Participatory tools — reference instance content

The source of truth for seeding the reference instance node tree. Each tool becomes a node; each section heading a phase or category. Provenance is preserved throughout, because methodology origins matter.

PRINCIPLES & ETHOS

(Meta-level — governs how all tools are used)

These are not tools. They are the conditions under which tools work. A tool used without these principles produces data. A tool used with them produces understanding.

Handing Over the Stick

Origin: Robert Chambers, PRA tradition What it means: The facilitator’s job is to give up control of the process as quickly as possible. The moment the facilitator holds the pen, marker, or stone, they own the output. The goal is to place those instruments in the hands of participants as soon as the activity is understood. In a school context: the facilitator is not the teacher. The student holds the pen. Watch for: Facilitators who “help” by writing, drawing, or arranging on behalf of participants. This is the most common way the methodology is undermined.

Triangulation

Origin: PRA/PLA tradition, Robert Chambers What it means: No single tool, source, or analyst tells the whole story. Use multiple methods (methods triangulation), ask the same question of different people (source triangulation), and have different people analyse the same data (analyst triangulation). When findings converge across methods and sources, you can have more confidence. When they diverge, that divergence is itself important information. In LFTI: The pre-perceptions instrument, the body map, and the transect walk should produce overlapping and sometimes contradictory stories about the same students’ experience. The contradictions are data.

Sitting Down

Origin: PRA field practice What it means: Literally and metaphorically. The outside facilitator positions themselves physically below or level with community members — sitting on the ground, not standing at a flipchart. In a school context this is radical: adults stand, students sit. Reversing this changes the power in the room immediately. Even moving from behind a desk to sitting in a circle changes what is possible. Watch for: The facilitator who stands while students sit. The adult who controls the front of the room. The arrangement of furniture that recreates the classroom hierarchy inside what is supposed to be a different kind of space.

Optimal Ignorance

Origin: Robert Chambers, PRA tradition What it means: You do not need to know everything. You need to know enough to act usefully. Trying to be comprehensive produces paralysis and positions the facilitator as the one who must understand before the community can proceed. Accept that you will not understand everything, that some things will remain opaque, and that this is fine. In LFTI: A facilitator going into a Zambian classroom does not need to fully understand the Zambian education system before beginning. What they need is enough humility to listen well.

Offsetting Biases

Origin: PRA/PLA tradition What it means: In any group, some voices are structurally more likely to be heard: older, male, confident, fluent in the dominant language, higher status. Participatory methodology requires actively seeking the voices that the room is not designed for. This means disaggregating groups by gender, age, confidence level. It means asking who is not speaking and why. It means creating conditions — anonymity, drawing, movement — where those without verbal confidence can still contribute. In LFTI: Who speaks in a UK classroom? Who speaks in a Zambian classroom? Who never speaks? The methodology must be designed to reach the student who has learned that their voice is not wanted.

Facilitation Not Extraction

Origin: PLA/community development tradition What it means: You are not mining data from people. You are enabling people to reflect on and articulate what they already know. The process has value independent of any output it produces. A student who has mapped their school, told a story about their body, and ranked what matters to them has done something for themselves — not just for a researcher. Watch for: Treating students as data sources rather than as the primary beneficiaries of the process. Rushing to outputs without allowing reflection time. Taking the artefacts away without leaving copies with the participants.

The Body as Instrument

Origin: Theatre for Development / Augusto Boal / Kamoto Community Arts What it means: Knowledge that cannot be spoken can be performed. Movement, gesture, posture, and voice carry meaning that survives translation across language, age, and culture. When a student cannot find words for their experience of school, they may be able to show it with their body — in a frozen image, a walk, a sound, a gesture. This is not a lesser form of knowledge. It is often a more honest one. In LFTI: The body is the first instrument available to every student in every context, regardless of literacy, language, or resources. Kamoto’s methodology is built on this. It is why performance, image theatre, and the body map are core tools, not optional extras.

The Rehearsal for Reality

Origin: Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed What it means: Theatre and performance provide a protected space to try out what cannot be tried in ordinary life. A student can play the headteacher. A Zambian student can play a Bristol student. The role distance is both protective (you are not speaking as yourself, so you are safer) and generative (you discover things in role that you did not know you knew). The rehearsal is not a simulation — it is a form of genuine exploration.

