Field Education and Community-Based Planning in a Worst-Case Scenario

Abstract

Spanish

Chinese

Community-engaged planning education and community-based planning are often uphill battles. This article uses the case of a Mexican village to illustrate a pedagogical model that trains students as participatory planners by immersing them in a community-based planning project, an approach we call transformative learning and community development. We join larger debates on education and participation—arguing that students can and should learn about participatory planning by doing it; that while community participation sometimes reproduces unequal power relations, it can also be structured to challenge them; and that successful planning and teaching require a dialectic between expertise and broad participation.

Keywords

participatory planning community development service learning university-community partnership transformative planning education cross-cultural ducation

Introduction

Community-engaged planning education and community-based planning are often uphill battles. This article uses our uphill battle in San Miguel Analco (Analco for short) to illustrate a pedagogical model that seeks to train students as participatory planners by immersing them in a community-based planning project, an approach we call transformative learning and community development. As the box below illustrates, our community studio began very inauspiciously, but ended remarkably well. In presenting this case, we join larger debates on education and participation—arguing that students can and should learn about participatory planning by doing it; that while community participation sometimes reproduces unequal power relations, it can also be structured to challenge them; and that successful planning and teaching require a dialectic between expertise and broad participation.

From Apathy to Participation in Analco: Two Vignettes.

Two students and one of us waited for jornaleros (day laborers) to show up for a discussion of issues faced by this least advantaged group in San Miguel Analco, Mexico. And waited. Finally one couple came. At their suggestion, we went to seek more participants. The only man we found, still cutting alfalfa, asked us, “What are you going to give me?,” then declined to attend when we told him no compensation was involved. The students’ take: “We told you so”—they had warned us community participation would be a tough sell. They vented at being stuck in a community-based course that took them outside their comfort zone.

Weeks later, 80 residents of Analco watched as each of four student-facilitated workshops posted the results of their votes prioritizing community goals. Despite the village’s reputation as deeply divided, each workshop had chosen the same priorities. Residents put aside old grievances and raised their hands to join the working group to address these goals. Afterward, students praised the course for giving them valuable hands-on learning.

Like other educators implementing similar approaches, we seek communities, organizations, and projects where the chances of success (in both community and learning outcomes) are strong. But here we present a project that began as a worst-case scenario precisely to highlight the challenges inherent to participatory approaches, and strategies for overcoming them.

We ground our argument by reviewing relevant literatures. In the following section, we then sketch the setting for this particular community participation studio, explaining what made it “worst-case,” and summarize our approach’s nine steps. In Findings, we describe major challenges confronted and strategies developed to overcome them. A concluding section re-connects the findings to broader debates.

Theoretical Framework: Three Literatures on Transformative Learning and Community Development

We draw on three main literatures in analyzing our class’s dynamics: participatory planning, field-based education, and cross-cultural teaching. Community-based or participatory planning has been proposed in varied arenas, but particularly in urban planning (Leavitt and Yonder 2013; Seitz 2007) and global development (Connell 1997; Mansuri and Rao 2004). Definitions of what makes planning participatory vary, but the first three criteria suggested by the Communications Initiative (1999) mark as good a starting point as any: participatory planning proceeds from periphery to the center rather than vice versa, it is bottom-up rather than vertically imposed, and it is based on dialogue valuing different forms of knowledge, rather than controlled by experts. Arnstein’s (1969) “ladder of participation” points out that levels of participation vary, but most define “success” in participation—as do we—in terms of expanding democracy and empowerment for marginalized communities.

Some recent studies of participation, notably Cooke and Kothari (2002), posit that community participation reproduces power stratification (between state and community, within communities) while obscuring it, and offloads social responsibilities from state to community, shoring up neoliberal governance rather than enhancing empowerment. Though some in the resulting debate have leveled additional critiques of participatory approaches (Mansuri and Rao 2004; Mohan and Skolke 2000), others have analyzed determinants of success in participation (Hou and Kinoshita 2007; Sandercock 2005; Umemoto 2001). We locate our intervention firmly in the second group: stipulating that naïve participatory approaches risk ratifying existing power relations, we contend that power-sensitive participation can indeed transform such relations.

Field-based education includes activities labeled service learning, field-based learning, experiential learning, and studio courses. A vast literature documents how community engagement benefits students’ learning (Kiely 2005; Lemieux and Allen 2007). A smaller set of researchers argue that such engagement can benefit the community by generating useful research, at the same time it aids students by modeling their professional roles (Kennedy and Mead 1993, 1996, Nyden et al. 1997). Some argue that community-engaged education’s impacts can go farther to build community empowerment (Angotti, Doble, and Horrigan 2011; Reardon 1998; Sletto 2010). However, this ambitious goal of empowerment, which we share, is not as widely embraced in the literature, and as yet strategies for achieving increased community capacity remain sketchy.

