Participatory Education in Social Professions

“There is enough data. What’s missing is the human connection to the data. That’s why I’m here.”

— Kim Tyre, Participatory Education in Social Professions Trainer

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People with lived experience of poverty are poverty experts. In ATD Fourth World’s Participatory Education in Social Professions (PESP) program they use this expertise to train social professionals and dialogue with them. Through an innovative training curriculum developed and delivered by people who themselves live in poverty, this Merging of Knowledge training enhances the ability of social professionals (piloted with social work students) to understand the hardships endured by people in poverty.

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“Everybody is up there answering questions from the students and collectively, actively, facilitating. Not just having one main facilitator, but, really truly everybody actually facilitating. Not getting up there to read their line. Which speaks to that level of being present.”

— Julia Sick, PESP Trainer

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Social workers and the organizations they work for are at the forefront of the fight against poverty, whether it is through direct intervention, the creation of knowledge, or the elaboration of social policies and programs. And yet training of social workers in the United States is based almost entirely on knowledge from academics and practicing social workers, and not on the knowledge and experiences of people who are the intended beneficiaries of these social policies and programs.

The Participatory Education in Social Professions program challenges this system by bringing together people in poverty, academic researchers, and social workers to develop innovative and insightful training materials for social work students. Using the Merging of Knowledge methodology creates the conditions necessary to include diverse voices and gain a more nuanced, accurate, and effective understanding of the complex issues of poverty.

Preparation for these professional development sessions is done in community and is very personal, developing a collective way to speak about individual experiences. When presenting to the students, people with lived experience of poverty are not present just to exemplify an experience of poverty, but as experts, researchers, and facilitators, exactly as their fellow trainers are.

 

“It was exciting and awesome to see P. feel comfortable enough to stand up in front of a group of graduate students and respond on the fly to questions and comments from the room.”

— Julia Sick, PESP Trainer

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The Participatory Education in Social Professions project is a reciprocal training, also developing the skills of the trainers. The trainers with lived experience of poverty:

  • Gain the tools to speak in public, with confidence, from their own experience but about a collective experience.
  • Learn the constraints of the service workers - caseload, hierarchy, etc.

By creating these conditions, they can present themselves from a positive perspective, and not be seen as "clients" but as "experts."

Too often in relationships between social workers and people struggling against poverty, people in poverty are seen only for what they lack. For example, they are homeless, hungry, or neglectful of their children. People in poverty describe being caught in a paradoxical situation: They must be autonomous to be seen as worthy of support, and yet they must sacrifice any real autonomy to social workers in order to access the support they need to survive. Very rarely does the nature of the relationship allow people in poverty to show how they resist poverty and how they contribute to their community. In this program, people with experience of poverty gain the tools, skills and opportunities to show this resistance and this contribution and to be actors in creating systemic solutions.

 

“We do the work to build the skills and experience of people living in poverty but also so that the students and professors will recognize that the experience of poverty has a huge value in the understanding of what is poverty, what is social work, what services should be provided, and how services should be provided.”

— Cristina Diez, ATD Fourth World Volunteer Corps Member & PESP Trainer 

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Seeing people from a different angle, understanding poverty from the point of view of people who live it every day, is fundamental to overcoming the ingrained and inaccurate assumptions that guide too much of our social policy and prevent our social programs from having a real impact on people’s lives.

The Participatory Education in Social Professions program uses the knowledge and insight of people with a lived experience of poverty to bridge the gap between perceptions of poverty from the outside and the reality of poverty from the inside, and in doing so free new social professionals from the misconceptions and stereotypes that undermine social services in the United States today.

 

“I work in a community development function of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and currently there is much discussion about foraying into PAR-based approaches to know more and learn about constituents. I can apply this learning in that context. I think the idea of carefully asking questions, considering physical dynamics of space, and building trust and engagement and how to collaborate and co-create with activists is very important.”

— from an evaluation of a PESP training at The New School

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In addition to the effect on professional service providers, the skills that PESP trainers build to speak from their personal experience with a collective voice are used to advocate for the rights of their families and communities in all aspects of their lives.