Insider Knowledge is Primary

Origin: Action Research / Participatory Action Research tradition What it means: The researcher is not more expert than the researched. The student is the expert on their own experience of school. The facilitator’s job is to create conditions in which that expertise can be expressed, examined, and acted upon — not to interpret it, correct it, or replace it with academic knowledge. The student’s account of what school is like is primary data. It is not anecdote.

Reflection-Action Spiral

Origin: Action Research / Kurt Lewin / Paolo Freire What it means: You do not plan completely, then act, then evaluate. You act, reflect on what happened, replan, act again. Each cycle of Gather→Collate→Present is one turn of this spiral. The output of Present is not the end — it is the input to the next Gather. Understanding deepens through iteration, not through increasingly comprehensive planning. In LFTI: The three movements (Past, Situation, Futures) are three turns of the spiral. The Whole cycle is a fourth turn that reflects on all three.

Ethical Practice

Origin: Research ethics / child safeguarding / participatory traditions What it means: Several non-negotiable principles govern all LFTI activities:

• Informed consent — participants (and for minors, guardians) understand what they are doing, what will happen to their contributions, and can withdraw at any time.
• Do no harm — no activity should leave a participant in a more vulnerable position than before. This includes emotional harm from activities that surface difficult memories without adequate support.
• Anonymisation — student stories and artefacts are anonymised by default unless a student explicitly chooses to be named.
• Image rights — photographs, videos, and body maps involving students require specific consent. Copies belong first to the participant.
• The camera warning — cameras and recording devices change the dynamic of a room. Use with caution, use with consent, use sparingly.

GATHER PHASE TOOLS

Pre-perceptions Instrument

Origin: Green Living Movement (Emmanuel Mutambashiku), Zambia Phase: Gather (runs twice — once at start of whole project, once after exchange) Format: Individual, silent. A4 paper folded into four quadrants. Time: 15–20 minutes each instance

The four quadrants:

1. What I think of myself (as a learner, a young person, someone from this place)
2. What I think of them (students in the other countries, before knowing them)
3. What I think they think of me
4. What I think they think of themselves

Process: Completed individually and in silence before any introduction or context-setting. No discussion during. Facilitator collects — or students keep and bring back. Run again at the end of the full exchange. The delta between first and second instance is the primary evaluation measure.

Critical rule: Do not explain, correct, or discuss responses during the first instance. The pre-perception must be genuinely pre. Any framing before the instrument contaminates it.

Feeds into: Whole cycle → Gather (second instance), Present (delta reveal as evaluation artefact)

Note: This tool runs across the whole project, not just one movement. It is a Gather tool in structure but an evaluation instrument in function.

Observation

Origin: PRA/PLA tradition (AFCAP, Chambers) Phase: Gather Format: Individual or paired, with notepad. Can be structured (specific things to look for) or unstructured (open observation). Time: Flexible — from 10 minutes to a full session

What it captures: People, resources, spatial dynamics, power indicators, movement patterns, what is visible vs hidden, what is named vs unnamed.

In a school context: Who moves freely through the school? Who is confined? Where do students go when they have choice? Where are the unofficial gathering places? What does the staffroom door communicate? What is on the walls, and who put it there?

Facilitation note: The facilitator observes alongside participants, not instead of them. Participants are observing their own environment — they are the experts. The facilitator’s role is to provide a prompt and hold the time.

Low-tech: Notepad and pencil. High-tech: Phone camera, voice memo, annotated photograph.

Semi-structured Checklist Interview

Origin: PRA/PLA tradition (AFCAP) Phase: Gather Format: Individual (key informant) or group (focus group). Two facilitators recommended — one to facilitate, one to note. Time: Individuals: 45–60 minutes. Groups: 90–120 minutes.

Key features:

• A checklist of topics, not a questionnaire. The order is flexible.
• Open-ended questions only: What? Why? When? Who? How? Where?
• The interviewer follows the interviewee’s direction — unexpected topics are welcomed.
• Key informant variant: for those with specific expertise (a teacher, a caretaker, a school governor).
• Focus group variant: for groups with shared experience (a year group, a friendship group, students who travel far to school).

In LFTI: Semi-structured interviews with teachers are a specific variant — the teacher as key informant on the system they operate within, not as an authority figure. The semi-structured format protects against the interview becoming a defence of current practice.

Facilitator note: The interviewer’s job is to be genuinely curious. If you already know what you think the answers are, you will not hear what is actually being said.

