The idea behind multilingual facilitation in community organising is to give voice to the people who would not be able to express their opinion precisely enough in the target language, although the topic of discussion concerns them directly. This is why, when decision makers decide to include some representatives of migrant communities in the decision making process, these are often either well educated with high enough cultural and economic capital that comes with expertise in the target language (while not necessarily being representative of the majority of people that the concrete issue affects) or, if the conditions in place do not allow for discussion in the expert language, they are subjected to tokenism. This is a simple tool that can increase participation in a group process and discussions. It allows for discussions to be held in smaller groups and in different languages, and then reported back to the larger group.
You will need:
Shared language groups work if there are enough people who share each expert language to form smaller groups. Although pairs might work as well, we found that it is better to have small groups, of 3-6 people, as that will allow for more different perspectives.
Time:
This technique works best in situations where you would in any case divide participants into smaller groups, as it then does not require any additional time. But even in the cases where, in a monolinguistic situation, there would be only one plenum discussion, the possibility to first discuss the matter in smaller groups and then refer to the plenum will not prolong the total time by more than 10-20% (if you planned for a hour-long discussion in plenum, add around 10 extra minutes if you plan to have group discussion and then referring).
Step-by-step
1 – Check the languages that are spoken in the room. This does not mean that everybody will necessarily use their first language, but every person in the group should be comfortable with the shared language.
2 – Divide the group based on the shared language.
3 – Present the question. Make sure that the question is well understood by all.
4 – Discuss the question in groups. The length of discussion will depend upon the specifics of the situation.
5 – Each group summarises and presents their discussion.
Tips
It is crucial that the groups understand the question well for this tool to work. You can always combine it with other tools, such as images, or theatre. For example, we wanted to discuss different ways people understood and related to power. We started with inviting everyone from the group to write the word “power” in their own language (which also spurred discussion, since not everyone immediately agreed on what an appropriate translation would be). We then used a theatre game from the Boal’s arsenal: there are four chairs, and a person from the group needs to organise them in a way as to symbolically illustrate that one has more power than the other three. In the original game the discussion about how we perceive the chairs, and power relationship between them would be done in plenum, but since the room did not share one common expert language, we divided the group in two smaller groups, one that spoke Arabic (with less than half of group being native Arabic speakers) and one that spoke English (with no native English speakers). Since everyone had expert proficiency in either Arabic or English, the discussion was much more engaging and fruitful than it would be had we insisted on using only one language.
