This story has also been published on the EADI Blog

Beginnings

I grew up in an industrial town in the North of the United Kingdom, and as a child my experience of agriculture was visiting the countryside, rather than working on farms. Along the way, I became very interested in farming and food production, and my first job was working on a dairy farm. I went on to study agricultural science at University. After that, I continued working for several years in different areas of agriculture and horticulture, enjoying the practical side of things, even when spending much of my time in wet, windy and cold conditions.

Gradually, I began to feel a need to combine my interest in practice with new ideas; and so I went back to school, literally, to train as a teacher. I had probably been heading in that direction without even realising, because both my parents were teachers, and as the expression goes, “the apple rarely falls far from the tree”. Also, I had discovered that facilitating learning was a really exciting thing to be involved in. Alongside my other work, I had been teaching piano to young people and adults. I discovered quite quickly that an effective way to encourage learning was to connect with the personal interest and experience of the student, and then to offer them the opportunity to expand their knowledge and skill, and to deepen their ability to perform.

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A different context

This background might sound a bit unusual for someone who has moved into the field of global development, but these early insights served me well, because after completing my teacher-training course, I saw an advertisement recruiting secondary school teachers for Botswana, in Southern Africa. I applied, and even though I was newly trained as a teacher, the combination of my university qualification with my practical experience seemed to meet a need. Very soon I was offered a position as an agriculture teacher at a rural secondary school, where I stayed for four years.

When I began working as a teacher in Botswana, I had not really engaged with notions of “development”, as a concept or set of practices. I was immersed in the world of education, learning and teaching. On arrival in a rural school, there was so much I had  to learn myself about being in a very different environment to that with which I was familiar. Botswana had a National Development Plan, which since its independence from the UK in 1966 had oriented around agriculture – especially cattle production. With the discovery of large deposit of diamonds which could be mined, Botswana made a very rapid leap economically, which allowed the government to invest in an array of ways which benefited society more broadly – schools, healthcare, transport. 

Education was a particular area of national focus. The population was fairly small relative to other African nations, around 1 million people, and there was a shortage of trained secondary school teachers – hence the overseas recruitment - which included many teachers coming from other African nations. The Ministry of Education was really interested in supporting learning of students, professional development of teachers, and the emergence of a high-quality education system. I found myself pondering, however, on many questions around the relevance and suitability of the UK-designed school curriculum, and how it could be made more relevant to the lives and experience of students. I also found, without realising it, that I was involving myself in what might in other circles be called a “development project”. We found that we could bring benefits to the school and learners by relocating the agriculture plots within the school grounds, locate and pipe up water from the river, put in secure fencing, and improve the fertility of the very sandy soil. With very limited resources and the combined effort and labour of myself and others in the school community, we accomplished the task without following the agendas of external funders or being forced to adopt certain ways of doing things. 

These experiences influenced my subsequent thinking about development in relation to the importance of bottom-up approaches, stakeholder engagement, self-reliance, and mutual learning almost as a form of learning by doing. This means addressing a felt need, working collectively for a common purpose, and also acknowledging the importance of engaging with the knowledge and experiences of those within a specific context.

Learning about learning

In Botswana, I also learned about the importance of starting out from the existing knowledge and life experience of the learners. I realised very quickly the school students had an incredibly deep knowledge of their own contexts, and the forms of agriculture that they had grown up with, that they and their families practiced, and which very often generated the livelihoods which had supported them in attending school. 

My knowledge of agriculture was grounded in a UK experience, so rather than trying to transfer my often-irrelevant knowledge to learners in the context of Botswana, I discovered that my contribution was more that of a facilitator. I needed to find out with the learners what they already knew, and then complement that with additional knowledge and practical skills, which they needed to perform successfully in school and in their exams. 

Agriculture was one of the few school subjects where students could see a direct relationship between what happened in the classroom and in practice; they enjoyed the fact that their knowledge was useful. They liked working together and had fun. They loved being outside where they could talk and interact freely, and could watch what each was doing in their small personal plots. They helped each other by sharing their ideas and methods. They also generally performed very well when it came to exams, and so agriculture was an extremely popular subject at school, with a high pass rate, and a lot of very motivated learners. 

We also engaged with different forms of knowledge and wisdom about traditions, folklore and local practices as a basis for discussion about ideas around science, local knowledge, spiritual beliefs and understandings and practices around community. As well as offering different ways to encourage dialogue and discussion amongst groups of learners, this interaction with indigenous and local knowledge created opportunities for reflection on ideas and practices that might often be taken for granted, but could now be questioned. These experiences, and my own “unlearning” about ideas and practices I had previously taken for granted, have influenced my later engagement in the arena of development, especially my involvement in work on participatory approaches and methods, often in the wider field of education and learning.

Implications for decolonising knowledge for development 

These formative experiences as a teacher in Botswana, engaging with the knowledge and experience of those I worked with, not only influenced my own approaches within this broad field of development. They also encouraged me more recently to engage with debates on development and coloniality, especially around intellectual ‘decolonisation’ or decolonising knowledge. They have influenced my work now, at the Institute of Development Studies, and also through this very exciting initiative with EADI, which this blog and its related podcast form a part of.

I acknowledge that I am an older, white, male, British person with all the attendant privileges that this brings, and so it is important that I reflect continuously on my identity in this respect. What is it that I can legitimately offer? Fundamentally I am interested in understanding better what I can do to support positive change and learning which is itself transformative. 

Along the way, I’ve learned that decolonising knowledge is political, and involves recognising and addressing power imbalances. So, understanding, amplifying and nourishing different forms of knowledge through different forms of development process seems to be a key dimension of decolonisation. And ultimately, it becomes personal. I hope I can remain true to the learnings, and unlearnings, I took myself from those years in Botswana, and in doing so do justice to the knowledge, experience and wisdom of those with whom I interacted with there and since then, as my journey has continued. 

Peter Taylor is Director of the Institute of Development Studies, UK