Transect Walk

Origin: PRA/PLA tradition (AFCAP, Episcopal Relief & Development, Chambers) Phase: Gather Format: Small groups (pairs or up to 8). Multiple routes can run simultaneously. Time: 1–3 hours including debrief

Description: A structured observational walk between two points, crossing as many different zones of the school/community as possible. The walk produces a diagram — hand-drawn, with annotations — that becomes the primary artefact.

Facilitation steps:

1. Route planning — choose a transect that crosses maximum diversity of zones (classroom, corridor, playground, entrance, boundary, off-site)
2. Introduction — share the purpose and focus (e.g. “we’re looking at where students have and don’t have voice”)
3. Walk — stop at zone transitions. Ask: What do you see? Who do you see and what are they doing? What happens here that doesn’t happen elsewhere? What is missing here?
4. Talk to people along the way — brief, informal, genuine curiosity. Not an interview — a conversation.
5. Draw as you go — one person in each group sketches the route and marks features. The sketch is intentionally rough. Relative scale (what is drawn larger) is information.
6. Zone debrief — after the walk, compile the diagram. Identify distinct zones. What characterises each? What assets, problems, opportunities are in each zone?

Low-tech: Paper, pencil, chalk on ground for the debrief diagram. High-tech variant (secondary): GPS track, geotagged photos, digital annotation on a base map. This is a secondary option — the hand-drawn version is primary because the distortions in hand-drawn maps are data.

The distortion principle: A student who draws the playground three times bigger than the classroom is telling you something about where they feel alive. Do not correct the scale. Preserve it.

Pairs to gallery: Ten pairs produce ten transect diagrams. In Collate, these ten diagrams are displayed together. What is consistent across all ten? What is idiosyncratic? The collection is the data.

As presentation: The transect walk can itself be the presentation — participants lead others (community members, other cohorts, decision-makers) along the route, narrating what they found. The walk is the report.

Body Map

Origin: Kamoto Community Arts / Mary Manzole (Artistic Director, Kamoto) Phase: Gather (primary — Past movement). Can extend to Situation and Futures. Format: Pairs, then individual, then gallery sharing. Time: 2–3 hours including gallery and discussion Materials: Large paper (A1 or larger — wallpaper, flipchart sheets joined), chalk (if on floor/ground), markers, pens, paint if available.

Description: One person lies on the paper while their partner traces the outline of their body. The outline becomes a map. The maker then fills their body map with stories, memories, feelings, and images placed on the part of the body where they feel that thing lives.

Examples of what might be placed:

• A broken arm from childhood riding a horse — placed on the arm
• Grief for a grandmother — placed in the hair, or the chest, or wherever it lives for this person
• Anxiety about exams — placed in the stomach
• Pride in running — placed in the legs
• A song learned from a parent — placed in the throat or the ears
• A journey — placed in the feet

The spatial placement is the analysis. You do not describe where something lives — you show it. Where people place things is not arbitrary. The body knows things that language doesn’t always reach.

Facilitation steps:

1. The tracing — in silence. The person being traced lies still. The tracer is careful and attentive. This act itself is significant — being carefully attended to is not a common experience.
2. Individual mapping — each person fills their own outline alone, working from inside the boundary someone else drew for them. No instruction about what to include — only the prompt: “place what you want to share, where it lives in your body.”
3. Gallery — maps are displayed. The group walks the gallery in silence first. No explanations yet.
4. Sharing — makers can choose to share what they’ve placed, or not. Nothing is compulsory.
5. SHOWED analysis — group discussion: What do you see? What is happening in these bodies? How does this relate to our lives? Why are these stories here? What can we do?

Cross-cohort power: A UK student’s body map alongside a Zambia student’s body map, displayed without captions. The viewer can see before reading: what stories do these two bodies share? Where do they diverge? The chest full in one and empty in another. The feet loaded in one, light in another.

IMPORTANT — Facilitation note: This tool surfaces personal and sometimes painful material. It must be facilitated by someone who knows how to hold that space — not just manage an activity. Mary Manzole’s facilitation protocol is the authoritative version for LFTI. This node is a placeholder until that protocol is documented in conversation with Mary. Do not use this tool without adequate facilitation preparation.

Ethical note: Body maps are personal and may be intimate. Explicit consent is required before displaying or photographing them. The map belongs to its maker. Copies stay with participants.

Photo Walk / Participatory Photography

Origin: PhotoVoice methodology (Wang & Burris, 1997) / Participatory Photography tradition Phase: Gather Format: Individual or paired. Camera/phone distributed or participants use own devices. Time: 45–90 minutes walk + 30–60 minutes SHOWED analysis

Description: Participants are given a prompt and asked to photograph their school/community in response. The prompt should be open: “photograph what matters to you about this place” or “photograph what school feels like” or “photograph what you wish others could see.”

