Climbing the Ladder? Community Perspectives on Learning to Be a Good Citizen in Uganda

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Climbing the Ladder? Community Perspectives on Learning to Be a Good Citizen in Uganda © 2022 the Authors Published version Bananuka, Twine H.; Kontinen, Tiina; Holma, Katariina Bananuka, T. H., Kontinen, T., & Holma, K. (2022). Climbing the Ladder? Community Perspectives on Learning to Be a Good Citizen in Uganda. In K. Holma, & T. Kontinen (Eds.), Learning, Philosophy, and African Citizenship (pp. 197-213). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94882-5_11 2022 Climbing the Ladder? Community Perspectives on Learning to Be a Good Citizen in Uganda Twine H. Bananuka, Tiina Kontinen, and Katariina Holma 1Introduction This chapter examines the ways in which members of a rural community in Western Uganda perceive and conceptualize diverse ways of learning to be a good citizen. It analyzes data generated by means of a tool called the ‘ladder of citizenship’, which facilitated explication of local ideas concerning good citizenship, and reflections on how one can ‘climb the ladder’, thus learning to be a better citizen. In relation to the debates on conceptualizations of citizenship in ways additional to the state-citizen relationship (e.g. Clarke et al., 2014; Lazar & Nuijten, 2013), we are particularly inspired by Kabeer’s (2005: 3) emphasis on the importance of T. H. Bananuka Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda T. Kontinen (B) University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] T. H. Bananuka ·K. Holma University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2022 K. Holma and T. Kontinen (eds.), Learning, Philosophy, and African Citizenship, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94882-5_11 197 198 T. H. BANANUKA ET AL. exploring citizenship based on how ‘people define themselves in different contexts, how they see themselves in relation to others, and what this implies for their understanding of citizenship in the world as they know it’. Citizenship is often discussed as something that can be learned or strengthened through education. These discussions always contain an idea—although it is sometimes implicit—about the direction in which citizenship should be strengthened and the ideals underlying the notion of good citizenship which should be learned. Additionally, there are at least implicit ideas of how the learning leading to good citizenship is supposed to happen. In this chapter, we focus on local conceptualizations of how one learns good citizenship. The chapter utilizes two theoretical ideas. First, the concept of cultural citizenship (Delanty, 2003)—which understands citizenship as a continuous learning process that takes place through interaction in informal settings—is used to scrutinize learning that occurs in the everyday life of a community. Second, the notion of folk pedagogies, introduced in the cultural approach to learning (Bruner, 1996), guides our examination of people’s own conceptualizations of learning. Folk pedagogies refer to everyday rather than academic theories concerning models of what learning is. In this chapter, the notion enables us to focus on community members’ own ideas about how one might learn to be a good citizen. Although coming from different research fields, both Delanty’s and Bruner’s theories draw on similar views of culture as an arena where meanings are continuously constructed in interaction with others. Therefore, in line with these theoretical approaches, and instead of departing from detailed academic definitions of citizenship and learning, the starting point of the chapter is to engage with the meanings of citizenship and learning articulated by community members. Overall, this chapter seeks to answer the question: How do community members conceptualize the diverse ways in which they learn to be good citizens? Examining local ideas of good citizenship in rural communities is especially relevant in contexts where non-governmental organizations (NGOs) implement diverse initiatives to strengthen citizenship. To be feasible and sustainable, these initiatives need to build on existing conceptualizations of what good citizenship is and how it would be possible to support learning processes leading towards it. We explore the question in the context of Western Uganda, where one NGO, the Kabarole Research and Resource Centre (KRC), has interacted with rural communities through projects which are based on the principle CLIMBING THE LADDER? COMMUNITY PERSPECTIVES … 199 that civic competences go hand in hand with economic liberation (KRC, 2017). Most likely, many ideas concerning good citizenship articulated by community members in this study reflect their interactions with the KRC. Nevertheless, our main interest is not to explore only the ideas they have learned from the NGO or evaluate the influence of its programmes, but to analyze the meanings attached to learning good citizenship in general. In what follows, we first discuss the concepts of cultural citizenship and folk pedagogies which inform our analysis. Then we provide a brief description of the study location and the methods used, before briefly describing the notion of good citizenship that holds in the area and presenting our main findings on their conceptualizations of diverse ways of learning good citizenship. In conclusion, we discuss these ideas in the context of our two theoretical sources of inspiration—Delanty’s theory of cultural citizenship and Bruner’s theory of folk pedagogies—and reflect on the implications of our findings for local development efforts revolving around strengthening citizenship. 