Protocols in Cambodia

This entry is about the work that I've been doing for Cambodian Living Arts here in Phnom Penh--lest you think that I'm all about play and no work for this month-long adventure. I admit that the balance has tilted toward play from my usual day, by quite a bit....but perhaps that's really because the novelty of what I've been doing here shifts what might be thought of as work if I did it all the time (e.g., digging in the dirt, washing endless pottery sherds) into play.

In any case, I was invited to Cambodia to help the core staff of CLA kick off the planning process of the next big summer youth arts festival they will sponsor, in summer 2010. They've done four of these in the past. I was lucky enough to attend the Mohaosrop 2006 with a group of Creative Arts Program students from Watkinson. That festival, and the one in 2007, were held in Battambang, a regional city in the NW of the country, near the Thai border.

Here in Phnom Penh we've held five meetings. The first two were me and Charley and 3 core staff members here: Phany, Seng, and Vithur, all of whom are bilingual. So these meetings could be conducted in English. At the first meeting, I asked each person to talk about their vision for what the Mohaosrop 2010 is: How would they know, when it was over, that it had been a real success? I put these ideas together into a goals statement, which I shared with them at our second meeting, where I also introduced the Tuning Protocol designed by the National School Reform Faculty in the US.

Protocols, for those of you who aren't my colleagues at Watkinson or working in schools associated with the Coalition of Essential Schools, are structured ways of holding a conversation with a group of people so that all voices can be heard and so that clear feedback or outcomes or action plans are generated in a way that is transparent and democratic. Protocols are meant to increase ownership and promote a sense that progress is really happening toward the implementation of a complex purpose.

There are different protocols designed for different purposes. The tuning protocol is used to examine a plan in draft form with an eye to making it better. This method was very new to the staff, and I introduced it as a tool they might want to use. They agreed to try it at our next two meetings, which would include some assistant master teachers and some lead students.

Since those meetings would be in Khmer, and since the process needs to be owned by CLA staff, they had to take on the roles of facilitators and presenters in those meetings. Charley and I sat by. I'm not sure how much of the Khmer Charley understood, but I was left reading body language almost entirely.

The first time we met with the larger group, they tuned two parts of the goals statement I had written and then revised with the staff, and which Vithur had skillfully translated into Khmer. The second time we met with the larger group, they tuned a very preliminary draft of a schedule for an 8-day Mohaosrop 2010, which I had designed based on existing models and which Vithur, bless him, had again translated into Khmer.

The hope is to hold M2010 in Phnom Penh. This is, in itself, a huge logistical challenge: where can some 500 people be housed, cooked for, and fed? Where can workshops of some 30 - 60 people each, about 8 running simultaneously, be held? Where is there a performance space where all 500 could come together for performances, film screenings, and demonstrations of as many as 15 different art forms?

Our larger group meetings--with 2 assistant masters, 5 students, 3 core staff, Charley and me--weren't designed to answer these logistical questions. The necessity for doing so soon has been brought to the fore, though, and work has begun to discover options. This may involve multiple guest houses and two or three other locations as there does not seem to be any space where all necessary functions could happen on one 'campus', as in Battambang. Core staff hope to settle on locations and a budget--clearly tightly linked to the question of locations--by April's board meeting. No small feat! There is always the possibility of returning to Battambang, but as part of the vision is to increase awareness of Khmer arts throughout Cambodia (and the work that CLA and partner organizations like Epic Arts are doing), having the festival in the capital makes good sense.

At each of the larger meetings we held this week, the group went through a timed and structured process to generate warm and cool feedback aimed at improving first the goals statement and then the preliminary schedule with which they were presented. What I liked was seeing how much engagement there was. All the students (both male and female) spoke up. There was both laughter and disagreement. There was pretty easy give and take between the assistant teachers--both people in their 30s or 40s--and the students. I'm not sure this would have been so if Masters had been there. The gap in ages might make it hard, as most Masters are in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. The respect that is to be accorded them might also make voicing alternate points of view difficult. But in this group, the conversation was quite lively. There certainly was discussion around complex issues of long-range importance, such as how and whether it is possible to create new work, to innovate, without damaging or disrespecting traditional forms. There were also predictable pleas for "more free time!" from the students when we looked at the schedule. More extensive feedback was generated--but since I can't follow most conversation in Khmer, I don't know the particulars.

Charley and I had another meeting with core staff this morning to wrap up this phase of the work. It's a first to be 18 months out ahead of a planned event, so this by itself is a good step. By the time we finished talking this morning, we had a lead on a promising site in PP, a timetable for next steps, some preliminary budget estimates, and a preliminary agenda for a gathering of about 75 stakeholders in August of this year to work together on planning M2010. It may be that the participants in our exercises these past ten days will become facilitators of protocols with smaller break out groups this summer. This would give students real practice in leadership roles...an interesting challenge, and one that could be tied to another major initiative underway, which is to write a clear curriculum for all the classes.

All along, I've worried about whether what I could bring to CLA would really be useful. Coming in as an outsider who doesn't know the inside issues and stresses of an organization, or its ethos, and offering to 'help', smacks of arrogance and a kind of well-meant liberal do-gooderism that I hate to embody. Having helped to run a large non-profit youth theater company for years, I know that oft times volunteers, however good their intentions, can make more work than they are worth. In my experience on the receiving end of educational consultation, I have sometimes been underwhelmed. On top of all that, I'm culturally only semi-literate, despite some ten weeks spent in country now over three years, and I don't speak the language. Yikes!

What is, is. I do believe that consciousness matters, and so I reassure myself that the fact that I am AWARE of all these liabilities may mean that I have avoided embodying them to egregious degrees. And finally, of course, it is so thoroughly not about me. I'm relatively sure that my mere presence attached to the project of planning M2010 has propelled that project to the top of the agenda this week. Since the project is so complex, giving core staff an earlier headstart than they might have been able to generate on their own in the face of so many other pressing items--the eviction of their students from the Tonle Bassac slum, the board meeting that will happen the day after tomorrow, the many ongoing projects--is a gift in itself. If some of the process we used is something they choose to adapt and continue to use from time to time, that will be gravy.

In the meantime, people seem pleased. Protocols end with a chance to debrief the process. As can happen, that part of the process was somewhat truncated in our meetings, but the students were very clear that they liked being involved this early and in such a direct way, and the staff has voiced appreciation and relief that a road map is in place. Perhaps the tool of a protocol that generates active discussion rather than passive acquiescence will be useful. In any case, I've done what I can, and I'm at peace with that.