We need to plan ahead

• To be effective, our role starts long before we walk through the door. By speaking with key players in advance, we can learn about the history, dynamics and expectations of the participants.
• We can ask participants about their hopes and “hope-nots” for the learning experience. We blend the insights gained from the participants with our knowledge of the content of the units.
• We can pick up clues from the participant feedback about a format that will fit for the particular group.

There are ways we can help each person to feel heard

• Many people have been discouraged from letting their voices be heard, particularly women and people of minority cultures and colour. As facilitators committed to ensuring every voice is heard, we need an array of approaches that break down barriers to participation in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

We need to remember to work with the whole person

• We bring all parts of ourselves into the room – feelings, beliefs, past experiences, knowledge, skills, bodies and spirit.
• People have a variety of ways of acquiring new knowledge and expressing themselves. We can open doors to learning by using a variety of approaches for learning.
• If we pay close attention to cues, such as tone of voice, body language, eye contact and gut instincts, we can move with the energy of the people in the room.
• If we feel tension, we can name it and ask for guidance from the participants, knowing that together we can create a solution to the problem.

Tapping into learners’ experiences

Adult learners, like all of us, come with a wealth of life experience. Our good and bad experiences have shaped our beliefs and values, our memories, our confidence and our sense of self-worth, and we bring that constellation into every learning situation.

We come to understand people’s life experiences through their stories. The creative challenge is to figure out ways of tapping into those stories. Roots of this approach to learning are partially found in “popular education” (meaning “the people’s education”) and the work of Brazilian adult educator, Paulo Freire.

In their Popular Education Handbook, Rick Arnold and Bev Burke list a set of common characteristics for the popular education approach to facilitation: