Thank you to #FacPower contributor Stephen Berkeley and his co-authors Dolores Cummins, Bob Dick, Geof Hill, Cathryn Lloyd, Graham Miller and Ian Plowman for this new paper drawing on their lived experiences in a form of collaborative practice-led inquiry.
As we prepare to launch new translations of the original book The Power of Facilitation during International Facilitation Week #FacWeek in September (watch this space!) the #FacPower team is considering publishing more new writing that supports our mission to promote the power of facilitation worldwide.
If you have suggestions, and if you may be interested to contribute, please contact us!
At a table with seven facilitators (PDF)
Abstract
The practice of facilitation came into the conversations about higher and adult education in the mid 1980s. For many practicing Facilitators, it is a matter of getting on with the job. Every once in a while, one is presented with a question about one’s facilitation and this invites a level of reflection that helps to illuminate the practice.
This paper explores such an event in which seven facilitators contemplated the initial stages of developing facilitation and adding it to one’s professional repertoire of practice. The paper draws on the lived experiences of its authors in a form of collaborative practice-led inquiry. In so doing it presents a plethora of insights into the initiation of acquiring facilitation in one’s repertoire that reflect the diversity of voices and inputs.
Introduction
This paper and this inquiry were undertaken in a context of practice-led inquiry (Gray, 1996) in that the focus of the inquiry arose out of its’ authors shared lived experiences and involved the authors reflecting on their individual and mutual practice. The authors of this paper are members of a community of practice (Wenger 2000) that has been meeting regularly since 2014 to share their experiences the art of facilitation and action learning. The community of practice was initiated as an exercise for one of the community members to enable her to explore her own facilitation of action learning, and it has continued as a working/practice community, with some changes in membership, since then.
This study has been undertaken as collaborative autoethnography (Norris, Sawyer, & Lund, 2012) based on a conversation on Friday April 14th 2023 between the seven authors.
To read on, download the full paper at :
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