These and some of my other concerns are discussed in Eli Pariser’s book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You. I heard an interview with Pariser earlier this month. He talked about how online companies, Internet search engines, and social media manipulate Internet content to fit the tastes and beliefs of individual users, the detrimental effects that this may have, and what could be done about it. Pariser says, for example, that Facebook shows you only the news feed from people with whom you interact—so that you may never see the news feed from your ‘friends’ who are more politically conservative or liberal than you are.

I was somewhat naïve and, like many other people, believed that information flows on the Internet are still like the wild, wild west. But the reality is very different. If you and I google the same term—but differ in age, political views, gender, and browsing history—we would get different results. Parister says that Goggle tracks 57 categories about you—even if you do not have a Google account.

What’s so bad about this? On a personal level, it creates homogeneity of thought and limits your opportunities to be exposed to views that are fundamentally different from your own. It seems that a simple matter of life as encountering and being exposed to different people, ideas, and products is not something that Google seems to value anymore. It also makes our online experience very passive, atomized, and uninformed by other views—while our democracy needs us to be citizens who are active, diverse, and able to appreciate the different views of our fellow citizens. On a social level, Pariser says that we may, as a society, lose the ability to feel empathy for each other and the ability to understand what other perspectives may look like. This sounds like too high of a price to pay for relevance, convenience, and mental comfort, doesn’t it?

All of this made me think about the Interactivity Foundation’s small group public discussions and our reports, where we present, explore, and develop different and fundamentally contrasting policy possibilities. It also made me think about how important it is to foster IF-style discussions where people meet face to face to explore the different beliefs, interests, values, and goals that are reflected in conceptually contrasting policy possibilities.

It seems that these kinds of discussions are becoming increasingly rare in today’s world, where the customization of the content on the internet happens without our even being aware of it, and where the Internet tailors the world to our individual beliefs, interests, values, and goals like never before.

I heard an interview with former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor earlier this month. She talked about the importance of civic engagement in our democracy and her concern about the state of policy discussions in America. She was particularly concerned that people are not being taught how to think and evaluate policies. (And let’s face it, no one is born with it.) Indeed, we are not taught how to think about policy in our schools, our universities, or our increasingly polarized media. This poor civic knowledge and engagement weakens American democracy.

Jay Stern, the founder of the Interactivity Foundation, wanted to address this concern by facilitating and encouraging the development and thoughtful consideration of contrasting policy possibilities. We explore and develop a wide range of contrasting conceptual possibilities for public policy pertaining to our areas of concern in our sanctuary projects, and we then organize and facilitate discussions of them among the general public. The facilitators who conduct these discussions do not tell you what to think about policies pertaining to food, property, genetic technology, or work; which possibilities you should or should not support; or which congressman to call. They focus instead on the process of thinking carefully, critically, and seriously about the possibilities themselves. They focus, in other words, upon understanding the different concepts, principles, beliefs, values, interests, and goals that might motivate different policies; understanding how they relate to the possibilities themselves; exploring their possible implementations; and exploring their intended and unintended consequences (for more see Mark Notturno’s four part series on ‘How to Evaluate an IF Policy Possibility’). And they try to do this for each of the conceptual possibilities that we present in our reports.

But it is not an easy process. It is, first of all, very difficult to think conceptually. Most of us are focused upon the more practical everyday world and are unaccustomed to thinking about abstract concepts, principles, beliefs, values, interests, goals, and the reasoning behind them. And it is even more difficult to carefully and critically and seriously consider ideas that are fundamentally different from our own—especially because they just seem to be outright wrong.

But we do not try to show you that possibilities are either right or wrong in IF discussions. We do not try to change your mind. We simply provide a forum in which you can discuss—as opposed to debate—the different policy possibilities with your neighbors, and explore the possible ways of approaching important issues to our society.

