PLA: Participatory Learning and Action
The successful use of PLA depends upon facilitators acting as catalysts and convenors and not dominating the process. Facilitators need to have the confidence that local community members are capable of analysing their own situation. Central to this is the idea that local people are experts of their own community. Some of the behaviours and attitudes which, (some facilitators believe) form the foundation of PLA, are listed below.
We must ‘hand over the pen’.
We facilitate and the community investigates. Our role is to help the community analyse the information. They then present their findings so that they have ownership of the outcome.
Learning
As facilitators we learn from community members. They in turn will also learn from their own investigation. Through PLA, facilitators and community members will find understand and appreciate local knowledge, viewpoints, skills and practices.
As facilitators we will always be making errors. Instead of hiding our mistakes we must discuss them and so use them as opportunities to learn
We must recognise our biases
We must make sure that we try to avoid taking sides and be prejudiced. It is important to recognise racism, sexism, elitism and etc. when we see it in ourselves and in other facilitators.
Use our best judgment at all times
Rather than relying on manuals or a rigid set of rules we must make our own decisions.
Team composition must be balanced.
Teams of facilitators should be balanced in terms of race, gender, professional knowledge, language skills etc.
Comparing information using different methods.
As information is gathered its accuracy can be checked by using different methods with different groups of people on different occasions. This is known as triangulation.
Critical self-awareness
As facilitators we must always examine
our own behaviour and try to do better. For
example we must continually ask ourselves questions such as did we dominate?
Did we intervene more than we needed to?
Did we allow community members to set the direction?
What was our personal agenda?
In order to allow local people to lead the investigation, PLA uses a number of methods. These methods allow local people to express and share information and stimulate discussion and analysis. Most of the methods require minimal input from facilitators and require few resources. Many are visually stimulating and can be used by people with low literacy levels. Some examples of methods are:
 |
Mapping. |
|
Venn
diagrams |
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Matrices. |
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Pair-wise
ranking. |
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Timelines. |
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Daily
schedules. |
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Body
mapping. |
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Seasonal
calendars. |
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Flow
diagrams. |
|
Card
sorting |
To fulfill the true aim of PLA local community members should lead the process. This is often a very time consuming practice.
Many people considering adopting a PLA approach often ask for examples of good practice. While it is useful to learn from others it can also be very dangerous if 'blueprints' are then adopted and transferred directly to other communities. Every community is unique.
We have adopted many different approaches with different people, some more successful than others and some more pure than others.