To track changes or document the history of a community or organisation.
By capturing the chronology of events as perceived and recalled by local people, a timeline provides details of historical landmarks or events. This tool provides an excellent opportunity for older people to participate and contribute.
A timeline is an effective way of tracking changes in relation to a particular issue over time and predicting future events on the basis of past experience. It can bring out powerful associations between cause and effect, and can be used to improve planning and preparedness, looking ahead and determining small steps that, over a period of time, might lead to a large change. A timeline can help to:
Explain to the participants that the objective is to outline the history of the village/community/organisation.
It's good to have elderly people participate in this exercise, but it may be impossible to pinpoint the accurate year of events. The facilitator may have to lead discussions that help the group agree on the most accurate approximation of the time. It is important to ensure that older women are consulted as well as older men and to triangulate all information received. People may get nostalgic about past events and digress into discussions around this. The facilitator must therefore keep the conversation focused on the topic.
Literacy - Ask the participants to copy the timeline into their books, adding the dates of major events in their own lives – such as when they were born and when they were married, when they gave birth to children or when family members or close friends died etc. Help the participants who need help and get those who finish first to help others. Then ask participants to write a few lines about an important event in their lives. Read all these out and write some of them up on the board for others to copy. With some, you could ask the participants to read them out very slowly, word by word and see if the others can write them down. Other literacy activities might include: interviewing elders in the village and writing oral histories (perhaps borrowing a tape recorder to help), writing oral histories, planning an annual day to commemorate a major local event (or person) which might otherwise be forgotten, making plaques to mark the places where significant things happened.
Numeracy - Some calculations based on dates can be introduced. Try to develop mental arithmetic skills to begin with by asking participants how many years there are between various events. In some cultures, translation from the local calendar to the international calendar could also be the basis for various calculations.