Consider the description of the possibility from the Democratic Nation Building Report that we discussed last time: ‘This possibility would have us forgo all active efforts to build democratic nations abroad’. This description is typical of the descriptions of IF policy possibilities, and indeed of policy possibilities in general, in that it briefly describes what the possibility would do, but not the reasons why it would do it. If you had only this description to go on, then you would be at a loss as to how to evaluate it. You could say ‘salvation at last’ or ‘over my dead body’. But this is just a reaction, and not an evaluation. It may, no doubt, be based upon the concerns, beliefs, values, goals, and interests that you have pertaining to democratic nation building. But there are all sorts of reasons why someone might think we should not try to build democratic nations abroad. And the concerns, beliefs, values, goals, and interests that motivate this possibility may be very different from your own.

So what are the concerns that motivate this possibility? And what are the beliefs, values, goals, and interests that underlie it?

These are the questions that you have to ask yourself in order to understand the reasoning behind it. The question at this stage is not whether you like the possibility, or would be willing to support it. It is not whether you share the concerns, beliefs, values, goals, and interests that motivate it. It is not whether the possibility is consistent with the beliefs, values, goals, and interests that underlie it. And it is not even whether or to what extent it is likely to address the concerns that motivate it. We will get to all of that soon enough. The question at this stage is what those concerns, beliefs, values, goals, and interests actually are. But in order to understand what they actually are, you will have to understand the possibility on its own terms. And in order to do this, you will typically have to see the possibility—and, indeed, the world—through the eyes of someone who might propose it.

But here, we may once again be our own worst enemies, just as we are when we are trying to understand what a policy possibility says and does not say. For we are all almost inevitably over-burdened by the conceptual baggage of our own concerns, beliefs, values, goals, and interests when we try to understand a policy possibility on its own terms. And if we are not very, very careful about it, then we may all too easily end up understanding it on our own terms instead.

Thinking seriously about contrasting policy possibilities is not for sissies. This is because it can be very difficult to understand a possibility on its own terms. It is because most of us are so locked up in the prisons of our own minds—so certain about the truth of what we believe and the falsity of what we don’t—that we never even recognize the bars. But it is also because trying understanding a policy possibility on its own terms can also be very frightening. It may force us to question some of our deepest and most fundamental beliefs, values, goals, interests, and concerns. And it may, for many of us, even challenge our own self-identities and self-understandings of who we are.

All of this would be bad enough. But there is also the human condition.

We may feel that we have understood a policy possibility on its own terms when it begins to make sense in light of the beliefs, values, goals, interests, and concerns that motivate it. But human beings are inherently fallible and always subject to error. So it is always possible that, even when everything seems to make sense, we do not really understand the things that we think we understand.  The upshot is that even when we think that we have understood a policy possibility on its own terms, we may always come across something that makes us think that we haven’t. So we should always remain open to the possibility that we have not yet understood a possibility on its own terms and must rethink the whole thing all over again.

This is the human condition. And there is no way around it. One of the most difficult things in life is how to know whether we are ahead or behind—whether, in other words, we disagree with someone because we do not quite understand the reasoning behind his beliefs, or because we understand the reasoning behind them well enough and believe that they are false.

But this is where your imagination, creativity, and courage come in. In order to understand a policy possibility on its own terms, you will typically have to break out of your own mental prison far enough and long enough to think how someone who thinks very differently from you might think. This will require your creativity to find a way to explore the world with someone else’s eyes. It will require your imagination to see how the world might look to someone who has very different concerns, beliefs, values, goals, and interests than you do. And it may even require your courage to question your most fundamental beliefs, values, goals, interests, and concerns—and, very possibly, the courage to become a very different person than you currently are by doing so.

I have sometimes heard people say that the language in our reports is too sophisticated and that it may sometimes even prevent people from understanding what a possibility means. But I, like Pogo, think that we have met the enemy and he is us. For my own sense is that it is more often the conceptual and political baggage that we carry into a discussion⎯our personal expectations and our philosophical presuppositions and our political prejudices and what we have heard on TV and our reluctance to take the time to read something, let alone carefully⎯that prevents us from understanding what is clearly described on a page in front of us.

