Legitimizing everyone’s knowledge
In concrete terms, the aim is to stimulate motivation to learn by placing the learner at the heart of his learning. This principle is reflected in the valorization of each person’s knowledge and the dialogue between these different types of knowledge.
By legitimising each person’s knowledge, we put forward the idea of listening to the people with whom we wish to carry out an activity of facilitation : firstly to benefit from the knowledge and experience of each person on his or her own situation, environment, etc. and secondly to position ourselves as facilitators and not as "teachers" - and at the same time to build trust - especially when we are faced with an adult audience.
This posture is directly inspired by the principles of popular education :
<"No one educates anyone, men educate each other through the world." Paolo Freire (1921-1997) - Brazilian educator, philosopher and teacher.
Testimony of Usha from the organization Fedina this video : "Our approach is not to arrive saying ’we know’, because what happens with this approach is that people look at us as people who are going to give them solutions. So what we do is we sit down and talk to them in a relaxed way. We don’t talk to them about awareness, or sharing information, and little by little we try to understand their situation, what they know, what they know.
Then we start to talk with them about the different decrees and laws that exist, give them documentation etc. So there is a lot to learn from them, they know the reality on the ground, they know their working conditions, their family situation, their cultural context. So we learn a lot from them.
This principle is linked to our priority for social transformation n°1.
