Tips and Tricks for Conducting Participatory Workshops

By Chelsea Supawit

After receiving the 2019 Blum Grant, I had the chance to travel to Eastern Uganda to conduct participatory soil health workshops for smallholder farmers. For years, I dreamt of a special opportunity like this. International Agriculture Development undergrads like myself long for hands-on project experience. Shortly after receiving the grant, my limited experience in participatory workshops finally hit me, and that was surely terrifying. It can be intimidating stepping into so much unfamiliar territory, let alone facilitating the whole thing. If you are a newcomer to participatory workshops like me, here are some tips and tricks to get you started. 

Know your audience

Before diving into the workshop content, take a moment to reflect. Think about the participants. Who are they? What are their education levels? What information do they want to learn about? What do they know already? If you are unsure about how to answer these questions, it would be a good idea to conduct a needs assessment with the local community where the workshops will be held. Information like this is critical for creating engaging and relevant workshops that meet the needs of the participants.  Participatory workshops should be participatory from the start, involving participants during the development of  the content and the day of. So even if that means setting aside more time for planning, do it.

Design the workshop thoughtfully

This is critical. Think about the material that you want to share, and how this can be done in a participatory manner. For example, for our soil health workshops we aimed to integrate local and technical knowledge systems. Thus, instead of lecturing participants, we instead created central messages that were realized through hands-on activities and thoughtful discussion questions. This gave us a lot of flexibility and let the workshop flow organically, allowing participants to elaborate on topics they found interesting. However, we had to be mindful of time, make sure the discussions didn’t go too off track and muddled the central messages. Overall, having goals for what information you want to relay to your participants will help keep you on track.

Create engaging material

This connects a lot to the above point, but engagement is especially important in workshops, so it deserves its own special section. In my experience, having a workshop centered around participatory engagement will already be more interesting than traditionally structured workshops. Make sure that there are opportunities for all participants to contribute at least once. Hearing a variety of different voices throughout will naturally keep the group more focused. We continued switching back and forth from hands-on activities to discussions, often including physical movement as well. Designing activities that create sensory experiences will also increase engagement and focus. To illustrate the above points, I will use a portion of day one of the soil health workshop as another example:

• We started day one of our workshops with introductions, where each participant shared their name and how their soil was doing. This created more comfortability and allowed us to personalize our discussions around the problems they were facing. 

• Then, we had the farmers take the group to places where the soil was “sick”, fertile and untouched (e.g. under a canopy), and cultivated but fertile. They would explain their justifications for taking us to each location, and then we would take a take a soil sample from each area.

• We laid out the three soil types and had the farmers dig into the soil as as sensory experience to determine the differences in soil properties and why certain soils were “healthier” than others.

There were a lot of other activities we did, but these illustrate the subtle ways you can design your workshop to make it more engaging and participatory. 

Establish a Participatory Space

Everything from the way you set up a space, to the way you respond to participants can set the tone for a participatory learning environment. Robert Chambers book, “Participatory Workshops: A Sourcebook of 21 Sets of Ideas and Activities” made me aware of small, but effective strategies that can make a space more inclusive. For example, arranging the seats in a circular orientation allowed for a more comfortable, discussion-based setting where participants were more comfortable sharing. These strategies helped set the tone, but it was not until actually conducting the workshops and saw positive examples --  from the other more experienced facilitators -- that I better understood how this all worked. Learning to ask open-ended questions rather than those with “right” or “wrong” answers allowed our discussions to flow more organically. As facilitators, our role was to guide the discussion rather than lead it. So welcoming in all responses, even if they may not be what we expected, became the norm. Once participants finished contributing, that is when we had an opening to impart some of the knowledge in the curriculum. Layering their own ideas with important concepts from our lesson plan made it easier for them to incorporate new material. Designing an inclusive space facilitates the empowerment of participants and what they have to offer.

Build a solid team

I can’t stress enough how important this was in my experience, especially as a newbie. With a solid team, you don’t need to know and do everything. I did not have a local understanding of the Ugandan farming systems, so I did not feel comfortable offering sound advice in that realm. This was also my first time facilitating a participatory workshop, so I wanted to observe best practices before diving in head first. These gaps in my abilities were filled by my amazing project team (Kate, Abe and Helen) who had extensive experience in these areas. Don’t get me wrong, at times, I definitely felt useless given my current experience level. But I also reminded myself that this was a learning process for me to get better at these things, and I certainly did!

Every workshop team should have a Kate, a professor and mentor with years of experience in the project area of study and teaching; an Abe, a well-established professional who understands the realities faced by the community through firsthand experience (particularly, smallholder farming and participatory projects in Uganda in this case); a Helen, a woman born and raised in-country working in a well respected grassroots organization; and perhaps even a Chelsea (me!), a passionate newcomer eager to learn and transform ideas into reality through intensive planning and preparation. Overall, our individual experiences provided unique perspectives and strengths that made our project team highly effective.

Projects aren’t perfect, they continuously shift and evolve. But with a reliable supportive team, it lightens the impact and helps you get through the challenges. Being in a team helps you discover how you show up, especially when things get difficult. However sometimes you don’t get to choose your team either, but that’s also okay. The more exposure you get to different cultures, personalities, and ways of doing things, the better you will be able to adapt.

Pauses are necessary!

A very difficult, yet critical lesson I had to learn was to give participants space to respond to questions. To be honest, long pauses made me uncomfortable. It brought me back to cringey and awkward social interactions prevalent in my angsty pre-teen years. When I tried to fill those long pauses, it would take that platform away from participants. Space gives participants time to brainstorm what they want to say. There is a beauty that comes with allowing participants to come to realizations on their own and collaborating with their peers in the process. 

Practice, Feedback, Repeat

You can spend hours, days, even years preparing. But eventually, you have to step up and go for it. It can feel awkward and uncomfortable at first, but with time comes confidence. Before conducting the official soil health workshops, we had the opportunity to do beta-test workshops with a small group of local farmers. We were able to adjust and improve our workshop content through direct community feedback and experiencing the flow of the workshop firsthand. The more practice and feedback opportunities you get, the more things will improve.

Indeed, I am a newcomer to both participatory workshops and the development field. Moments of frustration catalyzed by my lack of expertise still show up frequently. As I continue to gain more experience, I will be grateful for the growth and wisdom that comes with it. I am sure that with time, though, I will appreciate my openness and willingness to learn and grow in these moments of perceived weakness -- perhaps it is a gift after all, to be a newcomer. Maybe this advice isn’t for development professionals with years of experience. But I hope this can be a guide for people in similar shoes, and a reminder to not being so hard on ourselves along the way.

Connect more with Chelsea @Soil.Sista on Instagram!