Why do I think this? Because I usually find that the people who misinterpreted a possibility will quickly agree that they have done so after someone points it out to them.

In this particular case, there were two pieces of baggage that stood in the way⎯a suitcase and a carry-on. The suitcase was the fact that there are currently a lot of isolationist policy possibilities in the air⎯and the presupposition that this possibility must, of course, be one of them. The carry-on was the presupposition that every nation-building project must be a democratic nation-building project.

The suitcase led some participants to think that ‘Forget About Building Democratic Nations Abroad’ would forbid us from pursuing relationships with foreign countries at all⎯which might be a reason for some people to support it and for others to oppose it. The carry-on led some participants to think that the possibility would forbid us from engaging in nation building projects that do not aim at spreading democracy abroad, such as offering foreign aid to underdeveloped countries with no political strings involved (as China currently does)⎯which might be another good reason for some people to support it and for others to oppose it.

But is this what the possibility actually says?

⎯⎯‘Look at the first paragraph in the second column where it says ‘Far from being an isolationist policy, this possibility would encourage us to pursue our economic, military, and geo-political interests openly instead of linking them to spreading democracy abroad’.

⎯⎯‘Oh yeah!’

⎯⎯ ‘Look at the first paragraph in the second column where it says that this possibility ‘would not prevent us from offering foreign aid, or from participating in nation building projects in underdeveloped countries, or from offering humanitarian aid to countries that need it.’

⎯⎯ ‘Oh yeah!’

It wasn’t that anyone had any difficulty understanding what these sentences mean. And it wasn’t that they didn’t take the time to read the description of the possibility (though I am told that that sometimes happens). It was simply that their presuppositions about the area of concern and the policy possibilities for addressing it had somehow prevented them from taking these sentences on board.

Understanding what a policy possibility says is the first step toward evaluating it. And it may be especially difficult if the possibility says something new or something you don’t expect. It often means getting down and dirty with the language that describes it. And there’s not too much you can do to get around it. You certainly can’t do it with pictures. They may, no doubt, be worth a thousand words. But they do not say or mean any one of them. And while developing a policy possibility may be a fine art, the possibilities themselves are much more like laws. They are articulated in language. They are supposed to mean something fairly definite⎯this, and not that⎯and we may actually need to rewrite them if they don’t. They may, of course, be subject to different interpretations. And they may stimulate you to think about different possibilities. But they can’t mean anything you like⎯they would be more or less meaningless if they did⎯even if it does sometimes take a judge or two to say what they currently mean for us. And ignorance, just like in court, is no excuse here.

Understanding what a policy possibility says is the first step toward evaluating it. But you obviously do not need to understand what a policy possibility means in order to discuss it with your friends or neighbors, or even to discuss it intelligently. That, on the contrary, is a large part of what our public discussions are all about. For the process of coming to understand a possibility is the process of exploring its description and the concerns that inspired it, and what it would permit and forbid, and how it might differ from other possibilities for addressing the same governance concerns. You do, however, need to know what the possibility means, and what it does not mean, if you want to evaluate it. For otherwise you are quite literally evaluating something else.

That does not mean that every participant agrees with each possibility (those possibilities are sometimes in opposition to each other), but they are usually pleased with the insights gained through discussion and encouraged by the expansion of their views of what might be possible. This fits with most of what we know about the satisfaction that comes with this sort of “civic learning”.

But what if the response to an expanded sense of the issues in a given area is deeper skepticism and anger? Is there anything constructive to be found in a discussion that takes a turn toward exposure of what participants see as fundamental flaws in how society is organized and operates? Is there “benefit” in participant identification of individuals and interests that gain from these arrangements?

My answer to those questions is “yes”.

