Facilitation that Empowers: Philosophical Underpinnings
I have come to believe strongly in the importance of providing students with an interesting, engaging, and creative learning environment. Traditional models of education have tended to focus on reading textbooks or journal articles, reflecting on or discussing the ideas, and demonstrating learning through exams or essay type assignments. However, there is considerable evidence that students learn more effectively and enjoy their learning more fully when they are invited to engage in diverse learning activities that include creative, multimedia, interactive, applied practice, exploratory, arts-based, and self-reflective processes.
Dr. Sandra Collins: Culturally Responsive and Socially Just Counselling
The activities in this book are informed by the philosophical approaches of educators and theorists who have pioneered experiential approaches to education and personal development. Here are two of the key thinkers and activists who influenced my journey as a counsellor and educator with their human centered approaches to personal and social transformation.
Paolo Freire: Education that Empowers Learners
Paulo Freire was a Brazilian transformational educator and and radical practitioner. His book, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” shifted Adult Literacy teaching and learning around the world and even now, sixty years later, educators are challenged to create learning experiences that empower students to be actively involved in personal and societal change.
Thanks to Don Sawyer for the table below that delineates the contrast between the traditional “banking” philosophy of education and the radically different Frierian approach.
Banking Education versus Popular Education
*Banking Education is a term Freire used to describe traditional educational practices that resulted in the “domestication” of learners rather than their empowerment. He used “banking” because the term implies that the teacher in this model makes “deposits” of knowledge into the empty minds of the passive learners.
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Teaching versus Facilitating
Moving from Freire’s belief that empowerment comes from learners being participants in their education as opposed to passive recipients, the role of an educator shifts from an instructor who imparts knowledge, to a facilitator who assists with a process of discovery and learning that is relevant, engaging and transformational.
Narrative Therapy: “Centering People as Experts of Their Own Lives”
Narrative therapy is a collaborative and non-pathologizing approach to counselling and community work which centres people as the experts of their own lives. A narrative approach views problems as separate from people and assumes people as having many skills, abilities, values, commitments, beliefs and competencies that will assist them to change their relationship with the problems influencing their lives. It is a way of working that considers the broader context of people’s lives particularly in the various dimensions of diversity including class, race, gender, sexual orientation and ability.
Michael White and David Epstein developed Narrative Therapy in the 1980s and their disruptive theories and practices provided a refreshing jolt to established views of counselling. Instead of a problem saturated approach to working with clients, narrative therapists help people so see their challenges in the context of social messaging and power dynamics and assist them in discovering the multiple strengths and resources that they have used to survive.
In terms of group facilitation, Narrative Therapy moves the role of the counsellor or educator from being an expert, to being a co-learner who has honed the art of respectful, curious questions that encourage people to discover and share their stories, expertise and insights.