Thinking about field-based education overlaps with that about university-community partnerships, in which typically a university provides research assistance to a community in exchange for access to otherwise difficult-to-obtain information, and/or hands-on educational opportunities for students (Kennedy and Stone 1997). Recent studies of university-community partnerships laud benefits to both partners, but also spotlight numerous challenges in building mutual respect and constructive collaboration between academics and grassroots organizations (Angotti, Doble, and Horrigan 2011; Ashley and Vos 2015). All emphasize the importance of deep, long-term university commitments to work with a community, with adequate resources to ensure that communities have a full voice and genuinely benefit.

Finally, literature on cross-cultural pedagogy informs our analysis. This includes research on both cross-cultural education within a heterogeneous nation (Enns et al. 2004) and cross-national education via travel by educators or students (Liedgren 2015). In our case, cross-national considerations are relevant—we are two US-based professors who were teaching in Mexico along with one Cuban (though a long-term Mexico resident)—but we contend that related cross-cultural education issues are ubiquitous in planning classrooms today.

Cross-cultural education literature harbors a tension between two perspectives. One is a “multicultural education approach” (Sleeter and Grant 2003): take people’s cultures as more or less fixed, and design education so that all can learn, contribute, and have their learning styles appreciated. The other is a more interventionist “multicultural education and social reconstruction approach” (Sleeter and Grant 2003) or “positional pedagogy” (Maher and Tetreault 2001): a Freirean approach (Freire 1970) that openly challenges differences in privilege, prestige, and power among social groups, seeking to help students become agents of transformation. We adopt the latter approach. The challenge for the instructor within this framework is finding a balance between respecting students’ ideas and capacities on one hand, and on the other hand challenging narrow worldviews and guiding students toward more critical engagement with social reality.

Though we have reviewed a broad swath of literature to locate our approach, we underline that our own understanding is shaped above all by our experiences, many decades long between the two of us, with community-based planning and teaching. We have documented these experiences and some aspects of the broader approach previously (Kennedy and Stone 1997, 124–26, Kennedy 2018a, 2018b), sometimes in fugitive literature (Gaston, Kennedy, and Ryan 1986; Kennedy 1993). In this article, we present a single case in depth to develop a more comprehensive planning education synthesis.

Methodology

Our research methodology included straightforward participant observation and interviewing. We visited the community several times before the class to plan the project, speaking with just a few people. Once the class began, students conducted additional key informant interviews for a total of 22, and reported interview findings back to the class. We observed all student-led focus groups and the community assembly. In addition to requiring students to keep diaries and typing up and submitting notes on interviews, between written assignments and in-class discussion we elicited student perceptions and reactions throughout the project, including at the end of the class. One of us met with the students a year later, and two of us conducted a follow-up interview with a student, José¹ in 2017, ten years after the project took place.

Setting and Process

The Setting: A Worst-Case Scenario

The class, Participatory Planning for Community Development, was offered in 2007 in the Colegio de Tlaxcala in Mexico’s smallest state, Tlaxcala. Authors Kennedy and Tilly were visiting professors, and coteacher Mercedes Arce a regular professor, at ColTlax. The project was based in nearby San Miguel Analco, an agricultural village of about 1,600, in the Municipio of Natívitas. Municipios are the main unit of local governance in Mexico, county-sized conglomerations governed by a mayor and city council; often, as in this case, constituent communities have an elected auxiliary mayor. As with other traditional agricultural communities, Analco struggles in Mexico’s post-North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) failing rural economy.

Why do we call this a worst-case scenario? Start with the community. First, no organized community group invited us to undertake a project. A previously planned project fell through, and we scrambled to find a new one. Through a contact with the Natívitas Mayor’s office, we were thrust upon a community with no prior experience with us or ColTlax upon which to build a trustful relationship. Analco’s Auxiliary Mayor endorsed the project after a push from the Natívitas Mayor, but his stated support never translated into getting residents involved.

Second, Analco was physically, socially, and politically isolated. It was cut off from other cities in the municipio by a major highway, but also lacked any nearby on-ramp to that highway. The Mayor’s chief of staff, when setting out to show us Analco, didn’t know the way and asked another staffer to drive; the road was potholed and rough even by rural Mexican standards. He confided that the Municipio found Analco troublesome and querulous, hence the Mayor’s willingness to give us a relatively free hand.

