Travor

My most exciting moments at CADES have been from the Research Seminar activities. The Seminar has been the staple of the whole CADES programme for me primarily because it availed an opportunity for to be intimate with the social learning theory. This theory states that people learn from one another. The learning process according to the theory takes various forms including listening, airing out your own views, observing, imitating and modelling. For over seven years, I worked on projects that were underpinned by this theory. Performance indicators of those projects indicated that they had been a success. So this explains why I am a firm believer of processes that are somehow designed to facilitate social learning as does the Research Seminar. Given that the main objective of the research seminar was to facilitate amongst peers co-learning of ethnography, I have come with the word coethnographing to describe my own experience with the Seminar. This word implies learning ethnography from one another by doing it ourselves together. What therefore made CADES more interesting to me is the fact that we did not have a professor/teacher to teach us on how to do ethnography but only a mentor to give general non-hands on guidance and direction. This meant that we had to quickly learn to rely on each other, to support each other, to stand in for each other, to accept and benefit from the diverse perspectives of understanding and interpreting concepts, discourses, practices and phenomena. We learned fortunately early enough in our Seminar journey such that we managed to enjoy much of the time working together. Most of us came out from the research process with affectionate nicknames such as dad, 9, mum J, Boss and this goes on to demonstrate how comfortable and happy we were working together as a group and more importantly how the Seminar has been the most exciting component of CADES for me.