2Cultural Citizenship and Folk Pedagogies In this section, we discuss our conceptual approach to examining learning of what is perceived as good citizenship. Our main starting point is to define citizenship as a contextual phenomenon that entails an idea of continuous learning taking place in diverse ways. We draw on the notion of cultural citizenship suggested by Gerard Delanty (2003)and the cultural approach to learning proposed by Jerome Bruner (1996). In both, culture is understood as continuous meaning-making, where ideas are constructed in interaction with others by using and transforming the available cultural resources. These notions guide our examination of local ideas of citizenship and learning processes in the particular context of the rural communities under study. The notion of cultural citizenship (Delanty 2003; Stevenson, 2012) approaches citizenship from the point of view of socio-cultural identity. Delanty (2003) differentiates the notion of cultural citizenship from what he calls disciplinary citizenship, which encompasses formal membership in a polity, usually a state. According to him, cultural citizenship differs from both liberal and communitarian ideas; rather, he suggests a cultural arena of citizenship where individual and social learning intertwine, and where beliefs, values and culture are preserved and shaped. Moreover, 200 T. H. BANANUKA ET AL. cultural citizenship is highly contextual and is shaped in spontaneous ways through coping with lifestyles and survival. For Delanty (2003: 602), cultural citizenship ‘is a learning process’ wherein common experience, cognitive process, cultural translation and empowerment gain more salience than citizenship as formal membership and the consequent learning of rights and responsibilities accompanying it. He categorizes citizenship learning using three intertwined levels: individual biography, the cultural level and the social level (ibid.: 601). For the individual, citizenship is learned through their life history, both through interpersonal interaction and increasing self-knowledge. Cultural level learning refers to the collective learning of symbolic forms and cognitive models that provide shared interpretations of the world. Social level learning embodies cultural level learning in an institutional form, enabling social change to occur. In cultural citizenship, these learning levels intertwine in a process that Delanty (ibid.) refers to as the construction of citizenship. Here, citizenship is understood as continuously evolving and, thus, also having the potential to transform. Drawing on Delanty’s notion of cultural citizenship, we scrutinize citizenship as a learning process taking place in the space between the individual and communities. Our starting point is that rural communities in Uganda present a context for constructing citizenship through informal learning that occurs in the course of participation and interacting with others. Additionally, the construction of citizenship taking place in a particular community is intertwined with cultural meanings, especially those articulated in the vocabularies used when citizenship is discussed, and the beliefs and values that guide ideas of what is regarded as good citizenship to which it is worth aspiring. Departing from the notion of cultural citizenship as a learning process in which citizenship is constructed and transformed, we aim to examine how the idea of learning itself is understood by community members. Whilst there are plenty of diverse theoretical accounts of individual (Kolb, 1981) and social (Bandura, 1977) learning, less research has been done on people’s own explanations of what they consider as learning and how learning takes place. In our effort to grasp these phenomena, we draw on Bruner’s (1996) notion of folk pedagogies, which incorporates diverse explanations for learning and perceptions of the interaction between mind and action (Bruner 1996; Ili´c&Bojovi´c, 2016). Bruner (ibid.: 46) suggests that in the practice of education and learning, whether in a classroom or any other setting, there are implicit ‘folk theories’ about learning CLIMBING THE LADDER? COMMUNITY PERSPECTIVES … 201 in play. These folk pedagogies might resonate with academic learning theories, but they are everyday ideas about mind and learning. Whilst Bruner mainly discusses folk pedagogies in the teacher-learner relationship, he also connects the notion of folk pedagogies with a wider ‘cultural approach’ to the mind and learning. He discusses the cultural approach in contrast to the ‘computational’ one where mind and learning are geared around information processing. The cultural approach emphasizes that learning takes place in cultural settings that provide tools for construction of meanings (ibid.: 4). Cultural meanings play a role in how people understand the mind, learning and, further, ideal society and the ideal citizen (ibid.: 5). According to Bruner (1996: 63), people often hold both externalist and internalist theories of learning. The former focuses on how learning can be supported from outside and the latter on how learning is based on the intentional states of learners, thus, not only referring to cognitive capabilities, but also to beliefs, wishes and emotions (Ili´c&Bojovi´c, 2016). Under these two dimensions, Bruner (1996: 53) further proposes four models of learners’ minds which can guide teaching and also illustrate a range of ideas concerning learners and learning in general. These models perceive learners as imitators, as subject to didactic exposure, as thinkers and as knowledgeable. When a learner is perceived as an imitator, learning is mainly seen as following the models provided by teachers and mentors, and the skills and knowledge learned are taken-for-granted and neither negotiated nor subjected to critical reflection. In a similar vein, perceiving learning as resulting from didactic exposure includes the