Posts made by Asif Devji

Hi All -- thanks for your responses to my question. Good to hear that I wasn't alone in my uncertainty and that invitation-crafting is a skill to be developed in its own right.

One thing I take away from reading through your feedback is that invitations need to balance between being specific about facilitator intention with the activity yet vague enough to allow for participant interpretations -- which for me gets to the heart of facilitating LS activities -- the (necessarily) controlling intent of the facilitator and/versus the uncontrollable whatever will emerge from participants -- a fine line for sure but one which I'd like to say the facilitators of this course did a brilliant job of balancing. Thanks all -- much appreciated.

Asif

A couple of questions that emerged during the course were: (1) How can LS operate in international/multinational contexts, and (2) How can LS operate in online/asynchronous contexts.

As my brain tries to untangle what happened this week, it strikes me that one important factor in the success of the LS activities in the course was the immersive experience -- we did a lot of LS thinking/working/production in five days straight -- much more than I've seen done in most online courses.

Reminds me of a facilitation experience I had back in the day as a summer camp counsellor for international youth at Lester B. Pearson College of the Pacific -- which if you don't know it is a small, remote, rural campus on Vancouver Island. The participants arrived as young individuals from all over the world, spanning all social classes (many were there on financial need-based scholarships) and levels of confidence (many came as 'troubled youth') -- via air and then ferry and then van -- to co-exist for two intense months in this intimate, isolated location with only one another for support (we took away their phones and money upon arrival). They came as strangers and left as the closest of friends -- sobbing as they departed because they knew they were going back to their workaday lives with a very low likelihood of coming together again or recreating that experience.

There is an overlap for me between the questions about LS operating in international/multinational contexts and online/asynchronous contexts -- in both cases we are talking about participants (and facilitators) getting their bearings in unfamiliar worlds. This may actually be an advantage when it comes to facilitating LS activities, as people are already broken away from their workaday worlds.  If the facilitator is successful in creating an immersive experience -- and I think the effective use of time is one key factor in doing this (I'm thinking about the rigidity of time limits in the sequencing of LS activities) -- then a 'microculture' can be created in these worlds which is conducive to LS work.

All assumptions, I know -- but makes me wonder if this course would have produced the same results had the same activities been conducted over a two-week period.

  • Woke up in the middle of the night (I think it was between Mon and Tues) with the insight that the enforced 'structures' of LS (i.e. specific questions, group sizes, time limits, sequences) actually 'liberate' conversations that would otherwise be restricted by existing hegemonic 'microstructures' in most working/learning contexts that I've experienced

  • Was hit with the realization (as I read through the LS activities themselves) that what we were doing was actually participating in LS activities online and asynchronously (seems obvious now, I know...)
Began the course with the assumption that LS activities were simply common-sense facilitation techniques to create safe, needs-specific, engaging learning experiences for participants -- ending the course with the sense that LS is actually a conscious deconstruction of dominant power structures and a careful reverse-engineering of those with the goal of amplifying what might otherwise be marginalized perspectives.

Thanks Beth for jumping in -- 'question prompt' adds another wrinkle and leads me to conclude that I haven't quite figured this out yet.

I've taken the question to the open forum as you suggest -- great idea rather than struggling on my own -- looking forward to seeing what others think.