Difficultation #1

For a long time I've had an issue with the term "facilitation" / "facilitate" / "facilitator", and I didn't quite know why.  As in many other such situations, Augusto Boal helped.  The trouble with this term, he said (and I paraphrase), is that it encourages the teacherly tendency to make things easy and simple (fácil), often at the expense of exploring their real textual, political, and conceptual complexity and difficulty -- and hence, he proposed the alternative word "difficultator" as a better description of his own practice.  (Harvey Sarles, in our department, made a similar point in his book Teaching as Dialogue, where he suggests that the title "facilitator" implies an abdication of responsibility and bodily presence.)  Of course, this can be debated.  The point is, a lot of the examples of "facilitation" I've seen in critical settings involve oversimplifying and sloganizing -- and in the interest of true critical work, I wanted to resist that.

Similarly, with the issue of collaborative instruction.  From last week's post, you'll know I am suspicious of it, especially as it often implies a similar abdication of responsibility on the part of the teacher.  At the same time, I think it's essential.  If critical pedagogy is actually to make student-teachers out of students and teacher-students out of teachers, the teacher cannot remain at the helm, at the center, at all times. 

Here's my attempt to work through these contradictions.

For my Hitler (or history) class this semester, I have required each student to participate in a group (2-3 people) that will perform a "difficultation" on one of the materials we study.  It must:  be about 15 minutes long, include some interactive and physical activity, and make an argument (implicit or explicit) about the thing we're studying.  And they have to meet with me in advance to discuss it, so I can give them advice (and make sure it'll be a worthwhile experience for everyone...from my perspective at least) and incorporate what they're doing into my overall plan for the day.

So we did the first one last Thursday.  And overall I'd say it was quite good.  The text was by Waziyatawin, a local Dakota activist with a PhD in American history, about the history of Fort Snelling as a concentration camp (including comparative analyses of the Nazis and White Americans...right down to the architecture of the camps) and the contemporary politics of memory surrounding the fort.  Her message:  take it down.  The two difficultators, working partly off their initiative and partly off my advice, moved the class deftly from writing their own reactions to the text, to sharing those reactions speed dating-style, to a brief plenary discussion including an analysis of the Ft. Snelling website, to a small- and then big-group writing exercise in which we drafted notes for a letter that the difficultators (promised they) would send to a relevant authority, containing our recommendations for changes to how the Fort presents itself.

Generally, I thought it was quite successful.  The discussion was spirited, and people clearly cared, and were being pushed in new and productively uncomfortable directions.  Of course, we didn't get into the text nearly as much as I wanted to.  Of course, the "intervention" exercise felt a little bit quixotic.  Of course, they didn't plumb the depths of the implications of being complicit in genocide as much as I waned them to.  Of course, the connections to Hegel were left for me to make, hastily, at the end (though I did so while referencing their own blog discussion). 

So, some depth and polish and clarity were lost.  But I think these losses were offset.  Or did I let them off too easy?  Don't think so.  (And we can, as I often say and rarely do, always come back to it later.)