Date: Thursday 22 October 2020 Time: 12 noon Length: 60 Minutes
Presenter/s
Jacinta Cubis
This session is designed for:
Emerging facilitators Still developing Wisdom Keeper Everyone
Will this session be recorded? Partial recording
Important to note:
Maximum of 20 participants. Participants will need to use the phone app “Whatsapp” during this session. You will need to load this on your phone before the session.
Session Outline
Our smart phones have turned us all into photographers. They can also make us better facilitators.
Reading the room is an essential skill for facilitators but is rarely taught. We’re expected to know how to do this intuitively. The Facilitography Walkshop is all about getting a good eye to read the room.
Jacinta Cubis will guide us through a creative process to train our eyes not just to look, but to see, notice and observe. Street photography is the method and the everyday tool is the camera in our phone.
This walkshop will show how the much-maligned mobile phone is an accessible tool for connection and collaboration in groups that we facilitate. The #facilitography process further supports conference themes by highlighting the benefit, and power, of visual diversity.
It gives participants a means to authentically show what they care about, their ideas and views, and to in turn, use this with the groups they work with. It gives participants a valuable way to help the groups they work with understand others’ points of view, when they are trying to reach consensus, or to bridge the gap between polarised positions. (see Show what they think blog.)
Better observers make better facilitators.
Key Learning Objectives
- Explore new ways of seeing beyond the obvious. (“A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.” Dorothea Lange).
- Experience how we see changes what they see, as photographers and facilitators.
- Experience how taking photos in the street can help us to experiment and respond to change when facilitating groups.
How this session contributes to the AFN Community of Practice
#Facilitography walkshop will help to build the AFN community of practice in the following ways:
- Connect with your colleagues through photography and our phones, even from a physical distance.
- How to ‘work with what we’ve got’, in terms of what is around us, with a limited brief and time.
- Experience the rich diversity of how other facilitators ‘see’ things.
- Reflect on your own facilitation practice. How might we be getting in our own way as facilitators? A reflection on Linked In from a Sydney participant illustrates this beautifully.
Toolkit takeaways
- Practical exercises to start building a daily observational habit.
- Collated set of ideas from participants to use photographer with groups we facilitate
- Free copy of book Read the Room like a street photographer, which includes facilitography exercises.
Speaker Biographies
Jacinta Cubis, our ‘facilitographer’, is renowned for her energetic and creative facilitation style. She is passionate about the power of observation and how it helps us to read the room when we facilitate. For 20 years, she has facilitated collaborations, workshops and forums on diverse topics for government, education and community sectors, for 5 to 500 people. She is an outstanding communicator and empathetic trainer, able to build understanding and capability in facilitation, community and stakeholder engagement, across all levels of experience and sectors. A Co-Convener of the Victorian Facilitators Network, Jacinta has delivered presentations and facilitated workshops at numerous conferences, symposiums and seminars.