Finally, the 22 initial interviews pointed to a fractured community. Government officials and community notables described instances where the Municipio had offered a school cafeteria, milk money for schoolchildren, funding for a library, and rural assistance, but ended up withdrawing the offers when the community couldn’t agree on how to manage the resources. The community was divided between ejidatarios (land-owners via Mexico’s 1930s land reform) and jornaleros (landless farm laborers), between families of migrants who achieved relative prosperity through remittances and non-migrant families, and between other social networks. We initially found residents cynical about any possibility for improvement in the village, young people anxious to leave for almost anywhere else, and elders lost in their memories of better times.

Pedagogically, as well, the class had many worst-case elements. The project was intended for master’s students, but instead, doctoral students were required to take the class. These particular students had already begun dissertations and rather naturally wished to focus on their own research rather than the project. The course was scheduled for only one semester; we believe student field projects work best when they extend at least a full year to properly prepare students to work in a real-life situation with sensitivity to community culture (Kennedy and Mead 1996).

The Mexican students, most of whom were working full-time day jobs and taking classes at night, had little time for reading and assignments, and relatively weak academic preparation. The program’s approach to planning was theoretical, technocratic, and top-down (with some exceptions in Arce’s teaching), and students had no familiarity with community-level, let alone community-based, planning. “We’ve never done fieldwork,” Maribel told us a few weeks into the class. Immersed in a doctoral program that omitted and even devalued learning from practice and listening to community members, students were ill-prepared for a participatory field-based course, and at the outset disinclined to invest effort in it.

As the Analco project’s later turnaround revealed, behind this bleak landscape lay hidden potential. New leaders and activists surfaced in the community. Students moved beyond their early resentment to take responsibility for the project. Still, first appearances were grim.

The class did have one unusual asset: this was a relatively resource-rich class, with three professors for only eight students and a Fulbright grant to pay for supplies. And the fact that two of the professors were from the United States had mixed implications. On the one hand, it brought the troubled baggage of the hegemonic U.S. relationship with Mexico into interactions with students. On the other hand, that hegemonic legacy may have helped convince both students and community members to try something far outside their accustomed routines. An added plus was that despite all the “worst-case” aspects of the situation, the two of us and Arce as project leaders were motivated by a stubborn faith (based in past experience) in community members’ and students’ capacities for engagement, creativity, and taking hold of the planning and educational processes, respectively.

Transformative Learning and Community Development: The Teaching-Research-Planning Process

In this case, the transformative learning and community development approach consisted of a nine-step ladder of activities of teaching, research, and planning; our approach generally adopts some version of these steps, subject to adaptation. This sequence has much in common with “how-to” procedures for community-based participatory research (Seitz 2007, World Health Organization 2005, Ch. 3) and Kent, Gilbertson, and Hunt’s (1997) stages of learning from practical activity, though it is distinct. The steps are as follows.

1. Introduce students to the approach. In addition to assigning readings and lecturing on community-based, participatory planning, we gave the students a small-group in-class exercise on the concepts of “power and empowerment,” “labeling and self-image,” and “development,” drawing on students’ own planning experiences, whether as planner or client of a planning project.

2. Preparing students to “hear” the community. To truly hear community members, planners must identify and set aside their own attitudes and preconceptions (Kennedy 2008, 2018a, 2018b; Sandercock 2003). Toward this end, students completed three exercises. The first was to separately visit Analco and walk the same prescribed route without speaking to residents, and record what they observed and inferred, followed by discussion of the observations in the subsequent class. Second, students brainstormed what they valued and what they wanted to change in their own neighborhoods. In the final exercise, each student to drew a “mental map” of his/her own neighborhood, indicating perceived boundaries, places where they felt “at home” or unsafe, landmarks, and so on. In addition to these exercises, we asked students to keep an ongoing diary of their experiences and impressions of Analco, to attempt to separate personal preferences from professional judgments.

3. Introducing techniques for later stages in parallel with gathering information from secondary sources. We then explored varied research methods: survey research, interviewing, oral history, focus groups, action-research compared to participatory action research (PAR), and quantitative research compared to qualitative. Meanwhile, students were assigned to small groups to profile Analco based on secondary sources.

4. Key informant interviews. With input from the Auxiliary Mayor, professors and students together identified interview targets: elders or persons holding a respected position (teacher, shopkeeper, priest or deacon, and so on), and teams of two students conducted interviews. In the more ideal situation of working with a mobilized community, we would have followed a participatory research model. But in this “worst-case” setting, we used traditional research methods, while incorporating community views as part of a participatory planning process.

