Creating A Participatory Learning Space: A Reflective Case Study of an Embodied, Dialogic Workshop with Rural Preschool Teachers in Sri Lanka

Abstract

This paper presents a reflective case study of a one-day participatory workshop conducted with thirty preschool teachers from the Mundalama area of the Puttalam District, Sri Lanka. Rather than positioning the facilitator as an expert transmitting knowledge, the workshop was deliberately designed as a dialogic, embodied, and strengths-based learning space in which the participants’ own experience was treated as a legitimate source of professional knowledge. Drawing on Freirean critical pedagogy, transformative learning theory, drama-based experiential methods, mindfulness-based body awareness, and the narrative Tree of Life tradition, the workshop moved participants through a structured sequence: dialogic contracting and circle seating; body-awareness and gratitude practice; creative embodied expression; symbolic representation of “the child”; disclosure of trauma and abuse encountered in practice; a trust-based empathy exercise; and a Tree Analysis exploring the structural roots of children’s difficult behaviour. The paper situates this sequence within recent literature on critical pedagogy, trauma-informed early childhood education, embodied and drama-based teacher learning, narrative and strengths-based group methods, and the documented effects of parental migration on left-behind children in South and Southeast Asia. Based on the facilitator’s reconstructed field observations, the participatory structure appeared to be associated with a shift, within the group’s own discourse, from a deficit-based, symptom-level description of children (“aggressive,” “dirty,” “slow”) toward a more compassionate, structurally aware framing of children’s behaviour as communication of underlying adversity. Because this is a single-facilitator, single-session account without independent observation, participant interviews, or systematic coding, this shift is reported as an interpretive finding rather than a demonstrated outcome, and no claim is made about whether it persisted beyond the day. The paper discusses implications for the design of teacher-training programmes serving community-based early childhood educators in low-resource, post-conflict, and migration-affected settings, and it considers the limits of a single-workshop, practitioner-reflective design. It suggests, cautiously, that participatory, embodied pedagogy may be a useful precondition for surfacing the tacit, experiential knowledge that community-based practitioners hold, while noting that this claim awaits testing through more rigorously triangulated designs.