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PREPARING THE MOBILISER

Guidance for the Trainer

by Phil Bartle, PhD

Trainers' Notes

Using this module as training material

Who Can Become a Community Activist?

Not every one is potentially a good community mobiliser.

Do not assume, however, that training or education in specific disciplines will automatically indicate a predisposition to work with communities. A certificate or diploma in social work, or related subjects, does not ensure a person will be effective in strengthening low income communities. Engineers, graduates in commerce or science, persons with only one year of elementary education, have all become community workers, with good effect.

As much as possible, becoming a community worker should be a self selection process.

If you are training potential mobilisers, you should set up your programme in such a way as to make it easy for your trainees to choose either way.

This module on getting prepared contains material which you can use to expose potential mobilisers to the nature of their work, the personal characteristics they need, and what training they will face. Use it to create an environment so that they can decide if they should continue with the training.

The Elementary Training Material:

The first five modules on this site, in this training, consist mainly of short handouts, suitable to use in training workshops, and should be discussed and digested slowly and in small bites. They are based on the content of the first handbook, which is presented as a whole elsewhere on this site ( Mobilisers Handbook). They are broken into short handouts here to be used separately for workshop discussions.

You may advise advanced students to look at the handbook if they wish to study a longer document that combines all the material.

Later modules contain longer documents with more sophisticated content.

Each handout can be used in a forty minute training session (using the same name for the session) in an initial workshop. You can use the titles when you plan your training.

Starting with the complete list on the Site Map, you can list your training sessions in order as they appear in the first five modules, or rearrange them according your needs and those of the trainees.

You can also copy each handout, or a selection of them, onto transparencies, and show them up on a screen, so as to facilitate presentation, discussion, and participation. It is up to you to decide on how you use the material.

We recommend that each session include as much in the way of "doing" by the trainees, and only a minimum of lectures and one-way presentations.You can imagine and invent many activities that trainees can be active in each session, and you will find it useful to catalogue many of them and keep notes for using in further training sessions.

What works for you, and how?

Related Documents in other Modules:

Two documents that are in other modules may be useful if you wish to supplement those already in this one.

In the "Mobilisation Cycle" module, the document on "Being a Mobiliser" can be very useful here. It can be broken into two handouts, one listing the personal characteristics needed, written as a check list the trainee can see and ask herself or himself if s/he has those personal characteristics. The other is a simplified list of tasks the mobiliser is expected to do in the field. Either or both can be used as a handout here in the "Getting Prepared" session.

In the "Managing Mobilisation" module, the document "Job Descriptions" provides a more detailed description of the qualifications needed and the tasks and responsibilities expected.

That module, and "Participatory Management" both propose that the relationship between manager and mobiliser should be a partnership, and they should jointly generate their mobiliser job descriptions. (Unfortunately not every mobiliser will find herself or himself in a job where her or his supervisor practices participatory management ─ those two modules promote it).

If trainees ask for more details than in the handouts in "Getting Prepared" then the job description handout will be appropriate.

Training Methods:

There is a whole module on this site which is dedicated to presenting various training methods that you can tap when using this material for training.(Training Methods)

When you are setting up the initial training workshops on topics such as "Getting Prepared," browse through the "Training Methods" module for guidance and tips on how you might set up your training programme.

Throughout this web site and the training programme it contains, the emphasis is on "learning by doing. We all learn differently, at different speeds, and more on one medium than another. In general, however, we can learn more and retain more, especially skills, by doing something rather than just hearing about it or even by watching it.

We encourage you to avoid looking for an othodox method to training, and use your own intitatieve and creativity to desisgn your own training, based on the needs and conditions of the trainees and the local environment.

If you are running a training programme, you are encouraged to write to us and discuss your observations and ideas. If you have suggestions, perhaps we can jointly design new material.

© Copyright 1967, 1987, 2007 Phil Bartle
Web Design by Lourdes Sada

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Last update: 2010.11.10