5. Focus groups. Six focus groups were held: elderly women, elderly men, adult women, young women, adult and young men combined, and children. Focus groups were aimed at stimulating meaningful conversations, building community trust and consensus. Again, having community members just as informants, not participants in the research, departed from the participatory ideal.

Students facilitated and took notes in teams of two. Each focus group was to query participants regarding needs and resources in the community, and to move quickly to setting goals by describing visions for a better community five years forward, and identifying community resources to help achieve their goals. For goal-setting, some chose to use a nominal group method (a visioning exercise) designed to ensure that each person contributed to the discussion (Delbecq and Van de Ven 1971).

6. Community-wide assembly. Interviews and focus groups yielded a menu of six goals, which we presented at a community-wide assembly for priority-setting. The assembly agenda designed by the class began with students presenting a brief summary of problems, resources, and visions expressed by residents. Participants were divided into discussion groups to prioritize three of the six goals for immediate work, then reconvened in plenary session to share priorities and identify volunteers to work with the ColTlax team to develop strategies and action plans.

7. Strategies and action plans. In meetings with students and faculty, the new volunteer task force developed a strategy and action plan for each of the three priority goals and went to work, with student assistance.

8. Final report. A 60-page final report including the secondary data as well as the strategies and action plans was presented to the community task force at the end of the semester.

9. Evaluating the class and planning process. Best practice ends with formal evaluation, but in this case we were unable to carry out a full evaluation because steps 1 to 8 took us to the end of the class, and the departure of the two U.S. scholars. Evaluation was consequently limited to a mid-semester student survey an end-of-semester discussion among the students and professors, and an online evaluation (which only one student filled out) along with one follow-up interview with a student ten years later.

Findings

Challenges and Strategies to Meet Them

Challenges fell into three categories: societal, educational, and political. We consider each category in turn before turning to a fuller description of project outcomes. Most of these problems and solutions have analogs in virtually every community.

Societal challenges

Negativism about possibilities for change was perhaps the foremost obstacle in Analco—as in many communities. On the one hand, government was universally criticized by those outside it. “The authorities aren’t working for the community, they’re playing us for fools,” said Trinidad in a typical comment. On the other, many residents were as dismissive of the community as government officials were, describing Analqueños as “freeloaders” or “slackers”; Bárbara, who had served three years on a committee that oversaw the irrigation system, said she was never thanked or recognized and finally quit in disgust. We adopted two strategies and one tactic to limit pessimism and pivot to more forward-looking thinking. First, in focus groups and the assembly, we instructed students to direct discussion toward visions rather than problems, in order to break away from the litany of complaints that characterized much Analco dialogue. Second, we emphasized solutions community members themselves could implement, to disarm pervasive cynicism about securing government assistance. This is precisely what Cooke and Kothari (2002) criticize as allowing government to shed its responsibilities, but we saw it as the necessary to motivate community engagement. Third, tactically we gambled on bringing large numbers to the assembly, hoping that broader discussion of a positive agenda would motivate wider involvement. To build turnout, we used old-fashioned community organizing tools: scheduling the event for a Sunday after church, leafleting the Sunday before as people left mass, door-knocking and leafleting every home a few days ahead of time (yes, that was part of a student assignment), promising a meal, and sending around a sound truck on the day of the event. Eighty people attended—small compared to Analco’s population of 1,600, but large considering a long history of alienation.

In Analco, as elsewhere, hierarchy took the form of long-entrenched patterns of domination and deference that stood in the way of community-wide dialogue (Connell 1997). For example, the Auxiliary Mayor referred us to “leaders” distinguished by their age and rank, overlooking the less formal leaders who actually exercised influence in the community; Rosalío, a student, urged us to speak at the Assembly rather than leaving it in the students’ hands because “For you to speak as a [PhD] will bring respect to what we’re doing.” We sought to weaken hierarchy’s grip in the planning process in a couple of ways. First, we organized separate focus groups of men, women, and youth—evading tendencies for men and elders to monopolize conversations, and providing new spaces for more voices to be heard. Second, we trained students in facilitating participation by as many people as possible.

