Chapter 15: Discussion skills that create knowledge

Chapter 15:

Discussion skills that create knowledge

Now that we have the theory and form of ECOIs roughly in mind, we should turn to consider the practice, particularly the kinds of skills, the features of method, that the facilitators would be attempting to introduce and enhance as the discussions proceed.

The process involves creating or generating ideas and proposals regarding the issue under discussion, and then testing these proposals with a view to creating better ideas. This needs to be done by the participants. The invention needs to be unconstrained by anxiety about being judged by the group, so that quite novel proposals can be entertained – ones that fall outside the conventional railroad tracks of thought. These, in turn, need to be doubted and tested rigorously – again, without falling into conventional ruts of acceptance. To do both of these things well requires an environment of trust, mutual respect and active support.

Questions

Being able to ask good questions is obviously a primary skill. Good questioning depends on at least two things. The first is different points of view, frames of reference, conceptual schemes from which questions can be asked. To ask a question involves the ability to step outside the unquestionable, and to do this, we must have somewhere to step. Hence it draws on breadth of experience and grows with the process – as we become more familiar with different points of view and ways of looking at things; including sophisticated theories developed in the academic world, and religious and cultural positions which can bring with them considerable power. This is one reason why it is slow at first and why it is best integrated with good forms of independent enquiry which are properly sociable.

The second thing it needs is some conviction that there is some point to asking the question. Sustained personal experience of being fobbed off or dismissed results, firstly, in the questions simply arising silently, and eventually, not at all. They become “idle”. Questioning dies when there is no time or opportunity to explore their possibilities and address them properly.

Time and talk provide the oxygen they need. But when there are agendas, when there is “ground to be covered”, then questions are an interruption and a distraction unless they are confined to grasping the point that is a part of our agenda – and even then you should not try our patience too much.

The first impulse is to answer questions quickly. Questions, we think,  immediately call for answers. Having the answers, we think, is a sign of knowledge and expertise. But in our context, questions are a call for inquiry, for exploration. Hmmm. Let’s sit down and talk about this for a while. What does it entail? What other questions arise from it? Are we on the wrong track with this material after all? What proposals could be made about that? How would we know if we had a good answer? Are the conventional answers really good enough? This isn’t how most people expect to get through the material of a course, let alone live a busy life.

Testing

A second area of skill lies in the identifying, testing and developing of arguments or claims. This involves exploring concepts, assumptions, and teasing out the factual and value elements. What does that word really mean? This is important. Vague or misused words quickly corrupt whole lines of thought and decision. Once we get close to an argument we quickly find that dictionaries can offer only the most rudimentary beginnings. Philosophers write whole books on a single concept – when it counts.

Assumptions, too, often need to be located. All arguments contain a whole background that has to be taken for granted in order for the claims to be made. This isn’t a fault – it is a necessity. But of course problems and errors often lie in precisely what is taken for granted. Work here can not only reveal where we are going wrong but also be suggestive of different ways of viewing the matter that may help us to find our way out.

Facts and values

We need also to be able to distinguish matters of fact from value matters, and find out when both of these things enter in. Related to this, is the problem of the “naturalistic fallacy”. This goes, roughly, that statements about what “ought to be” the case cannot be derived from statements about what “is” the case – or “you cannot derive an “ought” from an “is” alone – or, a value cannot be derived from a fact alone. No accumulation, just of facts, will tell us what we should do.

That lion is charging us. Charging lions, on the whole, tend to have it in mind to destroy people – people being soft, weak, slow, and edible compared to lions – and people like us, on the whole, tend to wish to preserve our own lives. None of this tells us what we “ought” to do, unless preserving our lives is, indeed, what we value. Valuing our lives or welcoming death will lead to quite different “oughts”, given the same set of facts. Either way we are likely to get an adrenaline rush. Such questions focus our attention. We tend to judge them as significant. And a value underlies that.

