3Train for emancipation

Our starting point

• The term "training" encompasses all dynamics of learning and strengthening of participants : activities including awareness raising, capacity building, animations, information, mobilization, etc.

• "Emancipatory" training courses, based on the principles of popular education, use a combination of technical capacity-building (access to a trade, economic security) and political training, which goes through various stages : information, awareness-raising, developing the capacity for critical analysis, identifying problems, proposing solutions, forming alliances with other organisations. This training is action-oriented.

• The so-called "emancipatory training" process includes enhancing the knowledge revealed by exchanging practices, capitalising on practices, and forming collectives.

• In a perspective of social transformation, and as part of a popular education approach, the intention of the trainer is to encourage independent thinking and the individual and collective power to act of populations in situations of vulnerabilities. The trainer must thus adopt the attitude of a facilitator who makes it possible to provide spaces for expression and spaces for action.

What we have learned

Impact studies of projects conducted by members of the Train to Transform collective were carried out in 2022. The cross-functional analysis of these studies highlighted lessons learned by the organizations regarding the concrete application of the six priorities for social transformation. Here is what we learned for priority 3 :

• Increasing cultural [4] and symbolic [5] capital drives transformation in social relationships. Acquiring knowledge through training also enables people to develop resources that can be passed on or exchanged, and therefore help them to adapt better socially. This approach places people in a "give-and-take" situation [6] , and helps establish more equitable social relationships, since they are based on a greater reciprocity.

What remains to be verified

• In a perspective of social transformation, the articulation between individual emancipation and collective emancipation is to be explored.

An example of activities/actions : CENCA in Peru !

"Based on the pedagogy of the oppressed of Paulo Freire, Cenca offers very flexible training courses that allow people to start emancipation processes with a long-term perspective : spaces for discussion, technical training, schools for leaders.
This can consist of, for example, groups of women who participate in regular encounters hosted by women facilitators, and who then start technical training (for a trade). Some of them participate in ESDEL (the school for leaders). Their testimonies regarding building their power and capacity to act are in a book that they created themselves— "Voces de Mariategui"."

 
 
(4) Cultural capital is the set of cultural resources (goods, knowledge, know-how or skills, mastery of language and the arts) possessed by an individual which he or she can mobilise. This sociological concept was introduced by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron in "« La Reproduction : éléments pour une théorie du système d’enseignement " (1970).

(5) Symbolic capital refers to any form of capital (economic, social, religious, cultural, artistic, associative, etc.) that has particular value within society. It determines the social position of individuals in society. It is a concept coined by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in " Raisons pratiques " (1994).

(6) A concept that was created by Marcel Mauss, who defines gift-giving as a form of social contract, based on the triple obligation of "giving-receiving-giving back", and based on reciprocity, which creates a state of dependence that perpetuates the social bond, in " Essai sur le don " (1925).