Training Content

Amanda Tattersall has developed curriculum on community methods – ranging from orientation workshops to extensive module-based training programs – designed to equip academics, researchers and public policy makers in community methods principles and practices.

This pedagogy includes content on:

• Stakeholder engagement and mapping in research and policy making: Not all community partnerships are equal. Successful engagement and impact are affected by power and stakeholders’ capacity to act. Community methods create research and policy partnerships by understanding power dynamics; translating an analysis of power into research and policy practice through the tool of ‘power analysis’, which can be used to map allies, potential supporters and opponents – mapping the landscape in order to develop a strategy for developing and enacting change.

• Relationship building and outreach: Framed by the principle that ‘relationship precedes action’ community methods attend to how we build relationships with each other. These relationships might be between researchers and communities, but equally these skills speak to how relationships are built within communities, between researchers within and across disciplines, as well as between researchers, grant makers and policy makers. Community methods differentiate between transactional “business” relationships that have an intended outcome, and meetings that are co-creative, that seek to explore each other’s interests and inquire whether a mutually-interested relationship can be built. Usefully, community methods translate these relational strategies into practical tools such as relational meetings and table talks.

• Public narrative and relationship building: We are more able to cultivate relationships with others when we are more conscious of our own interests and the experiences we have had that have generated them. Our ability to relate to others in public life is connected to our ability to tell some of the stories that have formed us. These stories become clearer through guided reflection, structured practice, reflective tools like personal autho-biography and from a better understanding the art of story-telling.

• Working across difference: We are all different, and policy and research breakthroughs are often a product of collaboration between unusual suspects. Yet working with our differences – especially across bigger differences based on identity, discipline, experience or geography – can be challenging and can leave us rushing to try and find connection rather than sitting with and learning from what is different. Community methods like the relational method teach about the paradox of sameness and difference; that not only offer a different way to unpack the power of holding sameness and difference in knowledge creation but identify practical strategies for how this can be done better.

• Convening and meeting: We spend far too much time in meetings that should never have been called. Then even when we are in meetings that have the potential to be creative, they are often convened in ways that kill creativity, relationality and space for disagreement. Community methods offer principles, practices and useful strategies for rethinking how we meet with others – applicable not only for meetings between communities and researchers but useful for when any group of people gather.

• Engagement and Impact: Typically in research and policy making settings there are KPIs and measurements. These might encourage researchers to “engage” with communities, or call for the development of policy with “impact.” From a community methods perspective, separating engagement and impact is a false choice. The relational method argues that research and policy “success” is a product of both impact and engagement. Not only do engaged communities help generate policy impact, but the process of engaging communities creates outcomes in the form of democratic capacity, trust and ownership that are equally vital. Even so, the goals of impact and engagement are not simple, indeed they are often traded off between each other (engagement moderated for outcome, or outcome shaped by engagement). Community methods can help researchers and policy makers assess how to handle these trade offs.

• Evaluation and participant leadership development: There is no such thing as a silver bullet policy research or policy making process. Even amongst the many different community methods, all approaches have distinct strengths and weaknesses. Tattersall has explored the strengths and limits of people power strategies (with co-author Kurt Iveson) in the book People Power in Cities, and applies it to different community methods in this training. When it comes to research and policy making, understanding the strengths and limits of different approaches and their suitability to particular contexts and research goals is essential. Moreover, tools for iterative evaluation by participants offers an accessible and powerful way to keep any research process accountable to its goals, while supporting a culture of learning and improvement.

• Community-led project and grant development: Research is increasingly depending on philanthropic, industry, government and community support. Relationship building is essential for Initiating and creating successful research partnerships. “Selling” already developed research proposals rarely works. Rather, combining expertise with the capacity to explore and create projects based on mutual interests is key. The relationship-driven approach used by community methods offers strategies that can make funder and grant relationships successful.

Tattersall has developed a variety of ways to delivery this content. They Include:

• Project clinics: Programs of 6-12 months where small groups of 10-15 researches who are engaged in projects seeking to use these methods gather regularly to share their progress, be mentored and supported by each other and Tattersall, and receive training in the concepts made specific to their projects.

• Workshops and sessions: All these sessions can be delivered in training ranging from 2 hrs to half a day. They can be run individually – one topic at a time, or cumulative, packaged together in half day or full day sessions, as a program of work over weeks (such as the Lab Classes that ran for 8 weeks between 2019-2021) or overnight retreats.

• Talks and speeches focused on the philosophy and application of the approach, as well as case study stories that unpack lessons from Tattersall’s experience

If you are interested in engaging Tattersall, get in touch via the contact us section to find out more.