Unfinished draft
CLAUDIO SCHUFTAN
schuftan@gmail.com
Giving graduate students of nutrition a chance to practice activism skills vis a vis the problems which we are training them to resolve is a duty that ideally should be woven into all courses of their degree program. This not being the case, a second best (and hopefully transitional) approach is to set up a course that will better confront these students with their future ethical and political responsibilities, i.e. those they will have to face when they start working.
When facing this challenge, one has to keep in mind the possible strong and valid opposition of those who will say we might as well use our energies in such an endeavor to work directly with people, communities and budding civil society organizations –leaving the “engineers” aside since they are not the ones who are going to actually make the needed changes anyway. But then –if we are lucky– retooled engineer-activists may become additional advocates/multipliers in the huge task ahead of us of more proactively removing the basic causes of malnutrition worldwide.
The course:
A summer school course of 12 weeks in a graduate school will fit the needs well.
The course will be based on a series of student debates (in the style of those college debates that have made many a debate team member a local hero) and role plays. [A debate/role play format is the closest we can think of to mimic the real life challenges nutritionists-as-activists will face in their careers].
The students will be given access to a specially stocked room in the library and to the internet to research and prepare their debate strategies and contents.
A set of rules will be explicited and a team of 3 faculty judges will preside each debate. There will be one 6 hrs. debate per week for a total of 10 debates.
Guest lecturers may be invited for no more than 1 two-hour seminar a day. The rest of the time the students will be preparing their case and hanging the key pieces of it up in the form of a poster of 3-4 square meters.
There will be two teams of 6 students each with one faculty tutor each to support them. Each team will elect a leader.
Each debate will consist of an opening statement or argument which will refer to the poster which will be unveiled at that time. This presentation will be academic in style and will bring up the key debate points.
A full range of audiovisual media will be made available for the teams to use.
The opening statement will be followed by a mandatory role play in which one set of actors will represent the community and the other set the activists who are trying to learn from and discuss with the community representatives the best relevant action measures to take for the problems brought up; simple language and convincing examples will have to be used.
The first role play will be followed by the second team presenting their opening argument, their poster and role play.
After a break, the actual debate will start; a faculty member will act as a rapporteur and the chairperson of the panel of judges will direct the debate. The teams will challenge each other on issues. Faculty will also challenge them.
The format of the debate will be such that it will attempt to convince and persuade others about a certain reality and about the corresponding course of action needed. The contrasting potentials of top-down, bottom-up and bottom-centered approaches to solve the problems unveiled need to be brought up and critiqued. In other words, the debaters have to point to a way out that they think is better than what we have had so far. Creativity will be encouraged in the presentation of their arguments.
The two posters will stay up for 4-5 days each week for closer scrutiny.
The whole proceedings will be videotaped (could be even by two students themselves). The teams will have access to the tapes, to look at them so as to plan better strategies for their next debate. Later, a professionally edited version of the debates will be used for an internet version of the course (in the vein of the epidemiology super-course started by the Univ. of Pittsburgh?). [Graduate students from the Communications Department of the University can do this work for credit].
The debate will be followed by a wrap-up session in which each team leader and one member of the faculty (rapporteur) will summarize the major points that came out that are relevant to the students’ future engineer-activist’s role.
A winner will be declared each time by the judges pointing out strengths and weaknesses of each team (a prize given?); good leadership points will be pointed out as well.
Guest witnesses will be welcome and an open audience will be encouraged in the debates by advertising each of them on campus in advance. The audience could participate in voting for the winner team.
The students will be allowed to change groups provided there is another student in the other group who is willing to swap. The faculty may also have some say on this, early on, to better balance the teams.
The firs week will be an introductory week with instructions on the mechanics of it all plus a couple of lectures on “effective and critical reading” skills that will allow the students to more effectively scan printed and electronic materials, on “how to build a case”, on “principles of role playing”, perhaps on the conceptual framework of causes of malnutrition and the AAA approach of UNICEF, etc.
The faculty will set up the reading materials in the special room in the library by doing a systematic search and networking with colleagues worldwide to collect relevant documents. Graduate students on work-study assignments can be used for this (as well as for the videotaping). At least 2 computers with internet access are needed for each team.
The 10 weeks will each have one debate plus 2-3 scheduled guest lecturers’ seminars –making sure that these do not preempt topics of future debates.
A choice of topics for the debates is the following: [In no particular order yet]
– Paulo Freire and the ‘conscientization’ movement: relevance for nutrition work.
– Nutrition and equity.
– Nutrition and economic development.
– Nutrition and globalization.
– Nutrition and human rights.
– The new human rights approach to food and nutrition.
– Nutrition and agriculture: focus on land reform.
– Nutrition and demographic trends in developing countries.
– Foreign aid and debt.
– Development ethics and ideologies/paradigms: the last 40 years and why it has all worked poorly for nutrition.
– Nutrition: networking and coalition building.
– Genuine people’s participation in nutrition and development.
– Nutrition and empowerment.
– What is really empowering?
– Women’s role in nutrition and development: what is really empowering for them?
– Nutrition and small scale income generation programs.
– Nutrition and rural credit for women.
– Making sense of the myriad of “World Reports” (WDR, State of the World’s Children The Progress of Nations, State of the World-Worldwatch Institute, ACC/SCN Report on the state
of the world’s nutrition, etc.).
– World Declarations and malnutrition (Rome x 3, Rio, Copenhagen, Beijing, Cairo).
– Nutrition and sustainable development.
– Nutrition in emergencies.
– Nutrition in the times of AIDS.
– Nutrition: NGOs and civil society; the need for NGOs to ‘revision and remission’ their mandates to regain an activist’s role as true allies of the poor.
– Nutrition and SRA, LRA, PRA, PLA and other such letter soup acronyms.
– 20th century Science, Ethics and Politics and their effects on nutrition.
– Corruption, bureaucracy, accountability and transparency in nutrition programs.
– UNICEF’s conceptual framework and AAA approach.
– Hunger and famine: man-made?
– The limits of growth monitoring: a crutch or a valuable tool?
– Feeding the poor.
– Malnutrition and income.
– PEM and micronutrients work as careers.
– Nutrition and intellectual performance.
– The political economy of PEM.
– Nutrition in the 21st century: New needed commitments.
– A critique of positive deviance approaches in nutrition.
– The role of donors in world nutrition: blessing or curse?
– The role of government in the battle against malnutrition.
– Engineers and activists in nutrition and development.
[This list of topics will be edited and completed after a wider discussion of this idea with more colleagues].
The students will be given this list during the first week and will vote the 10 topics they want to cover in the whole course. They can also combine two or more topics in one debate or propose new topics for faculty consideration. Topics not chosen may become the basis to decide which guest lecturers to invite.
The last week of the course will focus on lessons learned by the emerging engineer activists. Each team will do their own presentation on this followed by the faculty. Each team and the faculty will hang their conclusions in a last 1-2 square meter poster. Suggestions for improvements on the course will be a part of this exercise. Each of the 12 students will then be given an opportunity to tell the class what they want to do with all this in their upcoming career and will receive peer and faculty feedback on it. In their presentations, they should also bring out their own personal and professional enthusiasms and apprehensions for the coming decade.
*: The format here proposed follows the Northamerican environment of a graduate course. Adaptations can be made to suit other academic environments.
Claudio Schuftan
Saigon, Vietnam.