Factual claims and value claims are justified in  quite different ways. Factual claims are the province of science, but value claims – except for those built into their techniques and procedures – are not. Value claims are the province of philosophy – of fields like aesthetics, philosophy of art, ethics and political philosophy. In our discussions, we have to decide how to treat the factual elements – whether we can accept factual assumptions, or whether we have to ask science, or some other form of experience. But the value claims are ours.

This distinction is of vital importance across the whole span of our public and private lives, and is the source of a huge range of errors and bad decisions. Recently, the New Zealand government asked the New Zealand scientific community to come up with proposals for how we should treat the elderly in the coming years, given the aging population.

Now as scientists, that community can tell us a lot about the facts of aging, and they can make various predictions about the future facts of aging; the role of biology and of institutions, for instance. But they can never, simply as scientists, propose what we should do with these facts in the way of policies or decisions. These things require value judgments to be made every step of the way. The value judgments needed at each step lie outside the field of science. All of those discussions of “respect” in Part 1 were just that difference.

This demarcation is, after all, the line that was drawn by science itself when science broke away from philosophy. Individual scientists are no better placed to make these judgements than the man or woman in the street unless, in addition to their knowledge of science, they have made it their business to be skilled in the relevant ethics.

Individually, of course, some might have done this, just as some might have studied classical music, or poetry. But so might any one else, and they are under no professional obligation to do so. As we have already seen, scientists are rarely required even to study the philosophy of their own discipline, so our expectations shouldn’t be high. People who think of themselves as scientists (and are thought of as scientists) constantly make this error, and think that what we “ought” to do flows naturally from their gathering of facts.

The values that riddle their advice are things hidden from them – often taken simply as obvious, which is odd when we consider how contentious values are usually taken to be. This confusion is a major contributor to why our policies and decisions so often fail to yield satisfactory results. You can’t be too hard on the politicians who ask them, though – they went to school too.

Anyone at all familiar with the philosophy of science, or who has done philosophical work at an advanced level, will know that there are problems both with the fact⁄value distinction and the naturalistic fallacy. Of course there are. How could it be philosophy and be unproblematic? Pushing ideas until they become problematic is our job. But for the sorts of discussions; the ECOIs, that we are considering here, (and for every public policy decision that is made) the distinction will be vital to avoid the simple school-girl howlers that we see every day.

Giving reasons

A third skill is the building of explanations and justifications. My experience with university students is that, by the time they have reached university, many have been reduced to one-word answers. A few can manage a phrase, and even fewer a sentence. That is what classroom questioning has come down to. A question is asked, and a very simple answer is given rather hopefully. This is one obvious reason why they write such bad essays, where the teachers suddenly expect them to give reasons as well. Asking “why” of their tentative answers is a bit too much. Practice is required for many people to be able to give an answer and then explain it. This is the first step beyond the mere venting of opinion.

There is a confusion here about the fact that we are all entitled to our opinions. Of course we are, but in these settings we are each supposed to be attempting to improve our knowledge. In which case I am only really interested in becoming engaged in the discussion when I can begin to see why I should accept your opinion. Without reasons, your opinion is on all fours with everyone else’s opinion, and there are billions of people on the planet.  The opinion, on its own, carries no clue at all to its value.  The reason, or the explanation that supports the opinion, does.

Beginners need to be nursed into this, because the task of explaining is often a big and difficult step. The attempted explanations need to be received sensitively and patiently, and not pushed too hard at first. Sometimes, just the first contribution is a land-mark event.

Examples can help here, and are often needed. Selecting good examples that can be used to illustrate many different things is a considerable philosophical skill. It is economical to use one example to illustrate many points, rather than to have a new example for each. It is also noticeable, when studying philosophy, that one’s ability to test something with an example is crucial to clear understanding. Much philosophy is simply opaque because examples are often not given, and when this happens, the work merely remains an obscure abstraction until readers supply the examples for themselves. It is in the examples that the work can come to life.

