About the PNI Practicum
The PNI Practicum is an online course where — there's a cohort of people who are going through it together, and there's a lot of discussion and peer learning and peer support. But the most important thing about it is that everyone does a project. Sometimes people will collaborate on a project, sometimes people do their own project, but everybody through the course of the course is doing a real PNI project. It's not theory. It's not — sit here and we'll show you how to do it. It's — you're doing it.
Now, we do show you how to do it; we have — there's a theory aspect, in which you're reading stuff that I've written, in which we talk about things. There's a sort of participatory aspect in which we go through some of the workshop techniques and you're a participant and I'm facilitating. But to me, the most important part of it is that then you go out and you do that yourself, and then you come back and we talk about what happened. You ask questions, and we all talk about your choices and things like that.
So by the end of the course, you have finished your first real project, and you've made your mistakes in a nice, safe place where you can talk about everything. And we've talked about ways to recover from the different kinds of mistakes. And everybody makes mistakes doing this. You need to do that so you can learn how to do it. But you can then benefit from them and learn from them by working with the whole group together.
The people, I think, who would benefit most from doing the PNI Practicum course are the people who have looked into PNI, have read a little bit about it — maybe they've read a lot about it — but they haven't done it yet. Or they haven't done it very much yet. And they're kind of holding back. They're kind of hesitating over the threshold because they're saying I'm not sure if I can do this. I'm not sure how to really get this under my belt, be capable and feel confident in proposing projects and going ahead with things.
And the idea is that we get you over that threshold. We get you through your first experience so that afterward, if someone says to you, "Oh, here's this project we could do," or you see a need for a project, you can say, "Oh, I know how to do that. we can do that."
Hi. I'm Cynthia Kurtz, and I'm going to answer five questions about the PNI Practicum. First question: What is the PNI Practicum? It's a series of online courses - project based - in which people learn PNI.
Second question: What is PNI? Participatory Narrative Inquiry. It's a blending of two things: Narrative Inquiry, which is a set of techniques in which people study stories to find meaning in them, and Participatory Action Research, which is a thing where people come together to talk about and think about what's going on, and how did it get that way, and what are we going to do about it, and how, and why. So PNI brings these things together to help people share their stories and work with their stories to make decisions, to discover insights, to get along better, to design new things for the future, and to make sense of things that happened in the past.
Second - third question: Why should you take the PNI Practicum? We all share and work with stories every day. It's just part of being human. But paying more attention to it, doing it on purpose, deliberately, to get more out of it is something that has a lot of value. But it's hard to explain that value. You kind of have to experience it to see the value in it. And in the same way, helping people share stories and work with their stories is something that you have to experience to learn. You have to do this work to learn how to do this work. And that's why I wanted to give a project-based course and not just a lecture course. I already wrote a textbook about this, and - but people come to me all the time and say, okay, I read all that, but how do I get started? Can you help me get started? So I've done a lot of coaching in this area. But I wanted to do coaching with a group of people, because I think that would help people more. Also, I'm one of the people who created PNI. I've been working in this area for more than 20 years. So I know what I'm doing, and I can help you.
Next question: What will the PNI course be like? What will happen? Well, you'll do a project. It'll be a project that has meaning to you and your workgroup or family or community or organization. And I will coach you through it. And you'll do it in a cohort of people who are all doing their first PNI projects. So there will be a lot of discussion and peer support and feedback. And I'm excited about that.
So, last question: What will be the outcome? What will you get out of the course? By the time the course is over, you will have finished your first PNI project. Now, I can't guarantee that it's going to go perfectly. But we're all going to work together, and learn together, and do the best we can. And the next time - the next time you have the opportunity to use PNI in whatever it is you do, I think that you'll be ready for it.
So those are the answers to those questions. If you have any more questions, you can send them to me at cfkurtz at cfkurtz.com, and I'll be happy to answer them. Thanks a lot. Have a great day. Bye.
Acknowledgements
Have a question I didn't answer? Send me an email at cfkurtz@cfkurtz.com.