Mistakes Are Great! Experiential Learning and Reflection with Participatory Video

By Sara Asadullah - Keynote speaker

As practiced by InsightShare, participatory Video (PV) is a set of techniques to involve a group or community in shaping and creating their own film. The idea behind this is that making a video can be easy and accessible, and is a powerful way of bringing people together to explore issues, voice concerns or simply to be creative and tell stories.
This process can be very empowering, enabling a group or community to take action to solve their own problems and also to communicate their needs and ideas to decision-makers and/or other groups and communities. As such, PV can be a highly effective tool to engage and mobilisemarginalised people and to help them implement their own forms of sustainable development based on local needs.
At the heart of InsightShare's praxis is a belief in experiential learning and reflection as key ingredients for transformation and growth in self-confidence, for individuals as well as groups.
In this presentation Sara Asadullah will explore InsightShare's methodology, with examples from recent projects.

Biography

Sara Asadullah has been involved with InsightShare since she first took the training course in 2006, after which she joined the team as an intern, then co-facilitator and finally lead facilitator. Now an InsightShare Associate, Sara is one of a team of facilitators working to deliver a 10 month project of 4 stages: capacity building for BRAC Uganda in using Participatory Video for Monitoring and Evaluation.
Further current work includes projects around Indigenous Food Sovereignty with a capacity building training in Meghalaya, North-Eastern India; and a partnership with the ‘Welcome to the UK’ project that supports women newly arrived in the UK, and prepares women in Bangladesh waiting to emigrate. Past work ranges from short projects, conferences, UK training courses, to trainings abroad, and capacity building phases (e.g. Mexico hub, Transparency International, Balkans, Nigeria, Namibia, and Kyrgyzstan). In 2008 she took a sabbatical to complete a Masters in Visual Anthropology and Ethnographic Film in Manchester, where her final film was an observational documentary about different generations of Bengalis living in London.
Sara studied Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Oxford, and worked for Survival International before joining InsightShare. She was attracted by Participatory Video by its potential for giving people a means to self-representation, but remains most excited when people realise their unknown potential during the process, discovering a new understanding of themselves and others.

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