Recently I facilitated a public discussion of colleague Jeff Prudhomme’s Helping America Talk report in the Lehigh Valley area of Pennsylvania. Most of the participants in that discussion were community college students struggling with part-time jobs and college costs. A couple of charismatic fellow students had recruited them to this discussion, but few had much in the way of discussion experience. One student summed initial attitudes up with the rhetorical question, “So, we’re talking about talking, right?”.

Jeff’s report has a number of extremely useful possibilities to launch discussion about public conversation. I have facilitated this report before and most groups naturally fall into a discussion flow of the topic and go beyond the report’s possibilities. This group, however, had numerous breaks in the discussion where cynicism and resentment was palpable.

Participants challenged each other with tough questions. Did we really believe that “those in charge” (loosely meaning almost all institutional leaders and those of great wealth) would encourage or even permit authentic public conversation? Don’t our patterns of media ownership and licensure work against public conversation? Aren’t our basic forms of public participation—like elections—fundamentally flawed and even rigged?

Most of the participants in this group came away with a sense that breaking the pattern of “management by elites” of public conversation was more important than specific remedies of access and transparency.

At first I thought the conversation took this tack because of the participation of two highly vocal young “tea party” backers. But in the course of the discussion I found populist anger of both Right and Left varieties.

IF discussions are facilitated in a dispassionate style, with emphasis on exploration of the topic rather than debate. Here I took a chance on exploring the resentments the discussion uncovered.  I had to shift from my usual approach of using personal capital to discourage outbursts to an acknowledgement of anger and probing beneath it.

I would not classify my style adaptations here an unqualified success. I have no formal training in using discussion as therapy. But I did hear directly from participants that they appreciated the opportunity to vent and my help in pushing them to look underneath the anger. It seems like there was a little learning about self in this exercise.

I do not want to over-generalize from this experience, but see some lessons for possible use in these times of divisive public discussions. Those of us who work as “discussion neutrals” may need to re-think our attitudes about how we describe a “good discussion”. For a significant part of the population “getting worked up” may be a significant part in generating the interest to engage.

There seem to be many facilitative challenges in engaging in these more direct discussion encounters. I am most interested in two of them. The first is how to maintain “safe space” for those not as prone toward the rough and tumble. The second is how to appropriately challenge factually inaccurate assertions in discussion.

In this most recent experience I found that acknowledging grievance as having a basis made it somewhat easier to challenge suspect assertions associated with the anger. I also found that raised voices did not necessarily mean that people were not listening. If something is worth discussing, it may also be worth “getting worked up” about.

While it doesn’t slice bread or otherwise provide all the answers, and bearing the not inconsiderable risk of appearing too enthusiastic about any particular structure, I am nonetheless recommending a recent occasional paper, “Beginning with the End in Mind,” by Martín Carcasson from Colorado State University.  This paper was published last year by Public Agenda’s “Center for Advances in Public Engagement,” and you can download a pdf copy of this relatively brief (14-page) paper from Public Agenda’s website and the following link http://www.publicagenda.org/files/pdf/PA_CAPE_Paper2_Beginning_SinglePgs_Rev.pdf

As my colleagues know all too well, I have often struggled in my deliberative education to articulate—both for myself and for others—an “elevator speech” that would place our more “front end” educational and engagement discussion efforts within the larger field of dialogue, discussion, and deliberation.  I’ve wanted—and sometimes irascibly argued for—better ways to “connect the dots.”  To be fair, most all of my colleagues have devised and repeatedly offered various iterations that seem to work fine for them.  The problem, in part, is not only that I’m a slow learner, it is also that I’ve been searching for an overall framework that fit with my own unique and largely inept efforts to explain our work to others.

Professor Carcasson’s paper doesn’t solve my learning disabilities, or my too-often rambling and incoherent speech patterns, or peel apples.  But it does provide one more overall framework—and the rhetoric around it—that I find greatly helpful in “situating” our work and seeing how it might connect to other and different deliberative and dialogic efforts.  In a few pages, I think he does a more than decent job of both surveying the field and summarizing its challenges, tensions, and conflicts.  In his interactive listing of goals, he also provides a useful structure for understanding one possible temporal or sequential order for different goals:  that is, first, second and third-order goals.

