Personal stories – narratives and analyses of what worked and did not work

James Powell just wrote by email to a number of colleagues including myself about OTB. Here’s what he said, together with my response. 

Larry Swanson and I agreed to develop a theme for OTB around personal case stories. 

I have found them very useful at communicating to citizens and communities in a meaningful way. 

One of my own personal stories is attached by way of example and is already on the OTB Forum. 

If we are to get OTB to take off we need to develop a conversation on it. I am asking you, therefore, to try to tell us one of your own case stories of what you found to be a good practice in your area of exploration relevant in some way to PASCAL. Your intervention should be short and sharp, but give people hope, in language they can understand. Don’t be too precious about what you choose; even the smallest intervention can make a big difference to someone. 

Please try to generate something. For instance I wondered whether Steve Garlick could do a short piece on how he started his party and how he got the great narrative to begin, so that they now had a senator. Or Larry on some of his amazing work in his region. Or Mike Osborne on how his big data centre is helping regenerate Glasgow. Or John Tibbitt on engaging local regional colleges. Or Budd and Rajesh on how just one of their own developments has changed the world of community action. 

I could go on, but you all have a short story – a case of engagement for learning action. Do give it a go. It doesn’t have to be long. Rather the shorter the better.  

We want stories that will turn into conversations that will make a difference. We’ll only know if they work if we try. 

I got this idea from a friend called Ivan Goldberg. He issues his own personal story every Sunday fortnight - on business matters. I attach one of his stories to give you a feel. Because he is always current, I read his blog when they come in. Because they are short, catchy and highly relevant, I do actually read them.

 So what do you think? You can either send your story to me or attach it on the relevant part of OTB, whatever appeals. Please also feel free to pass this request on to others in PASCAL or elsewhere that have a small story to tell. 

I hope this makes sense. Steve Rubin has gone to a lot of trouble to make a Forum that could work for PAC, so let’s use it.

Global at the price of local

I’m responding to James’s plea not quite as he asks, because the accident of my own life has prevented me from properly sustained connection with any local living community as distinct from many personal friends – something I’ve come to regret more with passing years. I’ve lived and worked in England and Australia in equal measure over the past 45 years and in both countries in each of those years; and for over a decade equally and first in rural France. My younger son and his Thai wife live with their little daughter in Bangkok and that is now a 4^th place of regular belonging if only in this sense. This means globalism at the price of more active localism.

I can bore you to death with my fascination about each of the four nations, peoples and societies and how this plays out in all kinds of ways: what I love, find quirky, avoid getting impatient with, puzzle and learn over. But I am a participant observer – more of an international comparative social scientist than a real contributing doer. This may explain my excessive effort to make Pascal a genuine community built on shared values, albeit virtual-global rather than people-place-bound.

If that’s my main disqualifier to contribute to James and Larry’s local stories conversation, the other is a suspicion in myself and in too many public figures about telling great self-promoting stories rather than making my best shot at explaining the truth; not that I see this as a risk here and under the guiding hands of Larry and James. Let me tell you instead about two new friends met when we first planted in Sud de Bourgogne soil in 2002-3.

Look local and look longer

Monsieur and Madame Chardonnay have lived in our little village and commune of Ozenay all their lives. Four of their five long-since adult children live here too. The family is a local community (and maybe economy) linchpin. Jean Chardonnay is what we used to call an organic intellectual – he’s lent me dense volumes on French medieval history and keeps pre-Revolution parish minutes of village council meetings. His wife Mado is a local community clearing house of information who keeps us informed of events that we risk missing with our nomadic lives. As a youngster at school 80 years earlier he was seen as the obvious husband-to-be of the woman from whom we bought our then austere 18^th century mill cottage. After that transaction we well understood when he said he had demurred – ‘much too tough for me’.

Jean introduced himself soon after we arrived: he enjoyed meeting folk from other countries and making them welcome. My light-hearted if gauche response was to say that he must be a very important guy with a name like that – Chardonnay village just nearby by celebrated its millennium about the year that Australia commemorated its 1788 ‘discovery’ and is a pretty widely known name. Oh no, I’m just a simple peasant – if I’d been de Chardonnay that would be a different matter! Some simple peasant, ten years my senior  but still an active local leader married to an ace animatrice.  

Living here – learning France rather than just French – we are good neighbours but poor active citizens, getting more than we can give. Open mill days enable us occasionally to share our bit of historical custodianship with local and some other visitors – always curious, informative, always time to talk, as at the weekly market in nearby Tournus. Another village elder who walks by straight-backed and friendly each morning remembers the rumble of our water-wheel as a village girl living a kilometre away. An equally straight-backed man used to carry in huge sacks of grain for milling. The wheel and the milling stopped in the mid-1950s.

