“Participation in education” – the story of yet another embattled concept …
June 26, 2012 in Freedom to learn

This picture is how the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom visualized “participation”. Licenced under a cc attribution 2.5 licence. Source and copyright: http://www.wilpf.org/2010CSWInvitation
So I am listening to the speakers of the panel “Learning is a two-way street: Participation in Communication and Education” of this years’ “Global Media Forum” of Deutsche Welle. And I keep thinking that the speakers on the panel seem to describe another case of a “stolen concept” here:
Kanchan Malik from India’s University of Hyderabad starts by defining “participation”. She explains, that the original meaning of “participation” was taken away from the practitioners, more precisely the power of defining it was taken away from the “communities”, who are supposed to participate in communication, learning and political transformation. Quite an irony.
I also hear lots of other formulations that hint at the perception of a distortion. The speakers emphasize, that “participation has often been reduced to a multipurpose label to give respectability to projects”.
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