Course outline
This training uses a participant-centred pedagogy that integrates theoretical learning with practice-based application. Through a combination of teaching inputs, curated resources, creative tasks, and individual and group exercises, participants engage in an interactive learning process with reflection, discussion, and feedback.
The approach mirrors the methods used in community settings, engaging participants on multiple levels:
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Intellectual (building knowledge through reasoning and exploring cause and effect)
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Emotional (reflecting on personal experience)
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Physical (embodied participation)
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Imaginative (playful, creative exploration).
At its core, this is practice-based learning - you will actively rehearse and apply facilitation tools, rather than only discussing them. In between each session, your self-study will be guided by structured study prompts and practical exercises designed to deepen learning and support the integration of theory into individual practice.
Course
The Building Transformation course covers essential themes in Social and Behaviour Change Communication (SBCC) through participatory theatre methods, enhancing engagement, learning and impact among communities.
Module One
Foundations: theoretical background, participation and SBCC
This week establishes the foundations for the course by exploring participation, social and behaviour change, and the relationship between them. You will be introduced to SBCC as a field of practice, examine a range of theories of change, and learn how these can be translated into community-centred processes through participatory theatre. Together, we will explore how change happens, how to conceptualise it through exercises, interrogate what enables change, and how to co-design an agenda for transformation with a community or target group in ways that make co-creation meaningful rather than superficial. The week also introduces the core principles that distinguish this approach from more conventional top-down SBCC models and tokenistic, 'tick-box' forms of community engagement.
Module Two
People-centred inquiry: participatory research you can use
You’ll learn how participatory social research supports better SBCC and development practice in general. We introduce practical tools you can use to genuinely put people at the centre, avoid extractive data collection and use qualitative, creative, physical and theatre-based techniques alongside quantitive, to plan, deliver, analyse and learn from research.
Module Three
Envisioning change and co-designing communication action
In week three, you’ll practice step-by-step tools for introducing change concepts that link to Theories of Change and build a communication strategy collaboratively. Embodied physical theatre techniques are outlined, demonstrating how Jacques Lecoq’s pedagogy can be combined with Augusto Boal’s transformative methods. For example, integrating push/pull dynamics, image theatre, mask/counter mask, for understanding how lived experience relates to knowledge, attitudes, norms and behaviour, and how interactive pyscho-social learning can be facilitated. This shapes an approach to navigating personal and social issues as well as systems. Feminist and decolonial theory underpin the tools, incorporating power analysis, a step-by-step method for addressing agency and efficacy, and pathways for determining (understanding and influencing) how individuals and groups perceive, interpret, feel, take decisions, act and change.
Module Four
Forum Theatre: from research findings to structuring action
You’ll learn the principles and practice of Forum Theatre as a framework for SBCC and community engagement. We explore how to use games, build stories, and apply narrative, character and improvisation techniques to construct clear engagement exercises for groups, linked to project-design and change objectives. avoiding didacticism or manipulation, and facilitating collective problem-seeing/solving. This week also explores how elements such as plot, dramatic action, character, and internal and external voices can embody different motivators and barriers to change. It then examines how techniques such as image theatre, enactment, and interactive games can be applied to address these barriers and strengthen motivation, both in face-to-face settings and across traditional and social media formats.
Module Five
Creative community engagement and facilitation
Having built stories, communication and engagement tools for your own project, we’ll test the facilitation of these against our theoretical frameworks. You’ll learn how to ensure joint aims are consistently met and how to facilitate participation in relation to specific learning or change objectives. You’ll explore how games, embodied learning, image and forum theatre can be facilitated and identify how you can support community groups to see patterns in knowledge, attitudes, norms, and behaviour – without shame, coercion, or oversimplified binaries – and address barriers to shifting these. Techniques for seeing, deconstructing and re-creating meaning are outlined and individual facilitation styles explored.
Module Six
Delivery, adaptation, and impact measurement with communities
We will review practical steps to deliver your project ethically and effectively, including structures for sharing power, co-facilitation and how adaptive learning cycles can be woven throughout. You’ll also design an impact measurement approach that communities can participate in and explore creative methods for capturing and sharing stories of impact. We will explore systems and power structures: how to work within them, and how to work outside them when needed.
There will be time to reflect upon the project you've designed as well as your learning journey with the course. Highlights from individual projects will be presented for peer review and feedback.
“Honestly, this training was such a breakthrough for me - it brought community engagement to life.
And did this in a a way that felt genuinely practical, creative, deeply human.
We all talk about 'people-centred' but this training properly explains what this is
and how we can do that."
"I came away buzzing with ideas, tools (and more confidence hopefully) to co-create research and action with communities in a way that feels meaningful and real.”
Feedback (annoynomised)
Participants, Building Transformation 2024
Digging into the Lineage
This course draws on on practice-based and academic influences that connect education, development, theatre, power, and decolonial feminist thought. Core influences you’ll encounter include:Paulo Freire (critical pedagogy and dialogue), Robert Chambers (participatory development), Augusto Boal (Forum Theatre and spect-actor practice), and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (decolonising culture, language, and knowledge).
Additional thinkers you may find especially useful (suggested, not required): bell hooks (engaged pedagogy), Linda Tuhiwai Smith (decolonising methodologies), Orlando Fals Borda (participatory action research), Kimberlé Crenshaw (intersectionality and power), Donella Meadows (systems thinking), and key applied theatre scholarship such as Zakes Mda, Dr. Jyotindra Jain, Helen Nicholson, Tim Prentki, and James Thompson (applied theatre ethics, politics, and practice).
On SBCC, we explore how and why “messaging” fails when it is "top-down," interrogating the roles of power, lived constraints, and social norms in enabling or inhibiting change. We'll lean upon Srinivas R. Melkote and H. Leslie Steeves to analyse, use and adapt theories of change to real contexts (including social norms, systems, and behaviour framing).
Digging into the Approach...
What is a physical and forum theatre approach to Communication, Community Engagement and Positive Change?
This approach has been developed over the past two decades by Arts for Action founder Melissa Eveleigh, in close collaboration with participants, community members, and co-facilitators across diverse cultural and humanitarian contexts. It draws on internationally recognised traditions in applied theatre and participatory communication, particularly the physical theatre pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, especially Forum Theatre (Boal, 1979). These are combined with contemporary frameworks in Communication for Development (C4D) and Social and Behaviour Change Communication (SBCC), which emphasise dialogue, participation, and locally grounded meaning-making (Freire, 1970; Servaes, 2008). Central to the approach is the body as a site of knowledge and expression, positioning creativity, play, and embodied practice as critical to learning and transformation. As such, games, exercises, facilitation techniques, and programme designs are rooted in lived experience, enabling participants to explore and rehearse change through action rather than abstraction.
Arts for Action has further evolved participatory and forum theatre methodologies to align with global best practice in community engagement and accountability, including principles of participation, localisation, and empowerment (Cornwall, 2008; Mansuri & Rao, 2013; CDAC Network, 2021). These methods enable community members not only to articulate their own narratives, but to actively shape the direction of communication and change processes. Through structured yet adaptable techniques, communities are supported to design, implement, and facilitate their own interventions, embedding ownership across the project cycle. This includes co-creation, iterative learning, and, where appropriate, the gradual transfer of leadership to local actors. In doing so, the approach moves beyond top-down information dissemination towards dialogic, community-led practice that fosters critical consciousness and collective agency (Freire, 1970), contributing to more sustainable and contextually relevant social change outcomes.