Ecological Facilitation: A Gritty and Creative Approach to Leadership

Course Overview

This practical and evocative course will explore questions of how to facilitate groups engaged in the challenges of creating a sustainable future. What forms and processes reflect our values and intentions? What practices reflect and therefore enable a more ecological way of being? What approaches to leadership support and model the change we seek to facilitate? These questions are applicable within community, workplace and educational settings.

Together we will create a vibrant learning community where novices and highly experienced facilitators will learn from each other, providing ample opportunity for you to practice, hone and explore your skills and qualities as an ecological facilitator. You will leave resourced and ready to make a difference.

Course Detail

Drawing from the fields of complexity theory, deep ecology, and participative democracy, we will start with the assumption that our current ecological and social crisis stems from deeply embedded cultural norms and habits, and so we need leadership and facilitation that is courageous in catalysing change: individual and collective. In practice, even the best set of tools are nothing without a facilitator who is clear and creative with their craft, and who is able to be fully present to what is there in the moment.

Key themes to be explored are:

• working with uncertainty
• relational practice
• the unfolding of the sensuous field
• facilitation as leadership

The programme will be practical, challenging and fun. Working with the real-life professional issues of participants, we will hold a co-operative inquiry into the practice of ecological facilitation.

The course will include small group work, talks, role plays, and peer and faculty mentoring sessions. We will work with our ‘many ways of knowing' and engage our intellectual, somatic, emotional and indigenous intelligences.

The course will include some online engagement and reading before the start date and the opportunity to continue learning afterwards.