From mild scepticism I’ve become a strict gardening-by-the-moon practitioner. My wife andI have learned more that I can write down about how things grow, work and can be used in woodlands, fields and pasture, as well as what a commune’s communitarian life really means. France is called the basket-case of Europe. Its people are found by social scientists to be among the unhappiest. Here we find other kinds of life, truth and learning. It is however not my community intervention story but the personal unsung story of fully embedded M and Mme Chardonnay.

So what for PASCAL?

There may be lessons here about place, identity, shared community knowledge and wisdom. They echo questions about the survival and revaluing of indigenous knowledge and ways in other countries. The xenophobic far Right Front National is riding high in France, as are parties of similar persuasion in many parts of Europe, though less in this sub-region. Can academic life and work connect with this non-metropolitan world? The cities are a world apart from this remote hinterland, although holiday residences draw city-dwellers in or back into temporary membership of rural communities. Inthis region young people commonly take apprenticeships in work that sustains a familiar lifestyle and environment rather than head for the cities to work for examples in patisseries, or land care. The local small town has a rich history and cultural life. Vigorous civil society bodies make social welfare provision that supports poor families from beyond the Mediterranean and the many local elderly.  Streets and shops are empty at night but lively and convivial by day. Their infrastructure is well maintained. Like the countryside they are a delight to the community as to visitors, communally owned and valued.

In this very local story it seems that local solidarity underpins something important about attitude to what is different – to outsiders, strangers, foreigners. ‘People unlike us’ can be made welcome. The Pascal Annual Conference in Sicily this October will take place on the exposed edge of fortress Europe. That feels different. How do local decency, openness and goodwill connect with national and European policy?

Here the local face to face micro-democracy of the Commune exercises real power. It can draw funds from five higher levels of government to supplement its own, mediating the influences of Brussels and Paris. Civil society community and local government seem all but melded, community stature and formal leadership earned by character and conduct.

I borrow again from Ivan’s quoted piece, James, to justify this rural ramble: Shifting times call for a paradigm shift in thought and action. This he called “outside-in” thinking; taking time out to smell the roses. To which add: sometimes look around and look back in order to look forward.

Thanks James for taking up my village story from both a personal learning and a leadership perspectice.

Meanwhile, writing ‘off-line’ after reading my contribution about this elderly French village community leadership couple, Hans Schuetze, who opened the Theme Forum on the Crisis of Western Democracy, observes that some such cases may illuminate other main OTB themes. 

Certainly this is the case with the village commune narrative if seen in terms of the functioning of democracy at the most local level in a country that I am told has as many communes, often tiny, as the rest of Europe together.

Hans asks that postings to the Personal Stories Forum draw out issues that may provoke a response, something I did indirectly rather than provocatively in this instance.

Here in point form are eleven possible provocations from my rural ramble in Okenay:

1. Crisis is Western democracies will only be fully engaged when democracy is practised at local face-to-face levels and more influence flows upwards;
2. Social media campaigns can prevent or force specific (single issue) political actions but usually remain locked into combative one-off issues that do not alter political style;
3. Ethical-based public policy needs anchoring in the values and ethical conduct of place-based communities;
4. The interweaving of sectional interests that lobby and influence policy decisions that can control and corrupt national governance are more benign the more local and transparent this is. Civil society and public sector blending create shared locality-based interest anchored in longer term perspectives and understanding;
5. Xenophobic ethnocentrism feeds a fortress Europe mentality that threatens to break apart the European Union – an important theme for the Pascal Conference in Sicily this October;
6. In this village ethnocentrism contradicts an innate welcoming attitude to strangers and newcomers that is probably more universal than we notice or remember (think of ‘naïve’ Aboriginal and Bedouin communities for example).The traditional attitude is now at grave risk in many places;
7. Wonderful as magic bullets, health regimes and research-based new technological fixes may be, we stand to lose a much economically and practically as well as socially and culturally when we lose old knowledge;
8. Not all young people leave local rural communities for the cities and for employment. Lower levels of income and wealth may be more than offset in appeal by the particularity of local life-style, culture (broadly understood) and quality of life which are culturally sustaining and ecologically sustainable;
9. Old people live more fulfilled, meaningful, socially useful lives when they belong in a local community, and more enriching if children and grandchildren are nearby. Inter-generational mobility globally comes at a high (if deferred) social cost;
10. The experienced world of the local village differs from the studied world of academe;
11. To engage with and have meaning for this experienced real world Pascal must tiptoe or choose between competing paradigms. It feels risky to confront the globally dominant paradigm of those who wield power.

