Because the learning process sees the learner's autonomy and self-direction as the key to success, it focuses on the learner's ability to apply what they have learned, not just in one context, but in many areas of their lives. In the specific field of employability and labour orientation the need for a professional role of adult educators as facilitators of such more holistic training and providing counselling, guidance, accompany, reflection is of high importance.
From a methodological and organizational point of view, this type of education requires variability and breadth in order to respond appropriately and flexibly to the needs and situations of learners. Educators are more than elsewhere companions of the learners in a process in which learning takes place facing real challenges. In pedagogy, the term facilitation has come to describe this changed perspective on learning.
Facilitating a training can be very different than the kind of teaching that often takes place in schools. Traditionally, a teacher is a person who primarily disseminates knowledge. Facilitation, on the other hand, involves accompanying people during a learning process in which they develop competencies. Educators create the right conditions for individuals to form knowledge and skills in a self-directed way, according to their specific needs. This is one aspect of empowerment. Our profession is better understood with a new definition: a shift from teaching to facilitating, moderating, and encouraging.
Contents
Recognizing Existing Knowledge
Facilitation builds on individual’s pre-existing knowledge, skills, capacities and potential. Do you trust in your learner's capacity to act successfully? This is described as resource orientation.
Facilitation is more than simply allowing each person to do whatever they want. Educators still use specific knowledge and guide learners. Facilitation involves granting your participants’ experience and knowledge more relevance than it has in traditional teaching. In this sense, facilitation is a step toward sharing expertise and appreciation, from vertical toward horizontal knowledge acquisition.
- More: Resource Orientation.
The difference between facilitating empowerment and traditional education lies in the attitude toward the learners. A facilitative attitude actively seeks to link experiences in a seminar situation in a cooperative way with the resources of the participants (life experiences, knowledge, competences, ...).
Considering that participants or learners have different learning styles, Adult Education educators' methodological skills help a group to bring their motivation and interests into play. Facilitation helps learners to find motivation, identify goals, develop action strategies, reflect on their existing skills and identify challenges.
The educators' moderation skills are used here also to enable the group to take responsibility in form of shared leadership. This has consequences for the educator’s position within the learning group.
The challenge is to find the position that works best for the learning process as a whole. With regard to your role, you might face specific questions, such as: Do I need to explain something here or should I focus on active group work? What part of the explanation that I have prepared is really useful?
Relationships
When the boundaries between educators and participants become more fluid, challenges for educators can arise. Sharing the same vision of how communication and collaboration should happen and a common ground for a democratic learning culture are prerequisite for a trusting atmosphere where participants can open up. In this sense, participants and educators are equals.
On the other hand, situations continually come up where educators have to provide orientation, act as a role model, or inspire others through their experience or expertise.
In a shared and holistic learning environment, educators are also included in the process, on a cognitive, experiential, and emotional level. Their relation to the participants has a direct impact on the learning process. The challenge is to establish a trusting and constructive relationship to participants while still keeping the responsibility connected with the role as educator in mind. In other words: Educators are part of the game, but are also partners with a larger responsibility for the whole.
At different stages of a process an educator is involved in different forms and with different focus. The Theme Centred Interaction (TCI) approach of social learning and personal development (created by Ruth Cohn and others; Schneider-Landolf, et al., 2017)[1] can provide orientation. TCI puts emphasis on the interconnectedness of the individual, social and topical dimension within the learning context (which also includes the broader societal conditions). The challenge for educators is to implement learning processes that are sensitive to all these dimensions.
Since educators are also individuals and learning is a social process, this model can also help them to reflect the tension between being part of a shared process and having a specific responsibility at the same time:
It can therefore be concluded that the educator must do justice to the following needs:
- of the learners’ group within the process (WE dimension)
- defined by programmes or training providers, influenced by the concrete social conditions of the learners, as well as of us educators (GLOBE dimension)
- of the educator (I dimension) including professional self-reflection and self-limitation
- the requirements resulting from the topical dimension (IT dimension)
- ensuring that the learning process gives attention to all of these dimensions
Power-consciousness and mandate
Education that works with people in processes of change can derive the justification and limits of its mission from social work, as described in the so-called threefold mandate:
- Mandated by the client/learner: To offer help and support and to advocate for their interests;
- Mandated by the rules/legal environment/organisation: To act in accordance with the goals and intentions. This correlates to some extent with a normative and control/balancing function of the educator.
- Mandated by one's own professional understanding: Acting according to ethical norms such as social justice, human rights, fundamental (labour) rights.
