The Barefoot Guide
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- A. SUPPORT TO WRITE YOUR OWN PUBLICATIONSThrough collective writeshops and support, we can help your team, organisation or community of practice to write your own publications, including new Barefoot Guides.
Writing a publication has a number of stages:- Preparation - identifying the purpose and the writers
- The Writeshop - gathering for +/- 5 days to design the publication, empower the writers and the editorial team... and begin the writing
- Writing the drafts back home - supported online by a coaching editorial team
- Editing - where the editors complete and polish the publication
- Publishing - illustrating, proofing and layout etc.
We can support, guide and facilitate you and your editorial team through this whole process. Each process will be unique, depending on how much experience and time you bring.
If you would like to develop Barefoot Guide based on your practice we can also support you to do that, as we did for Barefoot Guides 3, 5 and 6. - B. EFFECTIVE WRITING COURSESWe run online and face-to-face courses which teach effective writing of various kinds to social change leaders and practitioners.
We can run customised writing courses on demand, either face-to-face or online. Online courses can be broken up and scheduled over several weeks.
Occasionally we will be advertising public face-to-face and online courses. - C. WRITESHOP DESIGN AND FACILITATION COURSESWe will help you to learn how to design and facilitate writeshops for your own organisations.
This especially useful for inhouse writing and publication as well as for collaborative learning. The tools we teach you can be used for enriching and deepening your action learning processes between practitioners or collaborating organisations. - D. COACHING FOR WRITERSWe offer online coaching support, enabling you to get over your hurdles and shape your writing into something worth reading.
We can coach you, one-to-one, through short Skype/Zoom sessions coupled with email feedback and advice. Highly effective to get those rough drafts to a polished, publishable state. For stories, case studies, reports, proposals, conference papers etc. - E. PUBLISHING ADVICE AND SUPPORTWe offer online editing and advice to enable you to take writing drafts to final publication.
You have your almost completed drafts but need to take it the last mile to get it into final shape, with contents, acknowledgments, references, an ISBN number, proof-read, layout etc. We can give advice and guidance and even take on these tasks on your behalf.
We can also publish appropriate pieces on the Barefoot Guide Connection Website, making it accessible to a wide audience of social change practitioners and organisations. - F. RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENTWe do continuous research and development of all the approaches and methodologies of the Barefoot Guide Writing School to strengthen writing and dialogue tools for collective learning, sharing and advocacy.
When we learn and create together we lay foundations for working together. This element of our practice brings people together to address the growing need to deepen our ability to collaborate through enriching our approaches and methods of collective thinking and learning.
Why the Social Change Writing School?
Writing is more than just documenting stories, thoughts or ideas. The process of writing can reveal the deeper hidden experience and wisdom of people who have never thought they could write for publication. Writing can be explorative, creative and empowering. Writing makes experience, thinking and ideas visible not only to the reader but to the writer herself who cannot see it until it lies there on the page. Collaborative writing makes thinking visible to a group of people in conversation, enriching their learning, co-creativity and collective intention. With guidance and support, writing enables leaders and practitioners to share their stories and practices for others to learn from. Six Barefoot Guides, written by hundreds of people in dozens of countries on all continents are proof that this is possible. Confident and skilled writers are a small minority because people are rarely taught to use writing as the powerful creative thinking and communication tool that it is. The Barefoot Guide Social Change Writing and Reading School seeks to contribute to changing this in very practical ways. Our Writing and Reading School offers a range of services that give practitioners access to the methods, practices and resources, that have been developed by the Barefoot Guide Collective over a period of more than twelve years. |
The Barefoot Guide Approach
Surfacing, exploring and deepening practice through creative story-telling and collaborative action learning Our approach has been developed over the past twelve years, through experimentation and trial and error, by dozens of practitioners through facilitating the writing of Barefoot Guides, using writeshops, online coaching and support and a variety of collaborative editorial processes. Those who have been involved in writing workshops discovered that, besides enabling them to write their stories, it benefited them in so many other ways as well. They found that it helped them to listen more deeply, to observe more insightfully, using action learning to reflect and analyse in a systematic way, recognising and appreciating other ways of seeing the world, and through all of this deepening their understanding of their social change practices. The Barefoot Guides have received positive feedback from leaders and practitioners around the world. They mention the accessibility of the guides and its conversational style that avoids obscure academic and stuffy reporting language. It is also widely appreciated that the Guides are accompanied by illustrations and poetry that serve to illuminate and deepen the text. The Guides are written by practitioners for practitioners from real experience, and not by desk-bound bureaucrats and academics and yet they are used by fieldwrokers and university practitioners alike. The handouts and other practical resources that accompany the Barefoot Guides provide practitioners with valuable tools for better listening, learning and writing. |
"This unusual and exceptional volume (and series) is hugely accessible yet deeply rooted in solid theory and extensive practice across a wide range of contexts and fields. Expect from it something truly unique in its combination of insight, reflection, experience and highly usable mixed text/visual presentation. It is not "dumbed down."
I have seen it bite as deeply at high academic and professional level as at grassroots community leadership level, an astonishing achievement worth honouring. "
Professor Emeritus Jim Cochrane,
University of Cape Town, South Africa
Barefoot Guides available in العربية Kiswahili Español Bahasa English Français 漢語 Português Việt
