or community development practitioner.

From a shantytown in South Africa, to a rural community in India, or an informal settlement in peri-urban Mexico, the stories focus attention on the greatest leverage point for change that we, as engaged practitioners, have: our own self-awareness. By the end of the book, the practitioners are not only aware of their own conditioned beliefs and assumptions, but have opened their minds and hearts to the complex and dynamic patterns of emergent change that is possible.

This book serves as a much-needed reader of practice stories to help instructors and students find the words, concepts, and examples to talk about their own subjective experience of community engagement practice. The book applies some of the leading-edge concepts from organizational development and leadership studies to the fields of planning, design, and community engagement practice. Key concepts include the deep dive of sensing the social field, seeing the whole, and presencing the emergent future. The book also provides a creative bridge between participatory action research and design thinking: user-based design, rapid prototyping, and learning from doing.

1
Introducing Ensemble Awareness

Our team of facilitators rode the bus in the coolness of morning that day to the unpaved, peri-urban settlement of Llano Grande outside Mexico City. We waited in front of the still attractive vernacular of the community church, now silent and sagging. One of our team members, Alan, a choral singer by avocation, ventured into the church. He looked and listened. Then I heard him sing a few notes. It sounded as though he was searching for something with his voice. Indeed, he was. He was seeking the precise key that would resonate with the interior space of the church. And then he found it. The resulting harmony sent chills through me, as the space and his voice joined in what seemed a sacred ensemble, larger than both the space and him. It was as if the empty church had come alive! In that moment, I understood the meaning of “ensemble awareness” from a deeper place than ever before.

Ensemble Awareness

Ensemble awareness¹ is the term I use to describe the ability of the community engagement practitioner to sense the invisible web of relationships in which he or she is engaged. Upon identifying the community’s patterns and rhythms, and sensing with the residents the emergent possibility for the community, the practitioner joins in harmony to realize that potential. This living web of relationships cannot be controlled. But it can be engaged—if the practitioner attunes to it. The stories in this book illustrate how community change agents under differing circumstances have each learned to attune to, flow with, and foster the emergent potential of the community.

The stories, therefore, link the visible outer practice of the change agents with their inner practice: the rigor with which they stay aligned with purpose and monitor their own thoughts, intentions, and actions in the moment as they engage with others. It is this inner practice that undergirds the qualities of presence, relational awareness, and effectiveness of the practitioner.

In Latin America, this subjective side of social practice is sometimes called la mística (literally, the mystique): the ability to engender a shared sense of purpose, create a sense of belonging and safety, and foster creativity. Despite its pivotal importance, this inner dimension often lies in the practitioner’s blind spot. The stories in this book attempt to illuminate that blind spot.

The chapters ahead show how the practitioners’ inner practice played out in multiple communities around the globe, each facing issues of economic, social, or environmental justice: rural communities in post-civil war El Salvador; an immigrant colonia outside Rio Grande City on the Texas-Mexico border; embattled farmers in Colombia’s Cauca Valley; the Khayelitsha township of shack dwellers in post-apartheid Cape Town; a cluster of poor farming villages in central Uttar Pradesh, India; and two informal settlements in the Guadalupe Dam watershed on the outskirts of metropolitan Mexico City.

The specific issues facing each of these communities vary: precarious land tenure, access to water and essential infrastructure, environmental degradation, housing, economic security, and safety. But the central thread is clear: far beyond purely technical problems, these are issues of social and environmental justice. For any of the issues, a slight tug on the strings will reveal less tangible and more upstream forces at work: power, governance, voice, and identity. The community engagement practitioner enters this complex milieu of tangible and intangible issues and relationships.

The primary intent of the stories is not to delve into the specific issues, per se. The issues and the location become the milieu for the story of the community engagement practitioner—the outside facilitator or change agent. They chronicle the practitioner’s path from self-awareness to ensemble awareness. My ability as a community engagement practitioner developed with each of these field experiences. Thus, these stories reflect my own learning journey, as well.