Clarifying issues for PASCAL and PIMA 

The first note below, from James Powell (UK), was picked up by Elaine Webster (NZ) in the response below. It led to the further exchanges that also follow below.

This all arose from a consultation within PIMA (the new Pascal International Members Association) about personal interests, and priorities that relate to Association activity in the next 1-2 years. Elaine had indicated special interest in professional education.  

 It raises some interesting questions: about

 (a) kinds of ‘communities’, and the nature of  theirs and others’ ‘learning’;

(b) our priorities for the learning of individuals compared with that of civil society and  other groups and socio-political structures; as well as

(c) how best to support the different kinds of capabilities and forms of learning that members look for.

Readers are invited to add their own comments on these and indeed any other points raised by this posting.

… the key thing PIMA should focus on is helping citizens and communities take control of their own lives and learn how to flourish for themselves. So in your circulated paper I particularly concur with item three, namely 

A connected thread is valuing, building and empowering active local civic community groups to bring about ‘on the ground’ the changes implied [above]. Some link this with valuing and using local grounded and indigenous knowledge and wisdom. 

To me, PIMA and PASCAL should focus on its members learning how to promote and support the sort of lifelong learning that enable this to happen. Its professionals need to learn a better way of helping and driving those in power to truly support them rather than doing things for them that is so often, now, misguided and inappropriate. 

It feels as though this is a key issue for PIMA. I hope this is right. 

Kindest Regards.  James [Powell] UK

Thank you very much James.  

Very clear to me and I think that should/will emerge strongly - I hope so but it must be from the members not just we two. 

I wonder if that can be linked to Elaine Webster's (NZ) interest in 'professional education which is anyway such a big issue. Maybe we could hone in on this civic responsibility and capability aspect of the continuing education of professionals in PIMA. Let’s see if  Elaine wishes to comment.  

Chris [Duke]

Hi Chris and others 

I’m not sure I am on the same page with this!

My agenda is to continue to offer lifelong learning opportunities in the wider community and to support others in my institution to do so, both professional learning and public interest learning. I also encourage my institution to continue to support, value and recognise it in terms of staff contribution and as something to cultivate in students.

I am not interested in telling communities what or how they should be doing anything. In my experience they know what they are doing; we just offer what we know and they take it or leave it. Perhaps this reflects the kind of community we have here as much as it describes the focus and limits of my job. Some fantastic community education is done in Dunedin and across NZ but no longer by universities.  This is not likely to change anytime soon.                                                                              

Community education in literacy, citizenship, life skills, language revitalisation, community and social connection etc. are supported and represented by ACE Aotearoa, an excellent organisation. Although I remain an ACE member, our work does not intersect much at all. 

I am interested in the work I have on my plate now, and figuring out how to build LLL into the future both here and with our neighbours in Asia and the Pacific. All the best.  Elaine [Webster NZ]

Dear Elaine, 

Like you I don’t believe we should be ‘telling communities what or how they should be doing anything’. I agree they mostly they know what they want, but often are thwarted in obtaining these ends to their wants and needs. However, as well as other lifelong learning aspirations there are many of us in Higher Education that want to help such communities and their citizens achieve the ends they desire in a meaningful way, to extend their lives and flourish as a result. This does not cut across other aspects of LLL such as you mention – literacy, citizenship, life skills, language revitalisation, community and social connection - but would help those who still feel disenfranchised from getting the best from their lives.

I am not about telling anyone what to do, but university staff often have great cases to share which give people hope relating to their needs, wants and desires. So I don’t want you to misunderstand my position. I work with a social enterprise in Salford, called Peoples Voice Media, which enables citizens to give voice to their own needs where they had felt unable to represent themselves before.

So good luck with what you do, but I want PASCA to offer the sort of hope I mention in my managed part of OTB. Perhaps you could extend the cases there with some of your successes from New Zealand and ACE.

I hope this helps. I attach an excerpt from OTB to show what I mean in terms of cases. The best LLL starts with listening to citizens and the communities to learn how best to share knowledge whatever knowledge of skills virtuously. 

Kindest Regards  James  

Dear James

Thanks for your reply, and it’s all good work isn’t it! We are just doing slightly different things. Plus the approaches probably differ as much as the contexts, as much as the language used to describe it.  I didn’t mean to cause offence.

Best wishes, Elaine

Dear Elaine, 

No offence taken. I just wanted to say why I feel the need for PASCAL to act in the way I do. We all have a passion. I can understand yours, but sometimes in HE we become too ethereal and policy-driven alone. That is my real point. 

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. 

Kindest Regards  James