Facilitating With Stories

This book provides a rich connection between theory and practice for those seeking to work with stories in organisational, community, educative or coaching settings. With an international cast of contributors, it charters a unique inquiry into both ethics and the facilitation philosophies for working with stories supporting educators, facilitators, trainers and consultants towards more effective and considered practice. This book will be a valuable resource for professionals and reflective practitioners seeking to explore: What informs an ethics of facilitating with stories? How can we create safe spaces for story work? In what ways do we need to be attuned to power when working with stories in organisations and corporations? What are the unintended and ethical consequences of facilitating with stories?

This book provides a rich connection between theory and practice for those seeking to work with stories in organisational, community, educative or coaching settings. With an international cast of contributors, it charters a unique inquiry into both ethics and the facilitation philosophies for working with stories supporting educators, facilitators, trainers and consultants towards more effective and considered practice. This book will be a valuable resource for professionals and reflective practitioners seeking to explore: What informs an ethics of facilitating with stories? How can we create safe spaces for story work? In what ways do we need to be attuned to power when working with stories in organisations and corporations? What are the unintended and ethical consequences of facilitating with stories?

This edited collection seeks to enrich the dialogue about the expansive possibilities of visual sociological research facilitation. Although facilitating ethical research has long been identified within medical research literatures, there is a dearth of distinct perspectives and voices in academic theorizing when it comes to facilitating ethical research. For example, how can researchers learn and incorporate community created approaches to facilitation into their visual research approaches? Although ethics, positionality, and reflexivity remain important components of visual research, the authors argue that the incremental decisions made in real time by research facilitators within the process of visual research is currently under-theorized. This edited collection seeks to discuss how thinking about facilitation in a more critical and nuanced manner, as well as thinking through the kinds of relations, problems and local changes that happen within a project, can help visual sociological researchers move towards more equitable research practices.

Facilitators are being called upon to work in international and cross-cultural arenas more than ever before to help groups co-ordinate plans for governance, education and community development. There are also increasingly frequent cases of pandemics that require facilitating multicultural groups such as the Tsunami and HIV/Aids disaster relief. Facilitating Multicultural Groups provides a practical approach for facilitators needing to enhance their skills when working with people from a diverse range of multicultural backgrounds. Based on research and facilitator experiences it takes the facilitator step-by-step through ideas, processes, models and frameworks that are designed to assist with the preparation, facilitation and evaluation of workshops. It advises how to adapt learning materials to suit specific situations and offers techniques to deal with conflict. Complete with additional resources available on a dedicated website including: Cultural value cards pack; Cultural behaviors card pack; Medical insurance advice; Glossary of key terms; Useful networks; Country by country background information, this is essential reading for anyone facilitating multicultural groups.

Michael Quinn Patton’s Facilitating Evaluation: Principles in Practice is the first book of its kind to explain in depth and detail how to facilitate evaluation processes with stakeholders. Using the author’s own stories of his experiences as an evaluation facilitator, the book illustrates the five evaluation facilitation principles that are the organizing framework for addressing how to work with stakeholders to generate evaluation questions, make decisions among methods, interpret findings, and participate in all aspects of evaluation. Ultimately, this book will help readers perform facilitation to enhance the relevance, credibility, meaningfulness, and utility of evaluations. "A must-read for anyone considering a high-impact evaluation!" –Margaret Lombe, Boston College

Facilitating Community Research for Social Change asks: what does ethical research facilitation look like in projects that seek to move toward social change? How can scholars weave political and social justice through multiple levels of the research process? This edited collection presents chapters that investigate research facilitation in ways that specifically attempt to disrupt and challenge anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, patriarchy, and sexism to work toward social change. It also explores what it means to develop facilitation practices across multiple contexts and research settings, including specific facilitation methods considered by researchers working with visual and community-based methods with Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities. The complexities of how scholars negotiate decisions within their research with people and communities have an effect not only on how researchers construct their participants and communities, but also on the overall purpose of projects, the ways their projects are shared and disseminated, and what is learned in the doing of facilitation. This book will be of great interest to both emerging and established researchers working within the social sciences. It specifically attends to diverse fields within the social sciences that include health, media studies, environmental studies, social work, sociology, education, participatory visual research methodologies, as well as the evolving field of digital humanities.

Making progress on complex, problematic situations requires a new approach to working together: transformative facilitation, a structured and creative process for removing the obstacles to fluid forward movement. It is becoming less straightforward for people to move forward together. They face increasing complexity and decreasing control. They need to work with more people from across more divides. In such situations, the most common ways of advancing—some people telling others what to do, or everyone just doing what they think they need to—aren't adequate. One better way is through facilitating. But the most common approaches to facilitating—bossy vertical directing from above or collegial horizontal accompanying from alongside—aren't adequate. They often leave the participants frustrated and yearning for breakthrough. This book describes a new approach: transformative facilitation. It doesn't choose either the bossy vertical or the collegial horizontal approach: it cycles back and forth between them. Rather than forcing or cajoling, the facilitator removes the obstacles that stand in the way of people contributing and connecting equitably. It enables people to bring their whole selves to the process. This book is foranyone who helps people work together to transform their situation, be it a professional facilitator, manager, consultant, coach, chairperson, organizer, mediator, stakeholder, or friend.It offers a broad and bold vision of the contribution that facilitation can make to helping people collaborate to make progress.

This book analyzes children's agency as interactional achievement in formal and informal contexts of education and illuminates how agency can be encouraged and supported in these educational contexts. Taking a sociological approach, the author deals with children as social agents rather than learners and considers structures of interaction which encourage and support agency, rather than teaching. The book draws from field research conducted over more than twenty years in a variety of Italian and international contexts. This book is unique in providing a theoretical reflection on the social structures that can support children’s agency, as well as a large amount of examples which show how these structures and agency work.