We are offering a new type of course
preparing development and humanitarian aid workers and
service providers for working more effectively in foreign
cultures while deepening their human and professional
potential.
Many years of being engaged with other
cultures in the fields of development assistance and
personal development have led us and a number of colleagues
to see the need for a new type of course that focuses
on building relationships across boundaries and cultures
and on strengthening local processes in an egalitarian
way.
Despite the current move of development
agencies away from providing financial and technical
assistance to projects and programs at local levels
to providing macro level financial support to developing
countries’ government programs and budgets, there are
still hundreds of thousands of development workers working
in different functions at all levels from the village
to national and international government offices (according
to www.devex.com there are 500,000 development workers
in their network).
Strangely, very little is written about
what these development workers do, how they work and
how they influence development processes and outcomes;
even less about how they experience living and working
in a foreign culture. These are, however, central concerns
both from a human resource and an investment in development
perspective.
In development and humanitarian assistance
work, the main focus has often been on how to transfer
the development worker’s strategic and technical skills
to local people in a foreign (sub-) culture with insufficient
attention to personal, cultural, and social skills.
From our observations the lack of ability to integrate
self-awareness with sociocultural development has often
resulted in unsatisfactory improvements and personal
frustrations expressed as lack of mutual respect and
consensus, distancing, burn-out, and sometimes destructive
personal behaviours (such as excessive alcohol, risky
sexual behaviour, abusiveness).
Social development and humanitarian
assistance work requires self-knowledge and awareness
as well as knowledge of cultural and social development
and technical skills in a given area.
The course we are offering is a response
to these observations and reflections – in other words
to the real life experience and challenge of living
and working in developing countries and development
organizations.
The course will provide the participants
opportunities to:
• integrate knowledge and skills in personal, social
and cultural development based on equality and participatory
approaches;
• increase their awareness of how individual backgrounds
and beliefs affect interactions in culturally diverse
settings;
• apply concepts of systemic dynamics;
• apply the knowledge in a culturally diverse classroom
and field study setting;
• continuously build on the knowledge of personal
and cultural dynamics acquired through the course
programme and thereby to practise the skills they
will need in their practice setting;
• deepen a process of personal and professional development;
• explore the characteristics of organizational structures:
governmental/NGO/community.
The first course will take place at the University
of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada August 6-17
2012(part I) and March 11-22 2013 (part II). Please
find a full course description with registration form
attached.
We hope that you see the relevance of the course for
yourself or somebody else in your organization. Please
pass it on and do not hesitate to contact us for further
information. We welcome your comments and suggestions.
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