Participatory Facilitation
Shared leadership refers to participation, I. e. the various mechanisms people use to express their opinions and exert influence on social decision-making. Genuine participation takes place through partnership, in which a negotiation process is used to distribute power between educators and the people learning (in civic engagement, this occurs between citizens and power holders). In this process, decision-making is shared. For example, an educator
- …wouldn’t just propose two alternatives, but would ask open-ended questions about what participants want to learn.
- …would allow participants to co-decide on content and methods.
Shared leadership refers to participation, the various mechanisms people use to express their opinions and exert influence on social decision-making. Genuine participation takes place through partnership, in which a negotiation process is used to distribute power between facilitators and the people learning (in a civic engagement, this occurs between citizens and power holders). In this process, decision-making is shared. For example,
- You wouldn’t just propose two alternatives, but would ask open-ended questions about what participants want to learn.
- You would let them co-decide what content and methods they would like to use.
Following this logic, the highest level of participation involves people taking action and making decisions about their situations independently (Arnstein, 1969)[2]. In practice, one should also recognize that there are reasons that the goal of leadership cannot be to make leadership superfluous: For instance, educators are accountable, they have a teaching mission, the learner's want to be guided competently through a learning process.
- Educators delegate power to participants and involve them as experts.
- Participants can organise peer-learning.
- Educators negotiate methodology, goals, content. They contrast their needs and goals as a trainer with those of the participants, in order to come to fair common decisions.
Diversity-Consciousness
Focusing on individual needs implies the insight that everybody is different. Learners have different styles, attitudes, experiences, or cultural and social backgrounds, or they enjoy privileges or suffer from discrimination and exclusion to varying degrees. In many everyday situations this diversity tends to be homogenized. Facilitation means on the one hand to respect, to appreciate the(se) difference(s) as a resource, and on the other hand to actively respond to exclusion or discrimination. In the best-case scenario everyone gains from the realisation that different roads may lead to similar goals and that it is often the other strategy that might help you in your work. In a heterogenous society diversity consciousness is part of a transversal competence and learning field. If we take this seriously, facilitation needs to integrate this under real life conditions, for instance under limited time resources, or in heterogeneous, not always consensus-oriented groups. When individuals or groups violate non-violent and democratic principles, these need to be (re)established.
Dealing with differing opinions and conflict
How to navigate tensions, conflicts, and dilemmas? How can a group overcome the polarisation that racism, war, any kind of discrimination and other forms of violence create in our societies and in our minds? Educators acknowledge that conflict and violence exist in the world and are therefore present in their learning spaces. They facilitate the skills of learning to live with dilemmas, disagreement and conflicts. By employing good conflict management, educators also improve the quality and efficiency of communication in a group and equip participants with social and conflict management skills.
- More: Conflict Management
Staying open to self-development
Educators should stimulate others’ learning processes and create spaces for it. This implies the use of dynamic lenses to be able to observe individual and group processes, foresee needs and motivations, and co-design the process accordingly. Conducting a training is also a space for the educators’ individual learning. It is part of their continuous professional development. In other words, being a facilitator and imparting holistic learning means committing to being a lifelong learner: With a general positive attitude to self-development and the ability and willingness to broaden and deepen one’s knowledge, and applying new methods, approaches and technology in order to improve learning.
A necessary competence of an educator is to develop the ability to metacognitive reasoning, including a reflective view of one's own role and performance.
If competence-centred learning is to be a flexible approach that takes learners' needs seriously, then this requires a degree of flexibility and breadth. Educators need to be able to choose among approaches and methods and to apply and adjust their facilitation.
Specialisation, on the other hand, is a sign that educators also relate to the need for further development. In particular, this means that, instead of merely expanding areas of experience at roughly the same level, some are deepened.
References
- ↑ Schneider-Landolf, M.; Spielmann, J.; Zitterbarth, W. (editors) (2017). Handbook of Theme-Centered Interaction (TCI). Translated by J. Smith. Göttingen, 1st edition. https://doi.org/10.13109/9783666451904
- ↑ Arnstein, S. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners.
Elke Heublein
Co-founder of Working Between Cultures. Co-author of Holistic learning. Facilitator since 2004, certified intercultural facilitator (Institute for Intercultural Communikation, LMU München) and trainer (IHK Akademie München/Westerham), adult education (Foundation University Hildesheim). Focus: Cooperation and leadership in heterogenouos teams, higher education, train-the-trainer.
Nils-Eyk Zimmermann
Editor of Competendo. He writes and works on the topics: active citizenship, civil society, digital transformation, non-formal and lifelong learning, capacity building. Coordinator of European projects, in example DIGIT-AL Digital Transformation in Adult Learning for Active Citizenship, DARE network.
Blogs here: Blog: Civil Resilience.
Email: nils.zimmermann@dare-network.eu
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