Counter-arguments

Similarly, counter-examples are a crucial tool for testing. Here, perhaps, we have found an example with all of the properties of the other examples you were giving us, but this one seems to suggest the opposite conclusion, or that the claim doesn’t work or apply here. This process of example and counter-example is particularly useful when we are trying to develop a rule – perhaps for a concept or a practice, or simply how to behave. Here are the examples that fit. Are there any that don’t? Does the difference between examples show us where a line might be drawn?

Testing by opposing arguments – coming up with counter-arguments – is a core skill. It is here that we reach out of our comfort zones, or are forced out. We climb out of our box, challenging or violating our taken-for-granted. It is hard to imagine making progress otherwise. It is the Devil’s advocate – arguing for the very thing that you want to oppose.

My basic rule of thumb here? Our arguments, ideas and beliefs are only as good as the ideas that have tested them, the criticisms they have survived. Poor thinking results from poor challenges, feeble objections that they have managed to survive all too easily.

Years of reading student essays has led me to one explanation for the widespread poverty of their work – the lazy, conventional naïveté of the work of most of them. They write as they do because the critics they bring to mind are so weak. The only arguments their ideas have had to survive are so feeble as to be almost silly.

This is easily enough explained by returning to the idea that we internalize the reasoning around us. Good reasoning is a matter of associating with people who reason well in discussion. But most students have not had the experience of associating in such groups. They grew up among people who didn’t do it – taking their lives mostly for granted, among other people who share their convictions along with their lives, and who, if they discuss them, mostly confirm each other in their opinions.

Their discussions end quickly at a mutually agreed cliché which has little substance or experience behind it and has never been seriously challenged. They view with scorn the others, out in the world there, who disagree with them, and their opposing beliefs and arguments are reduced to pitiful cartoons – you know the sort – the ideas of liberals, conservatives, socialists, Christians, Muslims, atheists, those other cultures, environmentalists, men, women, the poor, the rich, the general public, politicians –  those sorts of people.

And, of course, at school, these students weren’t exposed to serious discussion in which ideas had to be developed and deepened, except those ideas the curriculum planners had in mind, and wanted developed in their own way.

Students are remarkably good at guessing the grade they will get for an assignment, but hopeless at anticipating the comments – which they should have been able to anticipate in their heads. But then they would have to have been receiving good and extensive comments as a matter of course. Not just ticks and corrections of sentence construction, or cryptic single words and phrases in red. But good commentary that discusses the ideas takes time, and the factory doesn’t allow such time.

Building counter-arguments that stem the tide of our ready belief is, then, a vital art. It is really flourishing when the group will get together to try and improve a counter argument to the point that it significantly challenges what we want to believe, so that it becomes a serious disturbance to our comfort, our sacred cows, our cherished beliefs. A sign of success is often when we come away confused about what we believe – uncertain when once we were certain. Confusion is a condition – a necessary phase – of real intellectual growth.

This, of course, is when outside observers, or those who are asked to consider these processes as seriously educational, are likely to become afraid. What if the participants reach the wrong conclusion? Our only real concern here should be that the discussion might not continue, that time will not be available for further arguments to be developed, and developed properly.  The more opportunities that exist for such sustained discussions, and the more respect there is for them – in formal educational settings, in public and private places, and in the media, the less there is to fear.

How can we get such discussions going then, and facilitate them?

I will give you a very powerful starting sequence I learned from practitioners in Philosophy for Children. Having chosen your theme – as facilitator, or as a group – you first need some stimulus material, such as an anecdote, a situation, a piece of a story, or a piece of video. Following the theme “are some lives better than others”, for instance, you might tell the story from the movie “Educating Rita” to the point where she comments on her mother’s remark that “there might be better songs to sing than this”. Or, if following the fragility theme from Martha Nussbaum’s “Fragility of Goodness”, you might draw on “Sophie’s Choice” where Sophie explains the choice she made, and the conclusion she drew from its apparent consequences.

