Facilitation in communication: Toward a study of an educational gaming simulation

In an educational gaming simulation session, a facilitator enacts multiple roles of "coach,""guide,""educator,""trainer, " and "supervisor" who attempts to manage the given educational setting toward a certain educational purpose. By exploring the characteristics of one facilitator's moves, we may be able to extend knowledge about some aspects of the nature of professional practices. It then leads to our understanding of the "practice context" (Schön 1983, 1987, 1991) of a facilitation process. The idea of the practice context acknowledges that part of our knowledge, understanding, and expertise to cope with the given situation are tacit and implicit in our patterns of action. This chapter reports on preliminary findings of a set of interview sessions with a facilitator after an educational gaming simulation session. It aims to offer further understanding of the communicative nature of professional practices as they are embedded in our action. Through the process of facilitation, the facilitator accumulates and personalizes experiences as a facilitator, and then generalizes such experiences into a private "theory" which may be applicable to subsequent opportunities to facilitate gaming simulations. Guided by the facilitator's own theory of practice, the facilitator selects and combines communication strategies in order to control the situation as the process unfolds. Based on a set of long interviews with a facilitator, some characteristics of the facilitation process are discussed in the context of a constitutive view of communication.