Facilitation is dynamic, contextually bound, and implemented in partnership with a community of learners. When done well, it recognizes and attends to diversity, equity, and inclusion. This chapter explores the role of facilitation in cultivating inclusion and enhancing learning.

Flores and Bollinger take us on a journey exploring four experiences which required facilitators to adapt the original game plan and use multiple techniques, often in varying combinations. They share these as a way of excavating three focal points of facilitation: First, they identify the ways in which relationships are foundational to facilitation and are always nuanced by sociocultural contexts. Second, the authors closely examine the role of learner capacity and capability, which includes realizing and accepting challenging moments, constructing choices, reshaping our beliefs, and developing communal support as mechanisms to help us navigate such moments. Third, the authors detail two general families of facilitation techniques to help enhance capacity and capability in real time adaptation. Within the frame of listening and probing, they explore reflection, embodiment, and personalizing/depersonalizing. Within the frame of processing and deepening, they articulate how to use reflection in combination with redirection and/or deepening, and how to carefully craft and mobilize questions.  

Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.36284/celelon.oa9.3