The photograph as framing device: Giving someone a camera is giving them the power to say “this is what I want to look at.” What students choose to photograph — and what they choose not to — is the data.

SHOWED analysis:

• S — What do you See in this photograph?
• H — What is Happening here?
• O — How does this relate to Our lives?
• W — Why does this situation exist?
• E — What can we Do (Educate, Empower, Act)?

Exhibition as presentation: The photographs become an exhibition. This is a complete Gather → Present pathway without a formal Collate stage — the curation of which photographs to display is the collation.

Ethical note: Photography in schools requires consent. Photographs of identifiable students require specific consent. Photographs of staff require consent. Who appears in an image, and who is conspicuously absent, is itself a finding.

Story Circle

Origin: Oral history / narrative methodology / community organising Phase: Gather Format: Small groups of 4–8. Seated in a circle, no hierarchy. Time: 45–90 minutes

Description: Each person tells a brief story in response to a prompt. No interruptions. No questions during. After all stories are told, the group finds the common threads.

Prompts for Past movement:

• “Tell a story about a moment when you felt like a learner — really learning — not necessarily in school.”
• “Tell a story about a time school felt like it was made for someone else.”
• “Tell a story about something you know that school didn’t teach you.”

The no-interruption rule is structural. It prevents the loudest voice from shaping the story while it’s being told. Responses come after, in the thread-finding.

Thread-finding: After all stories: “What did we hear in common? What surprised you? What was different?” The facilitator does not lead this — they open it and step back.

River of Life

Origin: PLA/narrative methodology Phase: Gather — Past movement specifically Format: Individual drawing, then paired sharing, then gallery. Time: 45–60 minutes

Description: Draw your life as a river. The river has tributaries (people and experiences that fed into you), rapids (difficult times, turbulence), still pools (peaceful or formative times), waterfalls (sudden transformations or losses), and a current direction (where the river is going now).

The spatial metaphor does work that prose cannot: You do not decide in advance what is a rapid and what is a pool. The drawing decides. Students who have never told anyone about a difficult period of their life will draw rapids and then, looking at what they’ve drawn, find language for it.

Cross-cohort version: Rivers from three countries displayed together. Where are the rapids? Do they cluster at the same life moments (exam periods, transitions between schools, family disruptions) or at different ones? The comparison is the learning.

Peer Interview

Origin: Participatory Action Research / oral history Phase: Gather Format: Pairs, rotating roles. Each person is both interviewer and interviewee. Time: 20–30 minutes per direction

Description: Structured interview between students, using a checklist (not a questionnaire). The horizontal relationship between students (as opposed to adult-to-student) changes what is possible. Students often tell each other things they would not tell a facilitator.

Facilitation note: Brief the interviewers on the checklist, the open-question principle (What? Why? How?), and the importance of silence — leaving space after an answer before asking the next question. The silence is where the real answer often lives.

Learning Journal / Field Notes

Origin: Action Research / ethnographic practice Phase: Gather (ongoing throughout) Format: Individual, ongoing. Can be written, drawn, voice-recorded. Time: 5–10 minutes at end of each session minimum

Description: Each participant (students and facilitators) keeps an ongoing record of what they notice, what surprises them, what they don’t understand yet, and what they want to return to. This is not a formal document — it is a thinking tool.

In LFTI: Every block node can have a learning journal entry associated with it. The journal is the raw Gather data that hasn’t yet been through Collate.

Timeline

Origin: PLA/oral history tradition Phase: Gather — Past movement Format: Group or individual. Physical line on floor or drawn on paper. Time: 30–45 minutes

Description: Map significant events on a timeline. Can be personal (your own life), institutional (this school’s history), or community (what has happened in this place). Events are placed in sequence and can be annotated with feelings, significance, who was affected.

In LFTI: A personal timeline alongside a school’s institutional timeline can reveal the points at which individual students’ lives and institutional decisions intersected — and the places they didn’t, where the school was completely unaware of what was happening to its students.

Focus Group

Origin: Social research / PRA tradition Phase: Gather Format: Groups of 6–12, ideally homogeneous (same year group, same gender, same experience). Two facilitators. Time: 60–90 minutes

Description: Facilitated discussion around a set of open questions. The group dynamic generates responses that individual interviews don’t — agreement, contradiction, negotiation, surprise. The interactions between participants are as informative as the content of what they say.