Having introduced the stimulus and made a general comment to contextualize it, you ask for each member of the group to silently spend a few minutes writing down one question that they would ask, for the purposes of discussion, arising from the stimulus. It must be an open-ended question, not a question of fact, and not a question of interpretation of what was  going on in the stimulus, but a question related to the issue, and hopefully one that they would like to understand better.

You then give the members a few more minutes to explain their question to their neighbour.

When they are ready, the members come up and write their question on the white-board.

Once they are all up, the group then votes on each question – the winning vote to be the one first up for discussion. This does not rule out returning to any of the others later on.

To start off the discussion, the person who proposes the question gives a brief explanation of their thought behind it. Then the discussion can begin, and there is usually plenty to be said by now.

As the group builds experience, and particularly when they pursue a theme over time, it may not be necessary to do all this. But it is very powerful, and a great fall-back if the group gets stumped.

It might even be too much for beginners, who may get very excited, but have very little skill or self-control. It can happen that everyone wants to talk at once; to make their suggestion that is brimming in their minds or to respond to other speakers almost before they have finished speaking, which almost guarantees that the discussion is superficial.

There is a style of discourse like this that I have often seen on morning TV talk-shows, where a group for television personalities chatter brightly at each other in an apparent effort to score points and show how witty that they are. Beginners are not necessarily motivated in these way, even to prove themselves like a gaggle of fourteen-year-olds, but there certainly are bad models out there, and without much of a shared insight into how knowledge is created through discussion, and with little experience, they may just be doing the best they know how. The enthusiasm, at least, is a good sign, and its emergence can illuminate the interest that such discussions can create – even the thirst for them.

When this is the problem, and the discussion is not slow enough for everyone to be truly listening and reflecting on what is being said, something like a “talking stick”, or better, a soft “cush ball” can be used. Only the person with the ball can speak, and when they have finished, they toss the ball to another group member who indicates a desire to speak next. Not only does this ensure that one person speaks at a time, but the act of tossing the ball allows for a more measured pace.

Another similar problem at the beginning is the participant who finds their voice and tends to dominate. This, too, can be a good sign, since it can indicate an emerging confidence, but it undermines team-work, frustrates the others and usually suggests a lack of self-awareness. It usually hinders the advancement of discussion, since people who do this tend to repeat themselves in various ways, just in case they weren’t heard properly the first time.

The answer here, is a small bell, such as a shop counter bell, and a limit of, perhaps, three minutes. I think it better not to start with these things but to have them ready, and to introduce them as a part of the training – introducing a few skills at a time – and dropping the use of these devices as soon as the facilitator judges that they are no longer necessary.

As discussions progress it can be additionally powerful to have a small team of facilitators, rather than just one. This would also enable more advanced learners to develop skill in facilitation; which is, I think, a very important thing to be doing if we want these sorts of discussions to be easily and widely undertaken.

Here you might have two secondary roles. The first of these would be at the white-board, attempting to track every point that is made with a quick phrase. This is a useful thing for a lone facilitator to do also, particularly if they have difficulty keeping their mouth shut, but it does take their attention away from skill development, and blunts their sensitivity to the group. One facilitator on their own may need to split their time between making brief notes that follow the shifts in discussion, and just listening. The value of close note-taking, though, is that beginning participants are often stunned to see what ground they managed to cover. It gives them a real confidence boost – reassuring them of the effectiveness of their minds.

Another valuable tool is to have a facilitator just sitting and tracking the argument in their heads. If they are able to do this, it can be a remarkable experience for all participants – including facilitators – if they can recapitulate a series of the moves that participants have made, perhaps the last half-dozen or so.

“You might recall that Joan proposed such-and-such. But then Peter asked . . . And Frank responded . . . But Susan wanted to know why . . . And to this, Amy’s suggestion was . . . But then Louise gave . . .  as a counter example. And then John suggested that we . . .”

