[Interpretationandmethods] Request

[Warren Yoder]

The Public Policy Center of Mississippi has received a grant to  
organize a child care quality improvement campaign in our  
predominately low-income, African American community. Are there 2 or  
3 people willing to volunteer an hour to help us think through the  
process of incorporating into this campaign the lived experience of  
mothers who received limited educations, now work in dead end jobs,  
and have children starting through the educational process?

Gunilla Dahlberg and Peter Moss have shown that developmental  
psychologists constructed the child development discourse that  
underlies this view of child care quality. The ideas of these experts  
have become the dominant discourse in the field and are now being  
institutionalized around the world, closely following the process  
first described by Maarten Hajer.

Peter deLeon has pointed out that government programs constructed  
without citizen participation tend to have limited effectiveness. In  
our experience as practitioners this is especially true for programs  
developed by experts without regard for the lived experience of the  
disadvantaged communities. The way the problem is named and framed,  
the identities and norms specified for the participants, the  
narratives and metaphors used all make sense to those with power and  
expertise, but they are foreign to the "target population." We fear  
our campaign will fall into this trap.

We plan to expand on participatory poverty research techniques  
developed for the World Bank. But we are trying a "self-focusing  
group" technique we piloted in another setting. The convener welcomes  
the participants, explains the general topic, and asks an open-ended  
topic question carefully worded to avoid invoking the dominant  
discourse. The group then chooses its own leaders, negotiates a joint  
response with minimal follow-up questions from the convener, and  
composes its own summary. We are listening for the names, frames,  
identities, norms, narratives, and metaphors embedded in what Dvora  
Yanow calls the local knowledge.

As you can tell, we’ve gotten many of our ideas from the interpretive  
policy analysts who hang out on this list. I can answer questions on  
this list, but our funder has asked I not release too much  
information in public just yet. Any wise people with a little spare  
time to review our plan and then our findings?

Warren Yoder
Public Policy Center
of Mississippi



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