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Publications
Griffith University and the Department of the Environment, Sport & Territories, 1997
Rob O'Donoghue
Natal Parks Board/Share-Net
South Africa
This workshop invites participants to explore different ways of using an Enviro-Picture-Building resource. The key concern of the workshop is to examine 'outside expert' and 'participatory' models of environmental and health education in rural community contexts. To explore these issues participants compare contrasting ways of using the 'picture-building' resource materials. The different approaches examined are:
The workshop seeks to enable participants:
This activity provides a brief introduction and a rationale for the workshop and concludes with a mini-lecture and group discussion on contrasting approaches to environmental and health education for rural communities. The history of the picture-building technique is also explained. The focus is on how contrasting approaches to environmental and health education appeared in the early design and use of picture-building exercises. The activities which follow illustrate these contrasts.
Participants build a picture of rural life and its problems followed by the examination of problem-solving replacement cards in order to make decisions on solutions to local problems.
Participants use a question and answer picture-building activity, discussion of local experiences and the use of a sketching scope to draw pictures of local environmental and health issues of concern to them.
This activity challenges participants to draw on both approaches to picture-building to develop a proposal for local environmental and health education. Participants develop a proposal for the adaptation and use of picture-building in a school or community education situation.
Resources
Resource 1: Madlusuthe's Farm: Environmental and Health Issues
Resource 2: The Changing Orientation of the Expert
Resource 3: The Enviro-Picture-Building Resource
Resource 4: Madlusuthe's Farm: Problems Solved
Resource 5A: Sketching Scope
Resource 5B: Sketching Sheet
Activity 1: Photocopy and enlarge Resource 1 to A3 size on light card for best results
Activity 2: Photocopy and enlarge Resources 1 and 4 to A3 size.
Activity 3A: Photocopy and enlarge Resources 1 and 4. Cut up an A3 size version of Resource 4 into 20 individual pictures. Use Resource 1 as the picture-building board.
Activity 3B: The materials needed are listed on Resource 5A. Clipboards or some sort of firm support would be helpful when using Resource 5B for fold sketching.
Bauman, A. (1989) The Epidemiology of Inequality, in 2020 A Sustainable Healthy Future: Towards an Ecology of Health, Melbourne, La Trobe University, pp. 43-67.
Brown, V.A. (1994) Health and Environment: A Common Framework and a Common Practice, in C. Chu and R. Simpson (eds.) Ecological Public Health: From Vision to Practice, The Institute of Applied Environmental Research, Griffith University and Centre for Health Promotion, Toronto, pp. 52-61.
Colquhoun, D. and Robottom, I. (1990) Health Education and Environmental Education: Toward a Shared Agenda and a Shared Discourse,Unicorn, 16(2), 109-118.
Kickbusch, I. (1989) Good Planets are Hard to Find: Approaches to an Ecological Base for Public Health, Future, 13, 29-32.
Labonte, R. (1990) Econology: Health and Sustainable Development, in C. Chu and R. Simpson (eds.) Ecological Public Health: From Vision to Practice, The Institute of Applied Environmental Research, Griffith University and Centre for Health Promotion, Toronto, pp. 19-35.
Rootman, I. (1988) Inequities in Health: Sources and Solutions, Health Promotion, Winter, 2-8.
World Health Organisation, Health and Welfare Canada and Canadian Public Health Association (1986) Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, WHO, Copenhagen.
(1987) Then and Now: Reflections on a Quarter-Century of Change, Health Promotion, 15, 2-7.
Note: The Madlusuthe's Farm Enviro-Picture-Building exercise used in this module is one of a number of innovative environmental education activities published by SHARE-NET, PO Box 394, Howick 3290, South Africa
Outline the focus of the workshop on the processes of health and environmental education, especially in rural communities.
The 'Tea Party' introductory activity in the preceding module by Helen Spork on 'Health, Environment and Community Development' could be used as an 'ice-breaker' if that workshop has not been completed by participants and if facilitators believe participants would benefit from an introductory exploration of the links between health and the environment. Various OHTs on personal, community and environmental health from the Spork workshop might also be issued to consolidate this idea.
A. The Story
Place an enlarged copy of Madlusuthe's Farm (Resource 1) at the front of the workshop room - either as a poster or an OHT. Ask groups to refer also to their group copy.