Disaggregation note: Mixed groups often produce dominant-voice responses. Consider single-gender groups, or groups separated by year group, confidence level, or experience. The students who never speak in mixed groups will speak in homogeneous ones.

COLLATE PHASE TOOLS

Collaborative Prioritisation (tool category)

The following tools all serve the same purpose: helping a group find shared priorities without imposing an external ranking. Each has different dynamics. Choose based on the group, the context, and what kind of social process is appropriate.

The underlying principle: Prioritisation is a social act, not a calculation. The goal is not to find the “correct” answer but to make the group’s collective judgment visible to itself.

Stones in Circles (Resource Allocation / Proportional Weighting)

Origin: PRA field practice / Kamoto community methodology Phase: Collate Format: Facilitator-run, single shared display. Group sizes of 8–30. Time: 20–40 minutes

Description: The facilitator draws or places circles on a shared surface (ground, floor, whiteboard, paper). Each circle represents an option or priority identified during Gather. Each participant is given a fixed number of tokens (stones, coins, dots, votes — the physical material matters: stones are visible, weighty, and cannot be taken back easily). Participants distribute their tokens across the circles according to their priorities. They may put all tokens in one circle or spread them. The distribution is visible to the whole group as it develops.

The social dynamic is the methodology: Seeing others place their tokens is generative. It prompts reflection, reconsideration, and sometimes courage — to put your tokens somewhere unexpected, or to hold back from the obvious choice. This is not a bias to be eliminated. It is the collective sense-making process.

The visibility question: On shared devices vs. a shared physical display, the dynamic changes significantly. A physical display (stones on the ground, visible to everyone in the circle) preserves the social dimension. Individual devices (digital voting) produces cleaner data but a different social experience. The physical version is primary; digital is a secondary option.

Facilitator-run single screen: The facilitator distributes tokens on screen based on participants’ verbal or hand-raised instructions. Everyone watches. This is the recommended digital implementation — it preserves the social visibility without requiring individual devices or network connectivity.

Output: A weighted distribution. Not a winner — a picture of where the group’s attention and energy sits. Multiple circles with roughly equal weight is as informative as one dominant circle.

Matrix Ranking

Origin: PRA/PLA tradition (AFCAP) Phase: Collate Format: Group. Drawn on ground with stick, or on paper/whiteboard. Time: 30–45 minutes

Description: A grid with options across the top and criteria down the side. Each cell is filled with tally marks (or stones, or dots) indicating how well this option performs against this criterion. The matrix is built by the group together, not filled in by the facilitator.

In LFTI: Useful for evaluating possible responses, interventions, or changes identified during Gather. “Which of these things would make school better?” × “Cost / Feasibility / Student control / Impact.”

The tally mark version is intentionally non-numeric: Seeing IIIII vs II is different from seeing 5 vs 2. The visual weight of marks carries more than the number.

Pairwise Ranking

Origin: PRA/PLA tradition (AFCAP) Phase: Collate Format: Group or small group. Paper or ground. Time: 20–30 minutes for up to 6 items

Description: Given a list of items, compare each pair: which of these two matters more? After all pairs are compared, count the wins. The ranking emerges from the comparisons, not from asking people to rank directly.

Why it works better than direct ranking: Direct ranking (“put these in order”) produces a list that reflects what people think they should say. Pairwise comparison (“just these two — which one?”) surfaces genuine preferences by reducing the cognitive load and the social performance.

Limitation: Works for small lists (up to 6–8 items). Becomes unwieldy with more.

Body Voting / Human Spectrum

Origin: PLA / community organising / Theatre for Development Phase: Collate Format: Whole group, standing. Requires floor space. Time: 10–20 minutes

Description: A line is established between two poles (Agree / Disagree, This / That, Important / Not Important). A statement or image is presented. Participants position themselves on the line according to their view. No discussion during positioning. After everyone has placed themselves, the facilitator asks people at different points on the line to explain their position.

Why it is powerful: You can see the distribution of the whole group at once. You cannot hide — you must take a position. Students who would not raise their hand will walk to a point on a line. The physical commitment is lower but the visibility is higher.

In LFTI: Particularly useful for surfacing disagreement within a group — and for making visible that disagreement is not a problem but a feature. “Look — we are not all in the same place on this. That is interesting. Why?”