idea of unquestioned knowledge being presented to learners, as in many conventional classroom situations. These ideas emphasize the external generation of learning. The models that focus on the internal dimensions of learning, according to Bruner (1996: 56–61), include perceiving learners as thinkers and learners as knowledgeable. The former category pays attention to what the learner already thinks and strives to achieve, with learning aiming to develop these ideas through discussion and interaction. The latter refers to learning where the information provided is critically assessed and may be given credit or discredited based on the knowledge the learner already has. Inspired by the general concept of cultural citizenship as a learning process and folk pedagogies as diverse ideas concerning learning, our next step is to examine how these are demonstrated in the particular context described in what follows. 202 T. H. BANANUKA ET AL. 3Study Context and Methodology This chapter draws on a study that was carried out in the communities of Kanyatete and Busaiga in Harugongo Sub-County, Kabarole District in Western Uganda. The inhabitants of the two communities are peasant farmers engaged in subsistence agriculture. In distinction from many other similar rural communities, here most people have no land and therefore rent it from a few rich landowners, which makes them vulnerable due to unstable markets and fluctuating prices for their produce. The Kabarole Research and Resource Centre (KRC), a Ugandan development NGO, has been partnering with these communities for the last 25 years. The KRC’s engagement has been in the fields of agricultural production and processing on the one hand, and civic education on the other, drawing on the philosophy that civic competence goes hand in hand with economic empowerment. Data generation was designed with the KRC who also facilitated building close contacts with the communities. The research team decided to use the tool referred to as the ‘ladder of citizenship’ to facilitate community members’ explications. The tool is based on the familiar image of a physical ladder used in construction and it has been previously used by Arnstein (1969) to illustrate a continuum of citizenship participation. In our study, the ladder’s rungs represented a journey towards what was considered good citizenship, which is at the top of the ladder; this initiated discussion on possible ways to climb the ladder and learn to be a good citizen. Together with study participants, we drew the ladder and accompanying illustrations on any surface available, such as the floor, tables, paper or walls (see examples in Fig. 1). The ladder of citizenship was used during qualitative interviews (n=37), and the issues arising were further discussed in four focus-group discussions with a total of 52 individual participants. The analysis and interpretations are supported by the first author’s prolonged stay in the communities, where he participated in community meetings, farming groups, church services, Village Savings and Loans Association (VSLAs) meetings and other activities. Moreover, after initial analysis, dissemination meetings in each community were arranged, joined by major stakeholders such as the KRC, local government officials and other opinion leaders. For this chapter, the interview and discussion transcripts were analyzed thematically (Bradley et al., 2007), first identifying instances where ‘good citizenship’ was defined, and second, places in CLIMBING THE LADDER? COMMUNITY PERSPECTIVES … 203 Fig. 1 Samples of field participatory discussion frames of ‘ladder of citizenship’ (Source Author’s own field photo) which the acquisition and learning of the characteristics of perceived good citizenship were discussed. The concrete articulations of learning were further combined into five categories, which illustrate the diverse ways in which learning was conceptualized. 4Local Conceptualizations of Learning Citizenship In this section, we present our findings on the diverse ways in which local community members conceptualize their learning of good citizenship. We begin by briefly describing the general characteristics of good citizenship as explicated in participants’ reflections on how to situate people on different rungs of the ladder of citizenship. We then offer a more detailed analysis of diverse ways of learning and acquiring what was considered good citizenship qualities, based on the analysis of discussions with participants about moving up and down the ladder of citizenship. The Characteristics of ‘good Citizenship’ In order to grasp local conceptualizations of good how citizenship may be learned, we start with a brief description of understandings of citizenship in this particular context. In the contexts of other Ugandan rural communities, Ndidde et al. (2020) claimed that the meanings assigned 204 T. H. BANANUKA ET AL. to ‘citizenship’ by community members mainly revolved around local membership in the community, rather than legal status or membership of the polity of the Ugandan state. This resonates with Delanty’s (2003) remark that a process of citizenship construction takes place in a particular community via its common beliefs and interests, and the shared meanings used to make sense of the world. Shared meanings are closely connected with the language and vocabularies used. In the local language or dialect, Rutooro, which was used in the interviews and other interactions, the word omwikazi was used to translate the English term ‘citizen’. Omwikazi literally refers to resident or member of a community, county or country more broadly. Thus, it was used to describe community membership at different levels, and further, at the national level, where it acquires legal status. However, when the research participants discussed the ladder of citizenship, their meanings revolved mostly around local residency and good community membership, whereas citizenship as membership in the state was rarely discussed, even when prompted. In local accounts, omwikazi was perceived as attaching to a person who has lived long enough in the community to be accepted, has a source of livelihood and a known address. As one of the participants explained, ‘Citizenship occurs when a person stays in an area for a long time and works with people in that area in one way or another, and sleeps in their home.’ In a similar vein, the characteristics of good citizenship, obwikazi oburungi, were also usually reflected on in relation to what was considered the behaviour of a good member of the local community. Characteristics, such as a good home, hard work and self-sustainability were central to good citizenship: ‘A good citizen is one who ensures that her home is clean, and her children sleep well.’ Having a stable source of income and the economic ability to ‘educate one’s children’ were central qualities enabling one to climb the ladder. Furthermore, good relations with others as well as the ability and willingness to help others in need were seen as important. A good citizen is expected to participate in joint activities, such as cleaning community water sources and helping at burial ceremonies. Good citizenship also involves subscription and allegiance to acceptable beliefs and community values expressed in local culture and religion. Occasionally, it was also mentioned that good citizens ought to abide by government rules and regulations, as when one participant claimed, ‘A good citizen in the village must have good relations with CLIMBING THE LADDER? COMMUNITY PERSPECTIVES … 211 5Discussion and Conclusions The overall aim of this chapter was to investigate the meanings of citizenship and learning as constructed in certain locations. This starting point was inspired by, on the one hand, Delanty’s (2003) idea of citizenship as a continuous learning process encompassing individual, cultural and social levels, and on the other, by Bruner’s (1996) notion of folk theories of learning. In what follows, our findings on local conceptualizations will be discussed through the lens of Delanty’s and Bruner’s theoretical ideas. In community members’ descriptions, good citizenship revolved around being a good resident of the locale and a good member of the community. This included having a good home, being hard-working and self-sustaining in terms of livelihood, being socially engaged and willing to participate in common activities and help others in need. This mainstream of the findings resonates with Delanty’s notion of cultural citizenship as a continuously constructed socio-cultural identity. In some instances, what Delanty terms disciplinary citizenship also occurred. The role attached to local government officials of instructing people in the nature of good citizenship and punishing those who fail can be seen as a manifestation of state’s disciplinary citizenship. Moreover, stressing the importance of mutual help, in addition to being a sign of communality, also demonstrates how the ideals of good citizenship as a contributing and helpful community member are closely related to the political and societal condition of the absence of the state as provider of social protection in the event of hardship. Delanty (2003: 601) categorized learning of citizenship under three intertwined levels: individual biography, the cultural level and the social level. Our findings reflect the intertwining of sources of learning citizenship. Some categories, such as heredity and challenges, reflected individual biography, whilst others, such as copying, acknowledged learning through interaction in acquiring and potentially changing the prevalent cultural meanings attached to good citizenship. The identified notions of learning also resonate with Bruner’s suggestion that certain folk theories of learning focus on internal sources of learning, whilst others stress the external. However, the overall themes in conceptualizations of learning were that, first, they were closely tied to community values and beliefs about what a good citizen is, and second, 212 T. H. BANANUKA ET AL. they reflected, in a one way or another, combinations of social interaction and personal understandings, sometimes as a result of intentional education, sometimes of what was happening in informal spaces. Taking a closer look on Bruner’s (1996) theory, some further points of contact can be identified. For example, stress on copying resonates with Bruner’s idea of learners as imitators, whereby the practices, ideas and behaviour of the more respected members of the community are imitated by the rest. Learning through the education provided by NGOs or the church demonstrates Bruner’s ‘didactic exposure’ scenario. The internal dimension was mostly reflected in the category of challenges, when the realization that one was not regarded as being a good citizen resulted in changes in attitudes and behaviour. To conclude, the meanings attached to the notion of good citizenship by community members were mixture of cultural beliefs, government regulations, religious guidelines and ideas introduced by NGOs. Local understandings of how good citizenship is constructed and the ways of learning it, of climbing the ladder of citizenship, are important for development workers and NGOs seeking to empower citizens. Identification of local understandings of cultural citizenship and the folk theories held on ways of learning it are vital in order to embed interventions in the local context to ensure their relevance, sustainability and resonance with the local priorities. References Arnstein, S. 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