As we noted above, Analco was fragmented by differing economic interests and long-standing grievances, most visible in the history of disputes over who would control government-provided aid. We attempted to build bridges in two stages. First, the focus groups provided small, intimate settings where residents could see each other constructively discussing visions for the future. But it proved difficult to get Analqueños to join the focus groups, and by the end only a small minority of community members had participated. So second, we tried to structure the assembly in ways that shook up old divisions. We reshuffled social groups that entered together by handing each person a name tag with a colored dot determining which break-out group they would join, strictly alternating between four colors. Students then attempted to replicate the focus group atmosphere by facilitating a short discussion of the six goals, leading up to a vote to prioritize them. Each attendee got three post-its, signifying first, second, and third priorities, and attached their post-its to a poster listing the goals. When the full assembly reconvened, students hung all the posters on the stage in view of the entire audience. The outcome was surprising, given the community’s fractious history. First in each of the breakout groups, and then in the plenary, three goals emerged as areas of strong consensus: better health, education, and water and sewage systems.

Just as this community-wide consensus was tallied and students were soliciting volunteers, cynicism and hierarchy threatened to vitiate the advance. An older man rose and belittled the accomplishment, saying, “Do you think that this is the first time we’ve done this kind of thing? The government does nothing for us … They don’t listen to us!” As he continued, neither student facilitators nor community members interrupted, for doing so would violate a norm of deference to elders. Though most of our strategies were relatively gentle, on this occasion we intervened forcefully. One of us interrupted the speaker, claimed the floor, described successful participatory processes elsewhere, and explained that the government’s inaction was the motivation for identifying self-help strategies—succeeding in refocusing the assembly on next steps. Ironically, defending the community’s ability to make decisions required trampling community values and disrupting a community member’s participation.

In terms of community capacities, every participatory planning process bumps up against some type of capacity issue, whether map-reading, understanding of the law-making process, or simply child care for parents attending meetings. The main issue we encountered was that many Analco residents, especially older ones, are illiterate, an issue that particularly arose in the assembly with its ambitious agenda. We explained above how we used colored dots to sort attendees into groups, and colored post-its to signal preferences. A final element was to create a simple and intelligible icon for each goal—for example, a glowing face to signify health, an open book to signify education, and so on. We drew these at large scale, recognizable from a distance.

Educational challenges

Treading unfamiliar educational ground brings its own risks. In our project, educational challenges to our learning model comprised two entrenched traditions, of rote learning and repetition on the one hand and a technocratic view of the professional’s role on the other, as well as a corrosive combination of students’ weak preparation, time and resource constraints, and resentment about being handed this unexpected requirement. Our students’ education up to that point led them to expect their teachers to deliver lectures and reading material that would contain “the answers,” allowing them to restate those answers back to us. For instance, in one early class small groups were asked, based on what we knew about the community so far, to discuss what level of community participation in research we should target. One of the two groups proposed a full PAR approach, outlining a six-stage plan that to us seemed completely unrealistic—repeating back nearly verbatim the arguments for PAR and elements of PAR laid out in readings. (The other group suggested a more feasible action research design.) At the same time, students saw themselves as nearly fully trained professionals, for whom suitable relationships to “clients” centered on asking them about their problems, then drawing on professional expertise to formulate solutions. They tended to conduct focus groups by simply asking the same question of each person around the circle, survey-style, and instead facilitating a visioning conversation.

Our transformative learning and community development approach frustrated both sets of student expectations. Guided by a Freirean orientation to community-engaged learning, we pushed students to learn primarily in the field, in sustained interaction with the community, with a spare set of guidelines and a willingness to improvise. At the same time, guided by a commitment to participatory planning, we urged students to restrain their technocratic impulse to identify and solve problems, instead valuing community members’ problem-solving abilities and valuing the community’s learning process for its own sake. At the same time, we did act on student feedback—for example, by cutting weekly classroom time in half and devoting the other 1.5 hours to field-based activities.

Student reactions varied, but often signaled distress with our approach. Through most of the semester, they repeatedly asked us for detailed protocols for our “techniques,” incredulous that these techniques were so open-ended. On rare occasions, they overtly voiced annoyance: early on, Tomás reacted to negative feedback on his group’s report by declaring, “This isn’t our main research, it’s not related to our dissertations!” More pervasive, however, was behavior we interpreted as a combination of passive-aggressiveness with simply being over-stretched and under-resourced (some students did not have computers at home): students almost invariably arrived late for class and for meetings in Analco, selectively ignored instructions, turned in work that was late and incomplete, and failed to follow through on promised deliveries of materials. It was only at the stage of turning in final work that they finally delivered most of what was assigned.