Affinity Grouping / Card Sorting

Origin: Design thinking / PLA tradition Phase: Collate Format: Group. Physical cards or sticky notes on a wall or floor. Time: 30–45 minutes

Description: All Gather artefacts (or summaries of them) are written on individual cards. The group arranges the cards into clusters based on similarity, without predefined categories. Categories emerge from the clustering. The group then names each cluster.

The naming act is critical: The name the group chooses for a cluster is their analysis of what those things have in common. It often surprises people. It often produces a word or phrase that becomes the organising concept for the Present.

Digital version: Cards as nodes in the system, grouped by the group’s decision into synthesis nodes. The physical version is preferable for the initial grouping — the act of moving cards by hand is part of the thinking.

Venn Diagram (Actual / Ideal pair)

Origin: PRA/PLA tradition (AFCAP, Chambers) Phase: Collate Format: Group drawing. On ground, floor, paper. Time: 30–45 minutes per diagram; 60–90 minutes for the pair

Description: Draw circles representing institutions, people, or forces that affect the group’s experience. Circle size represents significance/importance. Distance between circles represents interaction — circles that touch or overlap have strong interaction; circles that are far apart have little.

The actual/ideal pair: Draw the current situation first (actual). Then draw what you wish it looked like (ideal). The gap between the two is the analysis. The circles that have moved, changed size, or changed relationship between the two versions are where the group’s energy lives.

In LFTI Situation movement: “Draw the people and institutions that affect your experience of school.” Then: “Draw what you wish it looked like.” The student body, the teacher, the headteacher, the government, the family, the curriculum — where are they now? Where should they be?

Causal Flow Diagram

Origin: PRA/PLA tradition (AFCAP) Phase: Collate Format: Group. On ground or paper with sticks/markers. Time: 45–60 minutes

Description: Starting from a central problem identified during Gather, the group maps causes (flowing in) and effects (flowing out). Causes of causes. Effects of effects. The diagram grows outward. Eventually the group can see the structure of the problem — which causes are roots (far upstream) and which are symptoms (close to the centre).

The blue/green coding (from AFCAP): Blue nodes are causes. Green nodes are effects. This visual distinction makes the structure of the problem legible.

In LFTI: “What causes school to feel the way it does?” The diagram will show root causes (policy, funding, teacher training, cultural expectations) and proximate causes (class size, timetabling, assessment pressure) and effects (disengagement, anxiety, boredom, exclusion). The group can then ask: where in this diagram do we have leverage?

Spectrum Line (Two Poles)

Origin: PLA / facilitation practice Phase: Collate Format: Physical line or drawn continuum. Individual positioning. Time: 15–25 minutes

Description: Place two opposing concepts at either end of a line. Participants place a Gather finding, idea, or statement on the spectrum between the poles. The placement is their analysis.

Example poles for LFTI:

• Within our control ←→ Outside our control
• This happened to us ←→ We chose this
• School caused this ←→ We brought this with us
• This is about Past ←→ This is about Futures

The spectrum is not a ranking — it is a relationship. Things placed near the centre are genuinely ambiguous. That ambiguity is valuable.

Most Significant Change

Origin: Rick Davies / participatory monitoring and evaluation tradition Phase: Collate (end of cycle) / Present Format: Individual reflection first, then group. Time: 30–45 minutes

Description: At the end of a cycle, each participant identifies the most significant change they observed or experienced, and why they think it is the most significant. These stories are shared in a group. The group then discusses which change story they find most significant, and why.

The “why” is more important than the “what.” The criteria by which people judge significance tells you more than the changes themselves.

In LFTI: Run at the end of each movement’s Present phase. “What is the most significant change in how you understand your own experience of school, since we started?” The meta-reflection on the methodology itself is part of the data.

Synthesis Node (Placeholder)

Origin: To be developed Phase: Collate Format: TBD Description: A shared surface on which a group produces a collective representation that did not exist in any single Gather artefact. The synthesis is not a summary — it is a new thing that only the group could make. It may be a composite map, a collective body map, a jointly produced narrative, a scored diagram.

This node is a placeholder. The synthesis canvas is the most technically complex piece of the Collate phase and is deferred to a later development cycle. What exists now: a synthesis node can hold images, text, and relations to the Gather artefacts it draws from. The collaborative creation tool does not exist yet.

The synthesis output is itself a node with feeds relations to Present and to Whole → Gather.

Triangulation Check

Origin: PRA/PLA tradition Phase: Collate (final step before Present) Format: Facilitator-led reflection with the group. Time: 20–30 minutes

Description: Before moving to Present, ask: what did multiple methods tell us? Where did the body maps, transect walks, story circles, and interviews agree? Where did they contradict? The contradictions are not problems — they are the most interesting findings.

