attended a workshop on Critical Facilitation
The reading material arrived in my inbox on a Wednesday, five days before the workshop was due to start.
It was from a 2016 book: “Applied Theatre: Facilitation Pedagogies, Practices, Resilience”, by Sheila Preston. Chapter 1 presented a case study where:
a member of a mental health institution expressed his disquiet at the idea that other members of the group were happy to perform, in public, a play about the experience of mental illness. He felt uncomfortable with the association and that they would be representing “him”.
Indeed, any intervention – which may sometimes be a facilitated workshop, or a staged theatre production – may run the risk of reproducing dominant narratives, leading to anxiety and sensitivity among the disenfranchised.
What then is the role of a facilitator in this social and cultural system that surrounds the facilitator on all sides – whether at the family dinner table, or at the workplace desk, or during the morning commute?
I attended a workshop to find out – it lasted fourteen hours over two days, 10 AM to 5 PM each day.
The host, H.L., was candid about the setting of the workshop: “Workshops are romantic. They allows participants to meander on topics. After the workshop ends, the participants – and their accumulated know-how – are tested by the reality that awaits them outside of the workshop venue.”
The books referenced in this workshop did not make for light reading:
- “Theater of the oppressed”, a book by Augusto Boal (a Brazilian).
- “Pedagogy of the oppressed”, a book by Paulo Freire (another Brazilian).
- “Games for Actors and Non-Actors”, by the same Boal.
Time does not suffice to elucidate the proceedings of the workshop in detail. Nonetheless I attempt a sketch.
The participants numbered about thirty. Most appeared to be in mid-career, whether as a facilitator of workshops within a large, top-down organisation, or as a founder of a small enterprise.
H.L. started the workshop by inviting participants to set the rules of engagement.
Two participants collaboratively volunteered the first rule: “Hold space for each other's choices”.
Another rule was volunteered: “have fun”.
As a group of strangers coming together for the first time, this first activity served as scaffolding for the next seven hours of the first day.
H.L. introduced the “banking” concept of education (from Freire's book) where students are seen as docile cabinets that store the knowledge that trickle down from the teachers' authority-position; think: large imposing teacher's desk in the classroom, and quite possibly a punitive device, such as a rattan cane.
But H.L. draws from Freire's idea of the problem-posing method: here is a problem that has emerged; how shall we solve it together? This dissolves the dichotomy between teacher and student. In Freire's words (as translated by Myra Bergman Ramos):
“He [the teacher-student] does not regard cognizable objects as his private property, but as the object of reflection by himself and the students. In this way, the problem-posing educator constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The students – no longer docile listeners – are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers his earlier considerations as the students express their own. The role of the problem-posing educator is to create, together with the students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doxa is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of the logos.”
H.L. has his own spin on this afore-mentioned “re-considering of earlier considerations” – he coins the term: Negation Of Negation. (A heady brew of words, for sure).
In other words, the facilitator considers the downsides of the participants' choices, and then performs an intellectual leap to re-consider his own thoughts about the supposed down-sides – what if I go along with the participants' choices? What choices would be lost? What would be gained?
This idea could certainly be lost in a stew of cerebral-sounding words that ring hollow for participants and clients of the facilitator, so H.L. has provided a role model during this workshop, by having all 30 of us engage in activities that involved our physical bodies. This were games titled: “Take my name”, and “Sword and shield”.
“Learning involves the body and the emotions,” H.L. observed.
After the games, we sat down and formed a pair to discuss what happened during the game. This was particularly insightful as every one of us (30 pax) had brought a refreshing perspective based on our differing professional experiences: for example, one was a theatre performer, while another was a social worker.
According to H.L., the praxis of building possibilities together in such a teacher-student collective exploration, comes from (a) action and then, (b) reflection.
There was certainly plenty of time for games, and plenty of time to reflect on how the game illuminated these aspects:
- What did I notice about me as a person?
- What did I notice about Facilitation?
- What did I notice about myself as a facilitator?
In retrospect, I realise that the game serves as the problem-posing method. What happened in the game just now? How can we play better the next time?
This brings me back to the topic of this workshop, Critical Facilitation. Such a process of Critical Facilitation serves a dual purpose: (a) identifying the forces at play, in a oppressive dynamic – for example, to consider a dynamic between an alcoholic father, and his worker-children who toil away in sweatshops to send him money to feed his alcoholic addiction: there may be a toxic dependence on each other, and that is why the children are reluctant to leave: they rely on any crumbs of affection from the father, while the father is unable to find a job due to an economy that prioritises cheaper labour from women, and then he feels useless, and then he drinks to numb his pain.
A workshop setting (hopefully) allows the disenfranchised to build the world they live in, giving a voice to tensions that exist in this situation but which may have gone unheard during the outside-workshop setting. H.L. quotes Thomas Hardy here: “The caller always calls but is not heeded. That is why love falls through.”
Question: can the caller be heeded in a facilitated workshop?
But such a singular purpose is not enough. Critical Facilitation serves the second purpose of (b) imparting skills so that participants can make change after the workshop, as they return to their communities, in the hopes that they themselves can participate in such change.
A question for myself: what kind of skill might be useful to an adult child of an alcoholic father?
I think, perhaps that might look like instilling a greater sense of confidence in that individual's own gut feeling and intuition, which may likely have been buried under the shame of having been abused verbally and physically by the addict-father.
But, in the spirit of curiosity, and to apply Negation Of Negation, perhaps my above-ventured intervention could run the risk of being repulsively prescriptive – perhaps a facilitator could more skillfully serve the adult child by being asking what he, or she, wants – or what she (i.e. the adult child) finds helpful and what she finds unhelpful.
However H.L. sounds a caution for any would-be facilitator, by quoting a Jewish proverb: “When humans plan, God laughs.”
This corresponds with the Biblical Book of Proverbs, chapter 19, verse 21: “Many are the plans in a person's heart, but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails.”
At this point, I want to end this short reflection by listing the question that H.L. has invited us to carry out of the workshop venue:
- What did this space just admit?
- What limits us here?
- What will you bring into your space of practice?
Thank you for reading.