S1 Ep. 14 Exploring the Origin Story of the SHOWED Method: Straight from Roy Shaffer Himself

In this podcast, Bob Strack and Robin Evans-Agnew interview one of the unsung heroes of health promotion practice. Physician-savant Roy Shaffer tells us his story of how he became motivated by his work with marginalized populations as a bush-doctor in Kenya to develop one of the first community-health-worker (CHW) programs to provide education and reliable data collection in hard to reach communities. Amidst a big push by the World Health Organization at that time to develop such programs, Roy was inspired by the newly published work of Paulo Freire to push for empowerment and engagement methods for health promotion. A developer of several useful mnemonics for education, Roy developed the SHOWeD questioning method for encouraging emancipatory dialogue between CHW's and the villagers in the places he would fly into. In this podcast we learn that Nina Wallerstein probably learned about the SHOWeD strategy from Roy during a trip she made to Kenya at that time, including it in her and Ed Bernstein's classic (1988, HEQ) article on empowerment education.

In the 1990's Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris adapted the SHOWeD questioning strategy for employment in photovoice, where it remains the principle questioning strategy used by practitioners and researchers to this day.