Questions:

• Which findings appeared in more than one method?
• Which findings appeared in only one method — and why might that be?
• Whose voice is missing from what we’ve gathered?
• What would we need to gather to be more confident in what we’re seeing?

PRESENT PHASE TOOLS

Live Performance

Origin: Theatre for Development / Kamoto Community Arts / Augusto Boal Phase: Present Format: Performed to an audience. Audience may be passive (theatre) or active (forum theatre).

Variants:

Forum Theatre (Boal): A scene is performed showing a problem. At a key moment, the action is frozen. The facilitator (Joker) asks the audience: what should happen next? Audience members can replace an actor and try a different response. The scene runs again, differently. There is no correct answer — only the exploration of possibilities. The audience are spect-actors, not spectators.

Image Theatre (Boal): Participants make frozen images with their bodies — a sculpture showing “how it is” and then a second showing “how it could be.” No words. The images are read and discussed. A non-verbal version of the Venn actual/ideal pair, but embodied. Works across language barriers.

Verbatim Theatre: The performers speak the exact words gathered during Gather (from interviews, story circles, peer interviews). Nothing invented. The power comes from recognising: these are real words, said by real people, about real experience.

Music / song: An original song, or an existing song with new words, performing the findings of Gather. Kamoto’s tradition includes music as a primary vehicle for community reflection.

Dance / movement piece: Choreographed or improvised movement expressing the findings. The body that was mapped in Gather becomes the instrument of presentation.

Transect Walk as Presentation

Origin: PRA/PLA tradition (Episcopal Relief & Development) Phase: Present Format: Participants lead an audience along the route they walked during Gather.

Description: The participants become guides. They lead community members, other cohorts, or decision-makers along the transect route, stopping at each zone to narrate what they found, what they observed, what they felt. The walk is the report. The audience experiences the space in the same sequence the students experienced it.

Cross-cohort version: A UK cohort presents their school transect to a Zambian cohort over video. Each stop on the walk is a node that can be viewed and responded to asynchronously. The comparison between two school transects is a cross-cohort interchange in itself.

Exhibition

Origin: Participatory Photography / visual arts practice Phase: Present Format: Displayed artefacts in a shared space, physical or digital.

Physical exhibition: Body maps, transect diagrams, photographs, drawings displayed on walls or ground. The gallery walk (audience in silence first, then response) is the viewing methodology.

Digital exhibition: Images and text displayed as nodes in the spine, with the _visibility: portal flag marking them for eventual public display.

Audience response: Leave response cards, sticky notes, or a response book. The audience’s response to the exhibition is itself Gather material for the next cycle.

Short Video

Origin: Contemporary student communication / digital media Phase: Present Format: Individual or small group produced. Phone camera sufficient.

TikTok / Reels format (60–90 seconds): The constraint is generative. You cannot explain everything. You must choose. What is the one thing this student wants to say about their experience of school? The constraint forces the kind of clarity that longer forms allow you to avoid.

Documentary format (5–15 minutes): More space for complexity. Interview-based or observational. Students as directors, camera operators, and subjects.

The channel as ongoing Present: A project channel (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, or private equivalent) that accumulates content over the life of the project is not a single artefact — it is a living Present. Each contribution is a block node. The channel is a session node with an open window.

Cross-cohort exchange: A UK student’s 60-second video about their school morning alongside a Zambia student’s 60-second video about their school morning. Same form, same constraint, genuinely comparable.

Podcast / Audio

Origin: Contemporary media / oral history tradition Phase: Present Format: Recorded conversation, interview, or narration. Phone mic sufficient.

Interview format: One student interviews another using the semi-structured checklist approach. The audio is the artefact.

Story format: A student narrates their own story directly to the microphone. No interviewer. The intimacy of audio — you are in someone’s ear — produces a different kind of listening than reading or watching.

Cross-cohort exchange: Audio messages exchanged between cohorts before video exchange is possible. Lower bandwidth requirement. Can be asynchronous.

Zine / Photo Essay

Origin: DIY publishing / participatory photography / youth arts Phase: Present Format: Printed or digital. Individual or collective.

Description: A short, self-published document combining image and text. No professional production required. A phone photograph with a handwritten caption is sufficient. The zine form has a long tradition of giving voice to those without access to mainstream publishing.

