[July 6, 2010]
There really is no better way to learn than to experience. I cannot stress how much visiting the field, interacting with the HIV Support Groups and Community Healthcare Workers, and conversing with Malawians and those familiar with Malawian customs has opened my eyes to the application of our microenterprise training project. While I have needed the time to gain perspective, see the big picture and also investigate the finer details, I’ve actually discovered so much more to the process of learning.
Take Malawian learning style. By fate and good fortune, we had the opportunity to discuss our project (just in the nick of time, too!) with Casey Nesbit, mother of our friend and previous BTB student intern Elizabeth Nesbit. Casey shared with us her own experiences training nurses at St. Gabriel’s on the basics of physical therapy. Last summer, she held 25 1-hour sessions, in which each session covered one basic concept of physical therapy. She showed us her teaching materials and even a video clip of her training session, in which Casey would introduce new material with great repetition and then require her students to repeat and imitate the task. Casey found it effective to show both the correct and incorrect methods, using contrast to reinforce the concepts of what was proper physical therapy. Moreover, what Casey shared was that Malawians are very didactic learners. They are accustomed to lecture-style learning where the teacher presents new material and they repeat the concept verbatim.
This discovery initially posed a conundrum. We had left Houston with a comprehensive educational course based on a discussion framework. There was little straight-lecture, but rather the objective to create ideas through the formation of trust groups and discussion-based learning. Now, here we are, with real students who are used to a formal learning style. Will we be able to reach them through that same discussion framework? Can we still impart new concepts simply through discussion of shared experiences?
Out of fear that our original program would not achieve the desired effectiveness – and perhaps that our students would not be as forthcoming with their opinions, we have decided to incorporate more formal instruction into our lesson plans. Thinking back on the entire design process from the spring, we traced our steps back to a suggestion made by BTB staff and mentor Grace Wichmann, who recommended we look at a resource called Barefoot MBA. Barefoot MBA has established lesson plans for a variety of business topics, divided into modules of People, Businesses, and Markets. Each lesson plan follows the same structure: concept, background story, a comparison of two stories (in which one is “right” business behavior and one is “wrong” business behavior), guided questions, and finally the overarching lesson. According to Casey, the questions are even ordered according to a sequence appropriate to teaching – going from understanding information to application of knowledge. We have found that the beauty of Barefoot is that the concepts are so fundamental to business; they can be applied anywhere with just a few tweaks of the example stories such that the lessons can be culturally and economically relevant to different countries.
It’s definitely hard to backtrack on all of the hard work that went into our original course. However, being here in Malawi where our students are no longer just an idealized demography, Jasper and I are thinking that there is tremendous wisdom in the Barefoot lessons. Even so, we know that we can stay true to our initial discussion framework, since the simple concept of bringing together these Support Group members and Community Healthcare Workers can inspire trust-building and group motivation.