This map of how the discussion has moved can come as a revelation to both participants and facilitators alike. It shows how the reasons build, it shows the cooperation, and it is a great confidence booster. It isn’t easy to do, though; to pay close attention to the details of the moves, and to keep their sequence in mind. Lone facilitators are unlikely to have the mental freedom to do it, and it can be difficult even if a second facilitator has the potential freedom. Only twice have I been fortunate enough to have someone in the room with me who was able to do it. But then again, how often do we get the chance? Perhaps it is a skill that can be developed.

As we learn to track and question and explore our own educational development, it might turn out that academic journalling has a useful role to play. Clearly, it would help awareness, not only of our own reaction to ideas, but also to our self-consciousness of the processes we might perform.

1. Do I even know what that means?  What could it mean?
2. What would that look like in reality?
3. What would be an example of that?
4. Are there any examples that don’t fit?
5. Is that unlimited?
6. Could there be another explanation?
7. But . . .  (wouldn’t that mean?)
8. What if . . . (this happened)  (someone were to say)?
9. If only . . .
10. If . . . (this happened) (this was true), then . . .
11. Is this just a matter of  “either⁄or”?  could it be more complicated than that? Is there a third possibility?
12. What do these opposing views share in common?
13. How do they (or I) know that is true?
14. What if they (I) are (am) wrong about that?  What might the consequences be?
15. What is being assumed here?  Is that a reasonable assumption to make? What would follow from different reasonably plausible assumptions?
16. What values are implicit in that?
17. Are these things really the same⁄different?
18. Why don’t I like that idea?
19. Why does that idea appeal to me?
20. Why would anyone believe something like that? (How do we explain that?)
21. Is there a historical⁄cultural reason for things being this way?
22. Does this mean that we just have to accept it?
23. Am I really understanding what it would be like to be that person?
24. Does this square with my experience?
25. Could we imagine it being different?
26. If there was no such thing as . . . (truth, freedom, choice, the individual, facts . . . ) would it make any difference in everyday life?
27. How would a person behave if they truly believed X?
28. How do (or could) people learn that?
29. Could human beings really live that way?

Stimulation, debriefing, and the potential value of interviews

The stimulus

I used to conduct my university lecture courses with roughly an hour of presentation followed by an hour of discussion, more or less along the lines indicated here. It is surprising how much can be achieved with these discussions, even in a very formal setting, quite a large class and a tiered lecture theatre, though these were mostly lower level courses. I spent a lot of time asking them questions and working to get them to talk to each other rather than to me. I hid in the corner a lot.

My classes understood that I wasn’t there to impart “knowledge” or “the truth” to them, or tell them what to believe, I was there to challenge their thinking and their lives. My lectures were more or  less intended to be subversive. I would be making proposals along the way, but what they made of them or did with them was their responsibility, not mine.

The discussions in smaller classes also sprang from presentations; usually from the issues they raised out of them, and I stepped back and facilitated. Sometimes I was startled by how basic the questions were that they identified and discussed with enthusiasm and at length; sometimes way below the level that I had perceived the presentations to be. We can miss where the students are, intellectually by very large margins, and not pick up on the problem, because they have learned our game, and can be quite good at feeding us what we want.

This was valuable information, and I often created the flexibility to follow up with another presentation closer to their concerns. Better do that again!

My point here is that the stimulus could often be a part of an on-going inquiry; that groups of independent inquirers could pull together ECOIs, or join ones with other groups, using similar stimulus material. This is how I envisage educational understanding itself to be developed by mentors and learner groups working together.

It should not be difficult to gather up whole packages, and multiple packages of stimulus materials. Provocative stories, explanations and points of view. Indeed, this current book provides an ample beginning resource, since each chapter is intended to provoke in much the same way that I intended my classes. I imagine there will be no shortage of people with issues with every chapter. Given an ECOI or two, there ought to be an abundance of issues emerging for independent and group inquiry as well.