The Inner Practice of Community Engagement

Much has been written about the field methods available to the community development practitioner, participatory planner, or engaged action researcher.² Many authors have documented community engagement processes and measured outcomes. Yet the inner practice of the change agents—how they manage the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes that shape their presence—largely remains a black box. How does a practitioner become aware of the social field,³ i.e., the whole, and not just the parts? How does she sense what is emergent and possible in the evolving context of the moment? How does he weave an inclusive bond of love, respect, and purpose that empowers the community? It starts with self-awareness.

Cultivating self-awareness may be the most immediate and effective leverage point available to engaged practitioners for effecting change. The stories in this book demonstrate why. Highlighting the subjective experience of community engagement practice, the stories provide a sense of how the protagonists learned to recognize their own blind spots and reconsider their unexamined assumptions, value judgments, and mental models. We watch them learning to thrive in uncertainty and feel safe in not knowing, in letting go of outcomes. We hear their stories of breaking through the subtle barriers of preconceptions and expectations to develop relationships of respect and trust with community members. We see them discern when and how their expert knowledge can be usefully integrated with local knowledge.

The stories also include the voices of local community members describing the inner journeys that they experienced alongside the external practitioners. And—since the stories are drawn from projects that I either led or documented over the past 20 years—I have injected myself into the narrative, both as a storyteller and as a learner on my own inner journey.

The remarkable people I met on the projects—practitioners and community members alike—were more than my colleagues or research subjects. They were my teachers. They have profoundly influenced my development as a practitioner, which is still unfolding.

The Community Engagement Practitioners and Their Stories

The people I speak of as community engagement practitioners include a range of individuals. They may identify themselves as community development professionals, action researchers, participatory planners, public interest designers, or as community leaders. In various contexts, I refer to them by other terms—especially change agents, catalysts, and facilitators.

Drawing on my field projects and action research in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, I chose examples for this book that evidenced transformative outcomes in the attitudes and mindsets of both the external practitioners and the community members. Thus, the stories are not about perfect facilitators who make no mistakes; they are about remarkable change agents who learn from mistakes. Neither did I look for conventional “success stories” in the sense of having tangible, concrete outcomes achieved and wrapped up neatly by the end of the narrative. More often, with these stories, that work remains a work in progress—but the progress is being driven by a newly galvanized community.

Also, I chose cases in different areas around the globe, partly to represent a range of people and circumstances, and partly to show how certain fundamental principles can work in a range of settings. I use the seven most compelling cases as exemplars of transformative practice.

Each successive narrative adds a deeper level of understanding of the inner practice of community engagement. The change agents move progressively beyond simple cause-and-effect learning toward what the systems thinking/action research literature calls triple-loop learning: deepening the inner place from which the practitioner observes and engages the social field. The resulting shift opens the practitioner’s mind and heart to a more expansive relational and systemic awareness—open to the dynamic patterns of emergent change that are possible and to connection with ever-larger purposes.

Practitioner Stories as Parables for Learning

I offer these stories as a mirror for community-engaged professionals to reflect on their own practice as catalysts for sustainable community development and social justice. The readers may see themselves and their work in these stories and draw out their own meanings from them. Practitioners will likely recognize many of the turning points in the stories.

In the classroom, this book serves as a much-needed reader of practice stories, to help instructors and students find the words, concepts, and examples to talk about their own subjective experience of community engagement practice. At the end of each chapter, I provide questions for individual and collective reflection. My greatest hope is that these stories and the discussion questions will make it easier for instructors and students to talk frankly together in the classroom about what it means to develop a conscious inner practice for community engagement. Such a conversation can be meaningless in the abstract and intimidating in the first person. These stories, which have profoundly impacted and motivated many of my own graduate students, can open the way to a deep, safe, and insightful conversation about what it means to be fully present to the moment and open to possibility in the midst of field work.

By emphasizing the inner practice, the stories highlight the feminine face of community engagement work: the relationship building, the appreciative inquiry, the practice of dialogue for mutual understanding, and the interconnectivity of field awareness. These feminine attributes stand in creative tension with the action-oriented side of community engagement practice. The stories offer a practical look at how to integrate and balance the feminine and masculine dimensions of community engagement practice—the inner and the outer. Their conscious integration enables the creative process so needed today.

