A face-to-face training on Participatory Research (PR) will be organized by PRIA in the week of July 17-21, 2017 at its Delhi head office for a team coming from Bangladesh, comprising of nine people. The trainees are mostly practitioners with varying experience and engaged with different civil society organizations (OXFAM, Pollisree, Centre for Natural Resource Studies (CNRS) and Sushilan). The face to face component is the second phase of the training program and follows the online component, which was the first phase. The participants were given access to the online course on ‘International Perspectives of Participatory Research’ (run by PRIA International Academy (PIA) on moodle platform), two weeks prior to the face-to-face training, to enable the development of a common understanding of PR concepts among them.
While the online component comprised the initial orientation of PR; more detailed concepts like perspectives, approaches, methods, steps, application etc. will be dealt with in the face-to-face component. Here, the trainees will also have an opportunity to practice the concepts and gain an understanding on the applications of PR. The week long training program includes classroom facilitation for the first three days, a field visit to Panipat on the fourth day to witness PR methods in practice, and finally, debriefing and consolidation on the fifth day. The participants are expected to prepare a research design by the end of the training, which they would then pursue on their return to Dhaka. The facilitators of the face to face training include Dr Rajesh Tandon, Founder-President, PRIA; Dr Sumona DasGupta, Senior Visiting Fellow, PRIA; Dr Kaustuv Kanti Bandyopadhyay, Director, PRIA; Dr Alok Pandey, Deputy Director, PRIA among others.