Joe, Mba and their two children Sipho and Sammy live on a small farm (B3). Their home is called Madlusuthe's Farm. This is a Nguni (Zulu) name that means 'the place where people live and are happy together' (A3). Life is hard but they have all that they need. They keep chickens (C3) and there is a garden (C2) where Mba grows fruit and vegetables. The surplus is sold at their road-side stall (A2). Joe is the proud owner of cattle and goats (C4) which Sipho takes out to the pasture each day. When there is heavy work to be done they use a donkey cart (C5). They grow maize (C5) on their lands down by the river. The river is very important as it is their only source of drinking water and it is also where Mba washes the clothes (D2). There are now few trees around their home as, over the last few years, they have cut wood every day (B2) to cook their food. When food is short there are fish in the river (D1) and guinea fowl in the woods (B1) as well as bees that collect and store honey (C1). Life was better a few years ago when Joe had returned from his first job in the city. He then had the money to build a shed (A4) and a pit latrine (B4). The toilet is now full and it smells so the family just use the bush as their parents used to in the old days. Birds of prey (B5) are a problem because they attack the chickens. It has been a drought year with the sun (A5) drying out the crops. Isolated thunder storms (A1) bring much needed water but this erodes the footpaths, lands and river banks (D4). Unlike other areas there is not too much rubbish around. It has been dumped on the banks of the stream (D3). If the drought continues Joe may need to go to the city to find work. This community has many environmental problems for which they need to find solutions.
B. Community Problem-solving
Joe and Mba worked with their neighbours to solve many of the environmental problems. They formed an action group and started a lot of local environment and health projects.
Community Action Groups
They first started adult literacy classes to learn to read and write. They also started an early learning centre for pre-school children. This released the women to run community improvement projects including a family planning programme (B3).
Water and Sanitation
This was their first priority to improve community health. They learned to make bricks, build better toilets and the government helped them to put in a borehole for water (B4).
Cooking Fuel
Tree planting enabled them to restore trees and a solar cooker helped them to use less firewood (B2).
Rubbish and Pollution
The rubbish was cleared up and buried in a pit. Some of the waste metal was used to make containers. In no time at all the fishing in the river had improved (D3).
Erosion
Eroded paths were repaired and old tyres were used to revegetate river banks (D4).
Monoculture
Indigenous knowledge was used to restore traditional forms of inter-cropping (D5).
Water Pollution
Pollution was decreased by washing clothes near a sump away from the river. Men were encouraged to share the task of water collection (D2).
Over-grazing
The hardest thing to do was to reduce stocking rates. Joe wisely did this and now he has fewer cattle but they are healthier. The grass has recovered and next year he may be able to increase his stock (C4).
A. Community Problem-solving
This approach of picture-building represents a different model of health and environmental education from the previous one. In the previous activity, an outside expert (you, the facilitator) knew the 'answers' to the problems on Madlusuthe's Farm and you used the process of picture-building to teach them (the participants) your knowledge.
Explain that this activity provides a more participatory approach.
Preparation
Running the Activity
Facilitators Note: The grid square answer is marked in brackets. Facilitators may decide to tell this to participants or allow them to work this out for themselves as part of the activity.
Debriefing
B. Studying the Local Community
In this activity, participants have an opportunity to draw a picture (or set of pictures) that depict(s) environmental and health issues in their community. Conduct a group discussion on the sort of problems and conditions to be drawn.
Debriefing
Introduction
The diverse ways in which the picture building materials have been developed and used suggest that approaches may differ in the diverse social situations of environmental and health education. As educators we need to go beyond this simplistic truism and be prepared to examine social processes and power relationships in more detail.
Task
Ask participants to describe how they would plan to use picture-building in a school curriculum or community education context. Give particular attention to how the activity might contribute to developing the capacity for action competence to address local environmental and health issues.
Some Experiences and Responses to Enviro-Picture-building
Community health: Before we used the pictures with people we had no easy way of talking about the problem with the people. The pictures were talked about as if they were the problems of other people in neighbouring communities. The people were able to compare their problems with the pictures. The pictures were a talking board for the people and a means for us to get into the local problems with the community (Community health worker).
School fieldwork: When we played the game in the classroom there was a high level of excitement and then much more serious and informed discussion about some of the realities of rural environmental and health issues. Then we visited the Valley Trust and the quality of engagement with local people and health and development issues was much better than in past years when they went in cold. The language and ideas of the game became a spring-board for getting involved in environmental issues (College of Education lecturer).