A quick explanatory note:  don’t necessarily be put off by the paper’s sub-title referring to “goal driven” deliberative practice or assume that the paper is only about deliberative approaches that are primarily instrumental or focused on solving specific and current problems.  To the contrary, Carcasson’s effort seems to be to show how different public discussion and deliberation efforts serve a range of other and broader goals—like “issue learning”, nurturing democratic attitudes and skills, engagement, as well as improved “community problem-solving.”

Here are few excerpts that I found especially resonant or provocative or even confounding for our own approach:

• “…we should not discount the importance of the initial goals of improving democratic skills/attitudes and fostering understanding of the issues. … [such] first-order goals should be considered mere side effects on the way to action, but are critical in their own right…  … ‘The goal of a meeting may be build networks of citizens, to develop new ideas, to teach people skills and knowledge, to change attitudes, but not to influence government.’”
• “Whereas deliberation inherently leads to many of the goals, different goals nonetheless likely require different strategies—the processes that particularly spark issue learning are distinct from those that positively impact democratic attitudes and so on. …”
• “Too often, practitioners focus primarily on a deliberative technique and discount what comes before and after utilizing that technique …  One key implication … is that deliberative organizations must have the capacity for more than moderating or facilitating meetings but also be able to serve as, or otherwise have access to, policy analysts, conveners and reporters, among others.”
• “…despite the fact that ‘issue learning’ is situated here as the initial goal, it could very well be one of the most important goals, and deliberative organizations could easily focus solely on this goal and make significant positive impacts on their communities.”
• “A tension, however, has developed between the framing of ‘national’ issues and their relevance to local communities.  NIF [National Issues Forum] books, for example, may be particularly useful for local deliberative organizations to utilize to address first-order goals but, depending on the issue, they may not be situated well for second-order goals.  … I thus emphasize again the importance of appropriate selection and communication of goals.”
• “Democracy can certainly be positively impacted by improved democratic attitudes across many levels of engagement.  So while perhaps the primary target audience may be ‘ordinary citizens,’—particularly those that are disengaged and apathetic—improving the attitudes of politically engaged community leaders, active civil society members, elected officials, policy experts, and bureaucrats may be just as critical and would likely require different strategies.”
• One particular goal of our field must be to incorporate deliberation into curricula at various levels so that students develop these skills as early as possible and learn to consider community problems through a deliberative lens and not just through the typical adversarial perspectives.”
• “I would argue that we need deliberative practitioners that keep deliberation at the center of their work and focus utmost on serving as impartial resources to support collaborative action across broad based perspectives, not just on sparking specific community action. …[Specific] action [on a single issue] is not the ultimate goal of deliberative practice; the ultimate goal is increasing the community’s [overall] capacity to solve problems. [emphasis added].  Individual projects and issues are means to that end.”

IF has been fairly cautious about such adaptive uses of its process in its own projects, but has approved my use of online discussion for one of the panels in my current global security project. In addition it has encouraged me to follow and observe other technology-based discussions and report on lessons learned.

The first discussion online discussion that used adaptations of the IF process occurred in 2009 and was a six month-long development of energy policy possibilities. I served as coach to the list-serve moderator of the discussion involving participants in four upper Midwest states. This discussion utilized the basic IF process fairly faithfully in discussion, but deviated from its structural format in relying only on one panel. It ran fairly smoothly in this very bare bones online approach and was supplemented by several conference calls at its conclusion.

The second discussion was a climate change discussion conducted in the weeks before and during the Copenhagen conference.  The moderator of the energy discussion also moderated this conversation. Most discussions were “live”, although there were also considerable amounts of postings, distributed attachments, and web links utilized by widely dispersed participants (including one reporting in from Copenhagen).