Video provides the opportunities for excellent stimuli too, and TED talks offer a useful example, being brief, and intended to be provocative as well as sometimes being modestly scholarly. Documentaries have much to offer, and fiction, in video form, can bring the necessary life to many issues. The possibilities of good resources here are so much enlarged by the internet, and, once brought together by suitable educational organizations, the power and cost-effectiveness of internationalizing such resources have to be obvious. If we were to take these educational processes seriously, there would be abundant possibilities for fiction and documentary film-makers who can unpack life’s paradoxes and dilemmas and avoid pedantry.

Debriefing

Proper debriefing is an essential part of collaborative processes, both ECOIs and the more empirically oriented (or even textually oriented) collaborative inquiries discussed in the hierarchy chapter. Here learners are encouraged to explore and share their experiences of working through some topic or issue or teaching process or activity, including the group processes themselves.

These are not occasions for evaluating the leadership, but should be undertaken in a spirit of collective responsibility. They are occasions for sharing the internal conditions of experience, which we would expect to be different for different learners; including difficulties that were experienced and sometimes overcome, things that were startling or challenging, particularly those that were contributions from other learners, and insights that were gained.

They might also involve discussions of the course of the collective inquiry. Some might have felt that they would have benefited from more time on a particular issue or example. Some might have struggled to explain a point, and might ask for help. Some might wish to muse on whether the team properly exploited the range of available skill. Checklists could be used to review these things. Problems experienced can be discussed, and strategies for dealing with them explored.

The purposes of these debriefings are to encourage self-awareness of the experiential processes, to help learners to become aware of what they felt or experienced in common, but also how they experienced differently, to discover aspects of experience and insights that they might have missed, or even prematurely dismissed, and to become aware of strategies that might give greater power to their educational engagement, or help develop them.

Where there is a great deal of insight to be gained, and a good deal of mutual support, through the disclosure by individual internal conditions of experience, it is of course vital that discussion of the course of the inquiry itself be a discussion of a team effort, and not personalised. The importance of enhancing the collective culture and its self-regulation must always remain uppermost. To do many of these things successfully therefore depends, as almost always throughout the whole educational process, on the degree of mutual trust that learners have been able to achieved with each other, and their mentors.

These debriefings are excellent points for considering where further sessions might proceed, since through them participants may become much more conscious of paths not taken. By sitting back and adopting the larger view, they can give their discussions or inquiries more context, and even consider ways in which their own collective assumptions or perplexities might need to be challenged.

Interviewing

Sometimes, both in collaborative inquiries and in ECOIs, a need may emerge through these debriefings for a particular kind of stimulus. Here interviewing someone appropriate can provide potential not available in any other way. Perhaps we are having difficulty grasping something from one of the disciplines, or we suspect that there must be a history behind this, but it appears that it is too difficult for us to access it. There may be someone at the local university who would know; a scholar or researcher. We could invite them, or ask for an appointment. We could seek advice on where to look next, or we could interview them as deeply as we are able about the understandings themselves.

Nor should we be reluctant to take up their time, or because of the importance of their work. Many academics believe that they have an important role to play in the community, and are uncomfortable when academia is divorced from it. Others might even find the discussion a welcome distraction. Again, it can often help for them to discover how their work is misunderstood, or misperceive.

These people would not be invited to teach us in any conventional sense, though the authority of their experience would be respected, and is acknowledged just in the invitation process. We might encourage and submit to semi-formal teaching at any time. We would be approaching them to interview them, however, and this is why critical and respectful interviewing skills would be highly prized in conjunction with ECOIs and in independent inquiry, both individual and group work, and developed over time.

Or it could be that there is a motivational or empathetic aspect of some inquiry that some of us are struggling with. Why don’t women just leave? Why would any intelligent woman just stay there and take that abuse for years? Is there a social worker at the Women’s Refuge who may be able to help? Let’s invite someone who works with the unemployed to understand why they don’t try harder to get a job.

