Re: Upstream Upper Intermediate B2 Teacher's.epub
Jemima Torguson
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Indigenous children of the Amazon enjoy a wealth of resources for their intellectual, physical, and social development: the liberty to explore the jungle and experience science-as-curiosity, the joy of collective play, the chance to learn side by side with parents as they paddle, hunt, and garden (1). Neuroscientific studies show these elements as essential to brain development in early childhood. At the same time, provision of services is extremely difficult in a region where parents living in villages must paddle as many as 15 days in order to reach a hospital or pharmacy and the impact of the modern world has made material conditions extremely difficult. Local political leaders, knowing that their funding from the federal government depends upon improvements in health statistics, threaten retaliation and even death to nurses and doctors who report accurate data. For this reason, we see wild fluctuations in data, with child mortality at 15 one year and 150 the next: without objective data, project planning and evaluation are almost impossible (2).
Perhaps even more significant, indigenous philosophy on the Amazon believes it deeply unethical to see anything else as an object. For them, every other (even trees and rocks and animals) has its own perspective, its wants and desires. Indigenous epistemology does not try to objectively understand the other, but to see through the eyes of the other (6), revealing a world of knowledge that would have been foreclosed by a rigid, randomized controlled trial. CanalCanoa attempted to integrate this epistemology, open to the unexpected and to the productive force of errors and mistakes, in addition to the scientific rigor of contemporary evaluations.
In the language developed by the Measurement for Change initiative, the entire intervention was inclusive: the community contributed to the development of the project, benefited directly from learnings, decided on indicators, provided data, and in the end had access to all elements of the data and conclusions. Some 1,186 adults and 1,148 children participated in the project, with an additional 44,000 indirect beneficiaries through network effects, shared films, and cultural impact. This research emerges from semi-structured interviews with participants in 28 of the 294 Ajuris de Conhecimento; in some cases, we spoke with individuals who had participated, but other times the whole community requested to be part of the evaluation. Because of the community orientation of the culture of the Upper Rio Negro, we quantified changes by group, and not by individual.
Taking these challenges into consideration, CanalCanoa focused its evaluation efforts on identifying and measuring locally meaningful upstream indicators known to be associated with better results in early childhood development:
The upper Rio Negro enjoys extraordinary linguistic wealth, with 27 ethnic groups speaking 22 different languages (14) divided into several different language families: Tukano, Aruwak, Nadehup (Maku), Yanomami5, and Tupi-Guarani. Kinship rules of the riverine groups [Tukano, Aruwak, and some Bar (who are ethnically Arawak but who speak Nheengatu, a form of Tupi-Guarani)] demand intermarriage with groups that speak a language different from one's own mother tongue. As a result, children traditionally would grow up with mothers and fathers who spoke different languages, enabling them to speak at least two, and often four or five, languages. This linguistic context is immensely important for neurological development:
Participants in the ajuris de conhecimento report a large impact on language acquisition and linguistic development. Ninety one percent of interviewed participants report that they changed the way they interacted linguistically with their children or grandchildren after the ajuris. In 77% of the ajuris, participants (or, in the case of communities, the whole village) began to speak more with their small children in native languages. In 55% of the groups, participants began to tell more stories to their children after the ajuris, and in 36% of the groups, parents and grandparents sang more to their children. It is also notable that after many of the ajuris, older children began to sing and tell stories to babies and request that parents tell stories to them and their younger siblings.
Without developing new cognitive tests or using brain-scanning equipment inaccessible in the region, measurement of multi-lingual education and of the use of songs and stories serves as useful stand-in for intellectual development among indigenous children. The upstream indicator supplied scientific rigor while at the same time allowing for innovation in project development.
Physical development over the course of childhood was an area where local traditions and government measurement did not see eye to eye. While official milestones of growth track weight and height against age, local experts insisted on radically different metrics to evaluate if a child was growing up well7. For them, being able to climb a tree or swim in the river was much more important than height or weight, and they preferred to evaluate with the general happiness and well-being of babies and children. Indigenous experts evaluate activity, not the static body. Government health professionals also recognize that healthy indigenous children can stray far from the national average, due to both genetic and environmental factors8 Baniwa and Hup'dah children are simply smaller than their peers So Paulo or Rio de Janeiro; to be small and strong is essential to survival and success in the environment in which they live.
Instead of developing new standards and norms to measure physical development in each indigenous group, CanalCanoa decided to evaluate results based on several local metrics, on the way that parents learned to create a therapeutic itinerary in an urban context, and at how parents of young children feed their children. In this paper we look particularly at nutrition, because both local and national intellectuals agree on definitions of healthy food.
One story illustrates how this change functions: in the neighborhood of Fortaleza, one participant had an extensive urban garden. During the conversations after the film on nutrition, she explained how she planted, composted, and shared her fruits and vegetables. This experience motivated other women to do the same thing: almost all of the other participants in the group planted their own gardens after the ajuris. This anecdote allows us to see that it is not so much the film that inspired changes but the platform that the ajuris provide for successful mothers and grandmothers to share their techniques with others. The agent of social change in the process is not the educator, but the other participants.
By looking at upstream indicators of nutrition, CanalCanoa not only discovered that the intervention model improved the fundamental input for healthy physical development (diet), it also explained how the structure of the project encouraged urban indigenous women to teach and support each other. The model of evaluation validated and adapted the model, while at the same time elaborating the theory of change.
Sadly, the transition from village to town makes both of these issues difficult for indigenous parents of young children in So Gabriel. Migration breaks up social and kinship networks, while the filthy, loud, and unsafe environment of the slums of So Gabriel creates high levels of toxic stress for babies and young parents who do not have the tools to deal with it. The development or strengthening of social networks for early childhood in urban and semi-rural spaces was one of the most interesting results of CanalCanoa.
The strengthening of the social fabric that supports babies and their mothers illustrates several important issues around measurement for change or measurement for innovation. Original research plans did not include social network analysis, but at the end of conversations after the conclusions of the ajuris, both researchers and indigenous educators asked if there was anything else that the respondents wanted to mention. Without exception, interviewed participants spontaneously mentioned some form of social network strengthening as one of the most important results of the ajuris, especially the intergenerational issues mentioned above, but also increased trust for other ethnic groups and improved relations with neighbors in urban contexts.
Why were the films and ajuris so successful in strengthening social networks? In almost all of the traditional villages of the Rio Negro, communities begin the day with a community breakfast in the great-house (maloca). At 6 AM, everyone who lives in the villages brings xib (manioc porridge), fruits, beiju (manioc tortillas), and soup made of fish, game, and peppers to the great house for a collective problem-solving session. The community plans collective work (cleaning, construction), discusses and votes on how to relate to actors outside the village (government, army, health care providers, the church, other villages, anthropologists), and mediates any conflicts in the community (land use, fishing rights, personal conflict).
When families move from the villages to towns like So Gabriel, they lose this tradition of the daily community meeting. Most move onto streets where they know few other people; cities have few traditions of collective labor; there are few or no malocas to host the meetings; and relations to government actors are now mediated through individuals or nuclear families, not through communities.
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