This second discussion started with a warm up discussion of the previously developed energy possibilities in order to acquaint panelists with the nature of “possibilities” as IF describes them. The timeframe was extremely compressed and challenging. It would have been very difficult to develop coherent possibilities had it not been for the experience of the moderator in translating IF process tasks to this format and the dedication of the participants to log many more deliberative hours than we had a right to expect.

As one might suspect the results of these two discussions could be criticized by those who disapprove of the possibilities. It is not for me to defend those possibilities, but I do feel it is worth noting that the level of participant engagement was high and the level of facilitation was exemplary. It is much more difficult for a facilitator to use personal capital in such environments.

My third online experience in the global security project is ongoing and got off to a slow start owing to some missteps on my part as moderator. Lesson #1: the moderator I had mentored in the first two discussions made this look easier than it was for me.

With that modest reserve of experience under my belt at this time I can offer some observations about how IF process works in online and video discussion:

• The moderator/facilitator needs a comfort level with the technology and needs a toolkit of adaptive facilitative technique that relies more on anticipation of barriers to participation and less on “facilitative presence”.
• The participants also need to be adept in the chosen technology and platform. If not, expect to devote time to tutorials. Substantial unevenness in skill levels among participants can drive a wedge into your developmental discussions.
• There is some suggestion that these types of discussions work best where they are multi-layered: live online discussion, frequent postings and archival documents on a list-serve or website, and, perhaps, additional individual vehicles such as blogs.
• Online discussion works especially well in exploratory work where lists are compiled and ideas are produced in lightning rounds. Wherever and whenever brainstorming is called for online discussion shows great promise.
• Developmental work of fleshing out concepts seems more difficult online than face-to-face and requires greater facilitative support. Facilitators can help drive this with draft documents that attempt to capture the essence of discussion and create starting points for further development.
• Final editorial work of any possibilities developed also falls more on the facilitator and requires some sort of agreement with the participants about who “owns” the work product: the individual originating the concept, the group, the facilitator, the sponsoring organization? Better to get participants to sign off on the effort as a citizenship exercise as opposed to something akin to intellectual property.

You may still have questions about why anyone would undertake the fuss of such discussions. I asked myself the same things several years ago and since then I have discovered a multitude of answers. But two of those answers seal the deal for me. First, it allows you to tap widely dispersed talent and bring people into discussions who could not otherwise participate. Second, young tech-savvy people seem hungry for this sort of thing.

Trying to create discussion groups by recruiting individuals is hugely time consuming.  And the groups fall apart without constant tending.  This is because discussion is rarely glue enough to hold groups together. This is why it almost always makes sense to start with groups that are already there, that have their own religious, social, economic, political, or recreational reasons for existing.  We’ve had it all wrong: rather than building our own social capital, we should be building on that of other groups.

If we do, we will be relieved—more or less permanently—of the need to pitch, sell, and explain the IF Process.  Our community contacts will do that for us.  We won’t have to do it 101 times on the phone or via email to get people to participate.  And, once we’re in the same room, we’ll be able to get on with the discussions.

If we do, we can build on the shared values and connections in the room, rather than thinking we need to create them.

If we do, we can look forward to repeat invitations—the group will still be there, held together not only or primarily by its interest in discussion but by whatever brought it together in the first place.

The community organizer who can deliver public discussion groups at the drop of a hat is the El Dorado of facilitating public discussions.  You can become that person if you work hard at it.  Or you can go find one.  I found mine at the local Rotary club.  She is willing to use her connections for me because she trusts me personally and endorses our work.  She’s the bridge between me and the community.  People here respond to IF invitations not because they know me or IF or have a burning need for civic discussion; they respond because my contact asks them to.

It’s not what you know.  .  .

