Large-group capacitation is an adult education and social psychology concept associated with the Brazilian sociologist Clodomir Santos de Morais, and grounded in the "activity" of the individual and the social psychology of the large group. When applied to the context of the Organization Workshop (OW), which, historically, has been used mainly for the purpose of job creation and income generation, it is known as Metodología da Capacitação Massiva (MCM) in Portuguese, Método de Capacitación Masiva (MCM) in Spanish and as Large-Group Capacitation Method (LGCM) in English.
Coinage
The English term capacitation is a translation of the latino terms capacitação (Portuguese)/capacitación (Spanish).Capacitation marks the generic difference between transitive and intransitive modes of learning and communicating implicit in de Morais' aphorism se aprende, porém não se capacita (Portuguese) : "[The trainee] learns, but is not capacitated". Capacitation, – from capacitação (Portuguese) -, here, is reminiscent of the adult education concept of conscientization – from conscientização (Portuguese) -, popularized by Brazilian theorist, activist and a lifelong friend of Clodomir's, Paulo Freire. While Freire's work was translated into English as early as 1970, de Morais' Organization Workshop (OW) – and, hence, moraisean large-group capacitation (LGC) – did not come to the attention of the English-speaking public until the mid-80s, when the Chilean Social Psychologists I. & I. Labra moved to Zimbabwe and transferred the method to the (southern) African context. Latino texts were initially translated on an 'ad hoc' basis, including the 'dictionary' translation of capacitación (Spanish) as training (English). Cherrett's 1992 first ever translation into English of de Morais' Apuntes de Teoría de la Organización, also, was still referred to as a "Training" Manual. It was not until the ALFA International Conference in Manchester, UK, in 1998, attended by de Morais and academics from four European and four Latin American Universities, that a consensus was reached on the dedicated terms Capacitation and Large Group Capacitation (LGC).
Capacitation in community health, adult education and international development
Capacitation (outside the field of biology) has been used previously, in English, mainly to emphasize educational content which differs from and/or transcends the basic meaning of the English one-size-fits-all training. In some sectors of Community health, "capacitation" is said to be synonymous with empowering training. Capacitation has also historically been used in the area of adult education, starting with Paulo Freire, who, in the seventies, uses the term "Technical Proficiency Capacitation" to refer to a (n adult) learning activity which can "never be reduced to the level of mere training". In the eighties, Capacitation is defined, by the ILO, as: "availability of opportunities for people to build up their capacities to move from the status of object and passive victims of social processes to the status of subjects guided by self-consciousness and active agents of change". The UNRISD (Geneva) had started (in the seventies) to promote the term capacitation as a "problem-solving, educational" alternative to the then prevalent but mainly pragmatic 'social amelioration' approaches to International development. Jan Nederveen Pieterse contrasts "capacitation"/human development, as proposed by alternative or autonomous (aka self-development) theorists – (such as e.g. Korten, 1990; Max-Neef, 1991; Rahman, 1993 and Carmen, 1996), – with "development-as -economic growth" theorists' for whom, according to Pieterse, capital accumulation is the ultimate Development objective. By the mid-nineties, any mention of capacitation had virtually disappeared from the International Development scene, to be replaced by the World-Bank-sponsored Capacity Building<ref>: "Much of southern development practitioners' capacity enhancing practice is in the transitive vein of providing training courses for on one or another identified "capacity need".</ref>(Capacity) "Building": "To build" means "to form by combining materials or parts". According to . "Capacitation", – on the other hand -, "always involves working with the whole – (i.e. the entire process/activity at the same time) – and not with (a) small part(s) of the system". discourse. Although de Morais worked for many years with a range of UN and International Agencies, his "Activity"-based pedagogy never became common currency there, possibly, as Sobrado suggests, because of, among others, its then presumed "Evil Empire" pedigree.