Towards building a competency framework for learning and teaching Participatory Modelling

Participatory modelling (PM) is a craft that is often learnt by training ‘on the job’, and mastered through years of experience. There is little explicit knowledge available on identifying and documenting the skills needed to perform PM. The absence of a curriculum for PM is a barrier for building capacity and expertise in research and practice, and the field’s progression to a mature profession. If we cannot define the fundamental skills needed to perform PM practices effectively and the developmental roadmap towards proficiency, then how will we know if participatory modellers are sufficiently qualified for running projects that deliver on the aspirations (e.g. learning) that PM promises? In the absence of some guidelines, PM teachers are left to rely on a network of peers, scattered research literature, and much trial-and-error for developing their teaching resources and practices. The situation is aggravated by PM being a transdisciplinary craft, with no single discipline of skill set to borrow ideas and recommendations from. The ultimate goal of this presentation is to contribute towards building a pedagogical culture for PM. Creating this culture involves promoting debate, investigations, and evaluations concerning the basic and advanced skills for PM, and educational resources needed to acquire and improve these skills. Towards this goal, we focus our effort on the development of a competency framework to characterise PM skills. Our preliminary inquiry into this topic evolves around three subtopics: (1) reviewing and compiling literature on competencies in problem-solving research areas related to PM (e.g. systems thinking), (2) developing guidelines for the competency framework drawing on literature, past experience and expert opinion, and (3) distilling some critical questions for advancing the pedagogy of PM. We augment our inquiry with a conceptual map that positions and links existing definitions and advancements on competency in terms of their relevance to PM.