I split my class of twelve into two groups of six each, and I used Sue & Jack’s Team Membership Survey tool  from the Guidebook for Student-Centered Classroom Discussions, along with my own grasp of the various personalities of the students.  I’ve been trying to get the groups to work on their responses to our broad question “What is Art?”.  The responses so far are quite vague and poorly formulated.  I had intended the responses to be akin to theories of art – a lofty goal, as it turns out.  Right now what they’ve produced are ideas from “Everything is art” to “Art has to have meaning, and meaning can be just about anything” to “art is the expression of an emotion or idea, or the product of that expression”.  So yesterday I gave them the somewhat more concrete task of first listing all the works they have studied or seen that challenge conventional notions of art (what I call the “gray area cases”), then pretend they are on a grants committee for the NEA, and they have to determine which works are art, and so receive NEA grant funding, and which ones aren’t.  I asked them to look at the list of their responses to the question “what is art?” and ask about each response “does this response help us decide whether these works are works of art?”  If the response doesn’t help them decide which works are art and which aren’t, how can they revise the responses to make them more informative?  I told the facilitators to not get hung up on getting a perfect response – the task is to generate possible responses, not necessarily correct ones.  I also had them read an article that defends one theory of art – the Institutional Theory.  I held that up as a paradigm of theorizing, but noted that the theory has its own problems.

When they struggled with the task for 15 minutes or so, I asked each group to number the responses, then index each gray area artwork, by putting the number of each response next to it, if that response counted the work as a work of art.  Guess what?  Every response said every work was a work of art.  I pointed out to them that this means that they haven’t come up with 7 or 8 different responses, but all the responses are functionally the same.  Lights went on.  Since I’m working with theory, not necessarily policy, I was trying to get them to see that if you have 8 policies which all give you the same result in all test cases, you really only have one policy.  They ran out of time, but are eager to start over on Tuesday and try to revise the possible responses to differentiate them better.  Thank goodness.  The peer mentor assigned to my class regularly gives me looks during the small group discussions.  She is doing her best to not jump in and create order out of the chaos.

The facilitation is going reasonably well, although I can see that the baseline skills of these first-year students isn’t what I’d like it to be.  They have a hard time thinking about ideas other than their own.  Some have a hard time listening, and often the small group gets taken over by whichever student has the strongest personality.  The quieter people haven’t facilitated all that well, and some have told me they never want to do it again.  But I’m meeting with them after each session, giving tips and words of encouragement, and everyone sees the value in eventually learning how to facilitate well.  Next week my peer mentor and I are going to each facilitate a small group for 10 minutes, to model how it’s done.  I realize that at 18 (and even 17!) years old, these students just aren’t at the level to really have the confidence to step in and facilitate.  But I remain convinced that they can learn to do it.

I’ve had to jettison parts of my syllabus already in the interest of making discussion work in my classroom.   While I had planned on having half the class meetings in a lecture+discussion format, it’s turned into 2/3 IF-discussion pretty quickly.  And there are so many things to teach them that I’ve scaled back the readings, and some of the discussion of the readings.  Whether this is the right decision, I don’t know.

Finally, two colleagues at Hollins have asked me what the flip charts and easels are for, and when I described what I was doing in class, they were interested.  I’ve received two invitations to present to faculty groups, and I gave an impromptu 10-minute summary of IF discussion in my classroom to a group of 15 faculty teaching our first-year seminars.  We also have a leadership certificate program, and, given that I’m teaching facilitation as a style of leadership, I applied for my course to count towards the certificate in leadership studies.  The director of that program has asked me to present to a group of faculty who teach in that program, and talk about facilitation as leadership.  I’m trying to keep expectations low, and let them know that I claim no expertise!  Perhaps when my IF course is done, I’ll present something to the group in Spring 2010, and bring one or two of my students with me to discuss how facilitation looks from a student perspective.  We’ll see.  Already I’m well over-committed and I don’t know enough yet about what I’m doing or how it works best, so I’m trying to hold everyone at bay.  But it’s nice to know that there’s interest on our campus from some faculty.

Michael Gettings