Environment education centre: The game and picture prepare the pupils with images and language so that they can interpret the environment when we go out together (EE field staff).
Primary school: The children's own pictures of the school were where all of the excitement and action was but we would never have got there without the ideas in the pictures to spark it all off (Year 3 teacher).
These comments illustrate how the integration of images and words, mobilised in different picture-building contexts and activities, have given rise to a wide range of social processes of co-operative environmental and health problem-solving.
By the 1970s the environmental and health concerns of the rural peoples in many parts of the world had become the province of numerous development experts and environment agencies. Early expert-directed approaches to environmental education were thus centred on assessing needs, creating awareness and developing sustainable values and behaviour in rural community settings. Education was seen as a 'top-down' information and technology transfer through external social intervention to uplift the poor and suffering. These orientations achieved prominence as they were the common sense ideas of environment and health education specialists who already knew or could scientifically work out the solutions to community health problems.
These communication and intervention approaches have been applied, challenged and modified over the last few decades. The expert is now more commonly seen as a facilitator working in communicative partnership with 'grass-root' interventions by the communities themselves. This apparently radical change in orientation may essentially be little more than a subtle shift. In many cases a participatory rhetoric with its new words and ideas centred on local empowerments is underpinned by ideals of social change - but often with a social engineering intent. The health professional is thus more firmly established as an 'expert voice communicating among/to rural people'. This outsider position, and the sources of ideas and power relationships are seldom examined as experts talk to each other about how others should be educated, convinced and helped so that environment and health might be improved.
These historical patterns of interaction, changing roles and power relationships have created rural and urban 'communities of others' who have become the focus of education activities of health experts and environment agencies. Many of the prevailing approaches to education that professional health educators appear so certain of may need to be examined against some of the realities of rural community experiences of their endeavours.
The social realities of many rural development contexts is that 'communities' soon learn 'how to facilitate' and to work with those agencies that can deliver the most benefits. Others, however, soon tire of being researched and want the money that is solicited by development agencies but seldom gets through to them unless they do what the developers want. One 'frequently' facilitated rural man told me that in the early days it was easier because the people were always shown and told what had to be done. Now, he said it was getting harder because the development workers wanted to get the ideas from the people. They would thus listen to the community and wait until the people told them what they needed. For the community to get health benefits, the needs had to be those that the 'bosses would allow' (i.e. funders saw as important or possible).
This brief overview of some of the changing orientations to health and education suggests that we may need to pay more attention to the social processes and power relationships within environmental education.
The first picture-building cards were developed by the training school of a timber company. The activity was 'delivered' as a three stage training routine: picture-building, problem-solving and action-taking. Its rural development intent was to create environmental awareness and to foster better health and more sustainable living among rural African plantation workers. The module was a popular training session involving the picture-building game, problem-solving replacement cards and a practical session during which participants were taught how to make a trench garden.
An early communication ('tell them in ways they will understand') approach is encapsulated in picture-building Activity 1. The purpose of the activity is to enable us to explore how social engineering predispositions can shape community education in rural development settings. Some features of early direct delivery/training approaches may be somewhat shocking to us today but features of this outlook may underpin much of what claims to be facilitatory, participatory and co-operative environmental education today.
Picture-building Activity 2 examines a more recent approach where participants play the game to open up some ideas and possibilities before being challenged to explore their surroundings by drawing pictures or by taking photographs of local environmental and health issues. In these more participant-driven orientations, environmental educators often strive for, but may not always attain, more meaningful processes of co-operative community problem-solving.
A similar critical exploration of ideological predispositions and methodological choices was a central theme in the development of the Enviro-Picture-Building resource. The value of the pictures for mobilising a 'symbolic capital' (words and ideas) with which to see and to engage with the environment was noted early on in development work with teachers and rural health workers.
Note:
Whilst developing this resource, the author noted that participants were better able to initiate discussion and to pick out environmental issues in the landscape after building pictures. Prior to this, teachers often complained of having to draw field observations out of students. After experiencing the capital of images and language in the picture-building game, students had a lot more and more meaningful to say more readily. The narrative was also less of a guessing game of 'what is in the teacher's head' and more like a tentative constructing and weaving of stories with symbols that had the capacity to 'reveal' a narrative in the landscape.
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