To respond to these challenges, we drew on standard teaching repertoires. In addition to assigning a range of readings on participatory planning (as planned from the start), we foregrounded our ladder of activities far more than originally planned, repeatedly motivating the studio’s strategy. We modeled active student participation in research and learning in the classroom, organizing small group exercises and full-class discussions that put the onus on students to engage with each other’s views. We elicited student reactions to the field-based assignments, emphasizing the benefits of this form of learning (when necessary—students often identified the benefits themselves). We gave frequent feedback to individual students and teams—specifically highlighting tendencies toward technocracy and toward overlooking community input. Perhaps most importantly, we tried to facilitate students’ learning from each other through team exercises and assignments.

Political challenges

Political obstacles can impede participatory community planning and community-engaged learning. On the one hand, the municipio’s political elite had written off Analco, viewing the village with contempt. On the other hand, community members saw political engagement as useless, and tended to view it in narrowly instrumental terms. “People are self-interested,” was Filiberta’s diagnosis. “They’ll come to a meeting as long as there’s a gift or they get some material reward.” And indeed, participants in numerous interviews and focus groups asked what they would get in return for participating.

Our response to the political class’s jaundiced view of Analco was to plot an end run around them by guiding the community to undertake self-reliant projects, as noted above. Contending with the community’s instrumentalist instincts was harder. For many residents, instrumentalism plus official indifference led directly to discouragement, which we countered with strategies discussed above under “Societal challenges.” But those discursive strategies only worked on those sufficiently optimistic or curious to attend a meeting. To expand our reach for the assembly, we capitulated to instrumentalism, offering a festive buffet as a material reward. To convince assembly participants that the process was transparent and democratic, we used voting methods (colored stickers on flip-chart sheets with large drawings of the six icons) that made results instantly visible to all in the assembly—a strategy suggested by José.

The Strategies’ Results

These strategies reaped further positive outcomes for both community and students. Just getting the local government to notice Analco had at least one positive effect—the gigantic potholes in the road were fixed about three months into the project. Three more significant immediate actions resulted from the work of the community task force formed at the end of the assembly, and its three action teams on the top-ranked issues of water and sewage, health, and education: (1) a volunteer team borrowed a backhoe and cleaned out the septic that overflowed into the agricultural fields; (2) it turned out Analco had always been eligible to receive equipment and staffing for the health center from the federal program, but needed a committee to manage the program—now that the task force was in place, Analco got the resources; and (3) community volunteers arranged for students at a nearby teachers’ college to provide after school mentoring to the tele-secundaria² students, and visited parents of schoolchildren to encourage them to keep their children in school, explaining the importance of education amidst the Mexican countryside’s decline.

As these plans were realized, an interesting thing happened—the community and the government undertook additional projects. The jornaleros who had dodged the focus group voluntarily cleaned all the town’s streets, another group of volunteers painted the health center, and others repaired the athletic field toilets. Having discovered their shared goals through the participatory process, the community was now acting on them together. With the community in motion, suddenly local and higher levels of government came through with a number of resources that had previously been promised, but never provided, starting with a long-needed sewage treatment plant and help with various economic development projects such as greenhouses, and eventually including a highway on-ramp and even siting a long-planned regional hospital in Analco.

Underlying these visible actions was a positive shift in how the community was organized. The three action teams newly mobilized about twenty community members. These new activists were mostly younger women, and in our assessment and that of our students two of the women, a mother and daughter, were the most dynamic leaders we had encountered in the community. We were not able to elicit a community assessment of the project; the top priority for the task force was to formulate and carry out action plans, and the (long-planned) departure of the two U.S.-based faculty while this process was in full swing short-circuited any community-based evaluation. But we did check in with the Auxiliary Mayor throughout the process, and he seemed to have a bit of a conversion experience. Early on he communicated disinterest by repeatedly failing to show up for planned meetings. But toward the end, at a meeting of the health action team, he turned to the students and faculty present and said, “We’ve learned a lot from you … You’ve helped us to develop our abilities.” At the meeting with the full task force at which we turned over the report, he thanked us again, saying “We realized that we didn’t have to stay stuck in our pothole, that we had to get ourselves moving.” Rosario, the mother of the mother–daughter pair of leaders, added, “We’ve learned how to communicate better.”

Still, the community’s progress in participation was modest. In Arnstein’s (1969) and Rocha’s (1997) “ladder” terminology, the planning process started out at a consultative/mediated level of empowerment, in which experts seek input from community members, and by the end had stepped up one rung to a low level of socio-political empowerment—collective action for self-help, including unified pressure on power-holders for more assistance. Even this limited progress was dramatic given the many obstacles the project faced at the start. But a ten-year follow-up visit to Analco by one of the students (José) underlined the limits. Though the few community residents he spoke to recalled the project and were still enjoying benefits from it, they did not make a connection between the participatory planning process and the resulting payoffs. Though they had solved some knotty problems, they had not internalized a new mode of problem-solving—not surprising given the project’s short duration and limited scope for community participation. For that matter, even at the time we observed that some of those most actively engaged in the process were also contemplating migrating to the U.S. as another way to improve their lives.

