Verene Nicolas shares her experience of a Training for Transformation workshop in South Africa, relating it back to her work with the CHE.

Verene writes: Last April I travelled back to South Africa to visit my ‘mentors’, Anne Hope and Sally Timmel, founders of the Training for Transformation (TfT) programme that has inspired so much of my work in the last 10 years.

TfT originated in Kenya in 1973. It rapidly spread across Africa, Asia and Latin America. As a radical approach to adult learning and community organising it grew out of the pregnant movement for hope and justice of the sixties, inspired by the ideas of Paulo Freire and liberation theologians.

What previously led me to South Africa was an international ‘advanced’ training for facilitators that Sally and Anne organised in 2002. They’d realised that TfT had somehow lost its teeth and that a new generation of facilitators needed to be prepared.

I trained alongside 35 women from all over the world. It provided deep insights and inspiration for my practice in human ecology and my grounding in this world.

Sally and Anne teach TfT at Kleinmond, 100kms from Cape Town. In going back there this year I was keen to learn from their well of unshakable commitment to justice and spiritual transformation. Despite having dedicated their whole lives to combating poverty, injustice and women’s oppression, they’ve never sold out and remain as active as before. As they respectively approach 70 and 80, this is a precious time to soak in their life-giving witness and experience.

As a contribution I offered to help them set up a TfT website. I have frequently been contacted by people who have picked up on my personal website and wanted to know where they could access training courses and materials. No coherent body of web-based information is currently available despite the wealth of related projects and programmes worldwide. Sally also asked me to teach about ecology and climate change on the TfT programme that ran while I was there.

I was heart-warmed by the depth of discussions I had with the participants about painful topics like global warming and disrupted social and cultural patterns. Remarkably, although my input took place against the backdrop of violence in Kenya and serious anxiety from Zimbabwe (we had participants from both countries), most women were able to hold the big picture and express their concerns for the Earth without losing their warmth and exuberance.

As for the website, my technical knowledge doesn’t go beyond the basics of the Frontpage program, and my own site is hopelessly out of date. But it was the right project to take on. It was meaningful and inspiring to conceptualise the structure and content of the proposed site. Together we built a framework expressing the core elements of a ‘Transformative Training programme’ for effective leadership in social and ecological change. To me, that’s what our MSc in human ecology is also about and working on this website shed a lot of light on the work we are doing at Strathclyde.

The core elements we came up with are:
1. Reading our Reality: Social, economic and ecological analysis
2. Shaping our Future: Grounded alternatives to the mainstream paradigm
3. Practicing Transformation: transformative learning and community organising in action

TfT practitioners observe that most leadership courses are very good at ‘doing’ the analysis and ‘conceptualising’ the alternatives, but much weaker on the ‘practice’. We need to ask ourselves: does the course pedagogy reflect our vision? Are students practicing as they learn through immersion in transformative learning skills such as deep listening, discernment, facilitation and conflict resolution? How do we balance psychotherapeutic dynamics that inevitably arise while learning within the constraints of academic institutions?

I came back from South Africa refreshed and energised as to how we in CHE might tackle these challenges. When we deliver transformative education, we palpably participate in the healing of this broken world. Our MSc is a vital part of this picture. So is TfT. Moving with and beyond both, I want to continue being part of it.