Collective zine: Each student contributes one page. The collection is the publication. Print and distribute within the school. Send copies to partner schools.

Story of Self

Origin: Marshall Ganz / community organising tradition Phase: Present (but also a Gather tool for building narrative) Format: Individual narrative, structured. 3–5 minutes to tell.

Three elements:

1. Story of Self — why I was called to this. A moment that shaped who I am and what I care about.
2. Story of Us — what we share. What brought this group together. What we hold in common.
3. Story of Now — the challenge we face. Why this moment. What is at stake. What we are called to do.

In LFTI Present: A student telling the story of why this project mattered to them, using this structure, to another cohort or to a wider audience. Personal but not private. Specific but universal.

Pre-perceptions Delta (Evaluation Reveal)

Origin: Green Living Movement / LFTI methodology Phase: Present (Whole cycle — final) Format: Individual reflection + group sharing.

Description: Students retrieve their original pre-perceptions instrument. They complete a second version alongside the first. Then they share: what changed? What didn’t? What surprised you about what stayed the same?

This is the primary evaluation measure of the whole project. Not a test of knowledge acquired but a record of perception changed — or not changed, which is equally interesting.

The unchanged perception is as valuable as the changed one. If a Bristol student’s assumption about Zambian students is exactly the same after six months of exchange as before, that is the most important finding of all.

CROSS-CUTTING TOOLS

(Tools that appear in multiple phases)

Hot Seating

Origin: Drama in Education / Theatre for Development Phase: Gather (generating stories) / Present (performing them) Format: One participant in role, group asks questions.

Description: A participant takes on a role — themselves at a different age, a character from their story, a figure of authority in their school. The group asks questions. The person in role answers as that character. The role distance is protective — you are not speaking as yourself, so you can say things that would be harder to say directly.

In LFTI: A student in role as their year-3 self, being asked about their first experience of school. Or a student in role as their headteacher, being asked why the rules are what they are. The role-play surfaces knowledge that direct questions don’t reach.

Learning Journal (ongoing)

Phase: All phases See Gather phase entry above.

PROVENANCE NOTES

Several tools in this library have specific origins that must be honoured:

Kamoto Community Arts / George Daka, Phillip Kaluba, Mary Manzole: The Body Map facilitation protocol, the Participatory Performance Practice (PPP) framework, and the community arts methodology that underlies LFTI’s approach to the body as instrument. These tools originate in Zambia. When used by LFTI, they are used with permission and in partnership — not borrowed or adapted without acknowledgement.

Green Living Movement / Emmanuel Mutambashiku: The Pre-perceptions instrument. Used throughout LFTI as the primary evaluation mechanism.

Augusto Boal / Theatre of the Oppressed: Forum theatre, image theatre, the spect-actor concept. A formal body of work with its own literature, training tradition, and ethical framework. Facilitators using these tools should have specific training.

Robert Chambers / PRA tradition: Handing over the stick, triangulation, sitting down, optimal ignorance. These principles are widely documented but originate in a specific methodological tradition that deserves citation.

Wang & Burris / PhotoVoice: The SHOWED methodology and the participatory photography framework.

Marshall Ganz / Harvard Kennedy School: Story of Self / Story of Us / Story of Now. Developed in the context of community organising; applies directly to LFTI’s Present phase.

SEEDING INSTRUCTIONS FOR CLAUDE CODE

When seeding the reference instance from this document:

1. Each ### heading under a phase becomes a tool node with type: "tool" and meta._level: "reference".
2. Each phase heading (GATHER, COLLATE, PRESENT) becomes a cycle phase node with meta.phase set accordingly.
3. The PRINCIPLES & ETHOS section becomes a methodology node above the phase nodes, with contains relations to each principle node.
4. Variants listed under a tool become block nodes under the tool node, with sequence relations between them where order matters.
5. Facilitation steps go in the node body, not as child nodes — they are content, not structure.
6. Provenance notes become involves relations pointing to the relevant institution nodes (Kamoto, GLM, etc.) already seeded in the main LFTI tree.
7. Placeholder nodes (Synthesis) get meta._placeholder: true and a body noting what is deferred and why.
8. Cross-cohort versions of tools get meta.context: ["cross-cohort"] and a responds_to relation placeholder.
9. All reference instance nodes get meta._visibility: "partners" — visible to collaborating institutions, not public.
10. The Body Map node gets a specific note: meta._facilitation_owner: "Kamoto/Mary Manzole" and meta._status: "protocol_pending".

← All notes · More from LFTI