On the educational side, the students offered increasingly positive assessments as the course proceeded, but there was continuing ambivalence within the group. Some students expressed enthusiasm after the very first exercise, saying this was their first opportunity to reflect on their own experiences in light of the theories they had been learning. In a midstream evaluation one third of the way in, all eight students rated learning participatory approaches to community development “very useful” in their doctoral studies and profession—but the next week, they responded sullenly to our critical feedback on assignments. In the final class session, students reaffirmed the value of community-engaged learning. We asked students how the course/field project might be improved in the future; by offering detailed suggestions for improvement, they showed they had taken ownership of the process, in contrast to the early days of the course.

Tomás’s evolution was perhaps the most dramatic. In week 4 of 16, he fatalistically stated, “It’s difficult in Mexico, because we have the experience of 70 years of PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party] dictatorship in which we were told what to do. To decide for yourself, to think for yourself, is not something we are accustomed to,” and the following week he made the complaint about being required to do research so remote from his dissertation. Yet by week 15, he sought our advice about changing his dissertation to focus on participatory processes in Analco, and became highly engaged with Analco, continuing for a year after the class.

But Tomás was exceptional. As of week 15, Maribel still sounded fatalistic: “That’s what we don’t know how to do—to think.” At a party we threw for the students a couple of weeks after the class ended, Claudia voiced contradictory sentiments, saying “This class was a very good experience, because [up till now] we’ve spent a lot of time on theory, but it’s very different to go out in the community and try to engage in practice”—but then adding that she wished we had spent more time on theory! And Arturo resisted to the end our attempts to get him to take the community’s ideas seriously.

In the end, three students (including Tomás) changed their dissertation topics in order to continue working in Analco and a fourth incorporated some of the findings into his dissertation. A fifth student volunteered to work with the community along with Arce the following fall. Interviewed ten years after the project, José, who has stayed in touch with most of the others, told us, “You had a profound effect on how we look at working with communities”—adding that he was trying to incorporate participatory approaches in his leadership role in an influential local institution of higher education, and that Tomás was doing the same as a department head in a nearby municipality.

The Colegio made a “hands-on” participatory planning course a regular part of the curriculum of both the master’s and doctoral programs, though it did not carry out additional projects with Analco. Even the state government, which had withdrawn support for Kennedy’s original participatory planning proposal (necessitating the last-minute scramble that sent us to Analco), subsequent to the project requested that ColTlax students and faculty do participatory community development work with other communities.

Paths to Participation

The project’s success was not due to miraculous attributes of our strategies. Rather, the strategies opened the door for both students and community to activate potential that had been hidden. For the students, immersing themselves in discussion with a community, after being primed to be open-minded facilitators rather than prescriptive experts, generated excitement that encouraged them to break with familiar hierarchical patterns in the classroom and in relation to communities. For community members, the process was more complicated. Over the arc of the project, we saw some of the same community members speak out in the first round of focus groups, speak out again in the assembly’s groups, and then take an active role in the task forces that came out of the assembly. In retrospect, it seems clear that these individuals, including Rosario and her daughter, were natural leaders who self-selected into participation. It is striking that not one of them was identified by the 22 elders and influentials whom we and students interviewed at the launch of the project. It appears that the relatively open process allowed them to step out of the shadows of established leadership and put forward their own ideas.

Conclusion

Our model of transformative learning and community development varies in its specific application, but five elements constitute its core. The first is the ladder of activities that walks both students and community through a cumulative process of learning and practical engagement. This is a guideline rather than a fixed script, but there is learning and organizing logic to the order of steps on the ladder. Pushing students to acknowledge their positionality comes first, along with immersion in theory and cases of participation. Only then does outreach begin, building from individual conversations to group discussions to community-wide collaboration as the community climbs its own ladder.

Second, adapt to local circumstances—the goals of communication, participation, trust-building, and plan-making are universal, but the specific strategies and tactics employed will vary. In Analco, local adaptations included making provisions for non-literate adults, breaking up cliques at the key community meeting, and strategies to overcome deep-rooted cynicism.

