The Department of Communication and Journalism hosted a speaker on Friday who presented on an increasingly utilized tool of social change.
Arvind Singhal, a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, discussed a new approach called positive deviance, which is the belief that, in every community, there are some people who learned how to solve problems against all odds.
Those individuals are deviant because they are not the norm, and they are positive because they solved a problem, he said. The idea is to look at other individuals or groups who are using uncommon strategies or behavior, but are resolving problems with better solutions than others with the same resources.
“Positive deviance is about solving public and social problems: malnutrition, social injustice, teenage pregnancy,” Singhal said. “It solves public issues. You begin by determining the problem, determining if there is a positive deviance and discovering how they deal with the problem in their own way.”
Singhal provided an example of a woman in Vietnam actively feeding her infant children by hand, even though they were capable of feeding themselves, rather than simply teaching them to feed themselves. The mother’s strategy helped solve the problem of malnutrition and excessive waste in Vietnam.
“Positive deviance is an exercise of humility,” he said. “It is not what I know and you don’t, it’s ‘I do not know, does someone else?’”
The positive deviance approach is now utilized in more than 40 countries around the world, Singhal said.
So far, positive deviance has been used to decreases malnutrition and infant and maternal mortality in Vietnam and Pakistan, increase sales and business development in Mexico and the U.S., reduce school dropouts in Argentina and in the U.S., and reduce hospital-acquired infections in the U.S. and Colombia, according to the Department of Communication and Journalism’s website.
Singhal is a professor of communication, as well as the director of the Social Justice Initiative at UTEP. He also holds an appointment as a distinguished professor at Hedmark University College in Norway.
He teaches and conducts research on the diffusion of innovations, the positive deviance approach, organizing for social change, the entertainment-education strategy and liberating interactional structures, according to the Positive Deviance website. His research and outreach spans sectors such as health, education, peace, human rights, poverty alleviation, sustainable development, democracy and governance, civic participation and corporate citizenship.
This approach can be used anywhere and everywhere. According to Singhal, there are ways for students to use positive deviance in their schoolwork and in community work.
“You can use this to frame research questions by asking what is working so you can use it as a tool of research inquiry,” Singhal said. “If you are interested in doing work in the community to change behaviors, you can ask what is the best way to go about certain situations and problems. There are many ways as a student, as a researcher, (or) as a practitioner, to use (positive deviance).”
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Singhal said he hopes the audience at the colloquium walked away knowing that there is hope, that problems have been solved by ordinary people and that everyone can learn from them and do the same.
Denicia Aragon is a staff reporter for the Daily Lobo. She can be contacted at news@dailylobo.com on Twitter @DailyLobo.