The Global Reach of the Narratives

I first went to Peru to help with reconstruction after a major earthquake in the northern highlands of the Andes, and stayed to work as a regional planner with the central government’s development agency in Arequipa. That initial immersion attracted me back to Peru and Chile for dissertation field research, this time under the fervent banner of structural change held high by progressive Latin American intellectuals. It was not long before I learned the limits of both technocracy and ideology in catalyzing social change on the ground. I turned to local governance, civic engagement, and bottom-up community development. That path took me beyond Latin America to other regions of the Global South.

The lessons from these stories for community engagement practice are applicable to localities not only in the Global South, but in North America and Europe, as well. I have applied them in the U.S., for example, when working with Hispanic communities in Austin, Texas, and racially diverse neighborhoods in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans.

It is my heart that draws me to the developing world, and the magnetic teachers I have found there—those community development practitioners and grassroots leaders who embody the awareness of self and ensemble.

Action Research and Triple-Loop Learning

Examining the inner practice of those who work with communities is not unique to this book. It falls in the domain of the action research literature, especially that devoted to the study of the “reflective practitioner.” From the stories ahead, I develop a conceptual framework that integrates systems thinking and complexity theory with the literature on organizational development, leadership, social learning, and group process. This framework foregrounds transformative change processes, both individual and collective.⁴

Action research—also called action inquiry, action science, and action learning—is an approach to learning about human systems by engaging with others in a process of change. As such, action research is inherently participa-tory. It emerged in the first half of the 20th century, a counter-trend to the hegemonic rise of modernist rational-empirical epistemology.⁵

Used by academics and social change agents alike, action research emphasizes group process, relationship, collaborative action, and learning from action. A central tenet of action research holds that the outside expert or change agent must adopt a facilitative approach to change processes within an organization or community—working with people, not on them or for them, so that the participants own the results of their change efforts: “We did it ourselves.” Thus, the researcher/practitioner fosters a collective learning process of action and reflection for enacting change.

Action research emerged in part from the pragmatist philosophy of democratizing education and valuing practical knowing—i.e., learning by doing—that was so well articulated in the 1920s by progressive educator John Dewey. But it was the groundbreaking work of German-born social psychologist Kurt Lewin in the early 1940s at MIT that developed the study of group dynamics and the practice called “action research”—a means of collaborative inquiry by “ordinary people” to both lead and learn from their own change efforts. A unique and empowering part of this change process, influenced by Lewin’s embrace of Gestalt psychology, was focusing the participants’ reflection on the environment of relationships and forces surrounding them that propelled and retarded their change efforts.

Emancipatory action research developed in South America in the 1960s through the path-breaking influence of Paulo Freire, who taught that freedom starts within—with reflection on one’s own experience and knowledge. While exiled in Chile in the late 1960s, Freire developed his critical pedagogy for adult literacy, which utilizes dialogic reflection for social action. Building on Freire’s experience, Orlando Fals Borda also utilized a dialogical, self-reflective form of participatory research for people’s self-reliance and empowerment. He called the method participatory action research (known by its acronym PAR) and inspired many progressive action researchers, especially those working with peasant farmers. The emancipatory approach to action research focuses on collective action for social justice.

Donald Schön, professor of urban studies and organizational learning at MIT, was the first to use action research to describe the learning process of architects and planners in his pivotal 1983 book The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. He witnessed among some of these profess ionals the shortcomings of what he and Chris Argyris (1978) called single-loop learning: adapting past solutions to known problems. He noticed the creative thinking of those who engaged in what he and Argyris called double-loop learning: those professionals questioned the stated goals, the problem identification itself, and past solutions. They also questioned the assumptions underlying their own mental models about cause and effect. They were the ones who wanted to learn along with their clients, rather than maintain the distance of an outside expert. Such double-loop learning lies in the cognitive domain of the refle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• List of Boxes
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introducing Ensemble Awareness
• PART I The Journey Begins
• PART II Going Deeper
• PART III Moving Forward
• Index