17 pages, This article draws upon research exploring a project that combines edutainment and participatory communication strategies as an approach to social change in Malawi. Throughout the research, I take a critical stance that seeks to uplift voices of an audience attending a radio listening club (RLC) and therefore utilize participatory methods to co-create the body of knowledge with study participants. In this article, I query RLC audience’s thoughts of the project’s relevance and influence in their daily lives. Oriented by Hall’s concepts of encoding and decoding, I analyse my data focusing on the dynamics between the objectives of the producers and the lived reality of the participants. Findings reveal that audience’s motivation for continued attendance of the RLC is different to that intended in the encoding process; rather audiences negotiate the relevance of messages to their own needs, those of their children and utilize the space to extend their social capital.
Online via UI Library electronic subscription., Authors used the Positive Deviance approach to identify the effective communication practices of rural women entrepreneurs in Uttar Pradesh, India, who succeed against overwhelming odds. A variety of participatory processes and liberating structures - improv theater, personal storytelling, discovery and action dialogues, and card-sorting games - were used to identify the highly uncommon practices of these entrepreneurs.
14 pages, Dialogue with stakeholders has been recognized as an effective educational strategy for addressing complex topics such as climate change. We report here on the Carbon, Energy, and Climate fishbowl discussion series developed by Michigan State University Extension to assist the state's agricultural community in understanding and adapting to the changing climate. Facilitated dialogue reduced barriers to communication and promoted cooperative learning for target audiences and the project team, generating useful information on the current status of climate change adaptation within Michigan's agriculture sector and revealing needs to be addressed by future Extension programming. Using a dialogue-based approach such as the one we describe can highlight challenges and opportunities Extension faces in addressing various complex issues with diverse audiences.
USA: Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 30 Document Number: D10566
Notes:
10 pages., via website, The national magazine of the Sierra Club., FOR 47 YEARS, HARVEY KRAGE LIVED IN a white farmhouse with red shutters on the side of a bluff about 11 miles from the Mississippi River in southeastern Minnesota. He and his family kept ducks in a pair of ponds and drank water from the springhouse in their backyard. For three decades, Krage commuted from the farm through a woodland of red cedar and black maple, past corn and bean fields, to the small city of Winona, where he retreaded massive, heavy construction tires for Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. Then for another decade, he drove the company's semitrailers, passing the long hours with talk radio, especially the diatribes of right-wing commentator Rush Limbaugh. That's how he first heard about climate change, "about how crazy these scientists were."