Third, address stratification and its associated ideologies. Problematic ideologies in this case included elitism above, defeatism and mistrust below. Fourth, carrying out this approach, especially in inauspicious circumstances like those we faced, requires maintaining one’s belief in community and student capacities for participation, even in the face of setbacks. This can mean risking and indeed experiencing failure—and it is wise to keep a “safety net” option in reserve—but most often communities and students have strengths not initially obvious.

Finally, successfully carrying out this teaching and planning model requires a complicated mix of listening to and facilitating students and community members with guiding and structuring the two groups’ learning processes. We adjusted this mix based on our own learning-by-doing; perhaps the hardest call was interrupting the skeptical elder at the climactic community meeting.

As we discussed at the start of the article, this approach draws on three literatures—participatory planning, field-based education, and cross-cultural education—as well as on our own experiences. It is premised on the three claims relative to those literatures that we advanced at the outset of the article. The claims are as follows: (1) It is possible and positive for students to learn about participatory planning by engaging in it. (2) Community participation can confront and weaken power inequalities, and its degree of subversive potential depends on how it is structured. (3) Good participatory education and planning requires the balance noted above between valuing and supporting what students and community members know and do, and exercising professional expertise.

In San Miguel Analco, despite its worst-case starting point, all three were borne out, based on the limited follow-up we have been able to carry out. Our students did learn about community-based planning, and most embraced it in ways that built on their own interests despite their initial reluctance. Ten years later, the class still influences their outlook, according to the student we re-interviewed. The shift in students’ worldview affirms the value so many scholars attribute to community-based learning, and its persistence lines up with longitudinal findings of service learning’s impact by Kiely (2005) and others.

It is difficult to empirically demonstrate shifts in power differentials, but certainly a wide cross-section of Analco residents were energized engaging in productive future-oriented discussions, and by realizing that most neighbors shared their goals—and certainly the Municipio shifted from disdaining the community to responding to quite a few of its needs. This case adds to the evidence challenging Cooke and Kothari (2002) critique of community participation.

Regarding the third claim, we pushed students to do things that were uncomfortable and even unnatural for them, but we also heeded their feedback and tried to turn over ever more responsibility over the process to them; we followed a similar dynamic with community members. We read this mixed strategy’s success as supporting a Freirean, critical pedagogy approach.

Rather than simply celebrate our successes, however, it is important to address the limitations and contingencies of this project. The most glaring limitations emerged from the ways that this project departed from the university-community engagement ideals of committed and long-term university involvement, and building long run community capacity. The one semester class was too short, and transformations of students and community fell short of what a longer interaction might have accomplished. Though ColTlax incorporated participatory community studios into its curriculum, the institution did not build a long-term relationship with Analco; after one more semester of work by Arce and a student, a small number of student dissertations focusing on the community were ColTlax’s only form of follow-up. Though the project did start Analqueños working together more collaboratively, the longer term impacts on community capacity are unclear.

Two types of contingent outcomes bear emphasis. First, we were very lucky. If we had not been able to get a critical mass of residents to the assembly, if assembly participants had remained polarized, if the municipal government had continued ignoring Analco despite the community mobilization, it is not clear how much the process could have achieved. But second, the specifics of the setting—including those making this a worst-case scenario—clearly affected the process and outcomes. If the students had already been exposed to ideas of participatory planning and community empowerment, the pedagogical process would have had less adversarial aspects and more collaborative ones. For that matter, if the class had consisted of US students, a product of less hierarchical educational models and a planning field more attuned to communities as autonomous actors, discussions would have started at a different point and followed a different path (but also introduced new cross-national power dynamics). A less cynical, more organized community, similarly, would have dictated a changed ladder of activities. All of this underlines our point about adapting to local circumstances.

Our successes in this particular case by no means prove our three claims about planning education, community participation, and the need for a Freirean balance between listening and guiding. They do, however, suggest ways to achieve the potential to which the claims point. And in so doing, they also suggest that a transformative learning and community development approach is applicable far beyond San Miguel Analco.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank the Fulbright-García Robles Fellowship program for financial support. We also thank our students and the people of San Miguel Analco, who did the real work.

Authors’ Note

We designed this project, taught the class, and carried out the project with our colleague Mercedes Arce, then of the Colegio de Tlaxcala, so we want to acknowledge her collaborative role at the outset.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Marie Kennedy is Professor Emerita of Community Planning at the College of Public and Community Service, University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research interests include community participation, urban politics, social movements, and planning pedagogy.

Chris Tilly is a professor of urban planning at the University of California Los Angeles. He studies bad jobs and how to make them better, in the United States, Mexico, and in broader comparisons, and also analyzes social and labor movements.

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