Some of us never have been able to see why an intelligent person would believe something like that. Let’s find one, and invite them in. Not too convincing? Let’s get a second opinion. Perhaps someone else can better explain the emotions, the passions here. Our role would be to listen with sensitivity and respect, to be receptive and to ask thoughtful questions. Such experiences might open up whole literatures that had formerly been inaccessible. Discussions with different kinds of people within the community might facilitate all kinds of inquiry

The problem of indoctrination

I have said on a number of occasions that these discussions are the most educational activity that we can undertake – the most likely to be free of indoctrination. The possibilities for indoctrination still exist; in the choice of topics and in the failure to expand them sufficiently, and particularly in the degree of challenge that the intellectual climate, with its authority structure, allows and provides.

In the practice of ECOIs, the problem of indoctrination hangs over the decisions of the facilitator, and the dilemma of becoming involved with content. It is my perception that the Philosophy for Children movement, at least in its Australasian implementation, moved from the greater involvement of the facilitators that is evident in the BBC documentary “Socrates for Six-Year-Olds” from the 1970s, to a much more minimal involvement – even to a complete separation. Setting aside whether this may have been more appropriate for the discipline of philosophy, I doubt that such a total separation is optimal for educational purposes.

I do think, though, that a complete separation should be an iron rule for beginning facilitators, particularly if their sensitivity to the problem of indoctrination and an awareness of its possible presence is poorly developed. Beginners should also not involve themselves, simply to keep their own egos at bay; to cultivate their listening and their observation and gain a strong sense of how their involvement can impair discussion. They are also less likely to be familiar with the terrain under discussion, and their interventions can be clumsy because of this. But they should hold back anyway, until they gain a stronger sense of how their educational impulse might backfire and have indoctrinatory consequences, and what they might – perhaps often must – do to correct these possible effects.

Three instances where intervention might be justified spring to mind, and they are closely related. The first is when the discussion flags. In such an instance, an intervention might be desirable as a micro-stimulus. Like the opening stimulus, a call back from abstraction to the real world, or a case;  a story – even a personal one – told vividly and compellingly, might be just the thing to rekindle the fire.

A second intervention that could be both usefully powerful, but also has a danger of being perniciously so, is when the facilitator might call for an example or counter-example to ground the discussion. The group, and the discussion may be at a loss, or come up with inconsequential examples, or ones too vague and insufficiently grounded to reveal very much. “Would this be an example?” might be a reasonable move, and a powerful and vivid one might be most effective.

Such an example might bend the discussion in a particular direction for a considerable time. This might not be a bad thing, but the facilitator must be aware of the effects of their involvement, that in providing the initiative they have taken some from the group, and that they have, through their intervention, done something more to establish a potential agenda of their own.

The third and most problematic intervention is in the challenge to complacency, perhaps through a brief, vigorous and powerful  devil’s advocacy. This would be particularly appropriate where the discussion is falling into a comfortable consensus, or relying too heavily on unexamined platitudes or clichés. Just calling the group on the cliché or consensus might not be enough, particularly with beginning groups, even if it would sit much more comfortably with the idea of keeping within the bounds of methodological intervention,

Such an intervention definitely involves bending the course of discussion, though, and we can easily imagine how this might be done in settings that involve a religious or political partiality, and with a subtle bias, and that it could be conducted to indoctrinatory effect, pulling the discussion back into line with an underlying agenda. Where we can see how that could happen, we need to be alert to it also in discussions ranging from child-rearing, to business management, to medical practice, to sporting ethics. A quiet and conventional authority that reinforces conventional wisdom could, unfortunately, be reasserted from the background.

How can these problems be mitigated – particularly the last one? The problems will be at their worst in the absence of a larger educational environment that is persistent. We are considering ECOIs where learners engage in them consistently from childhood through adulthood, and that their educational understanding and responsibility has been nurtured equally throughout that time.

Having participated in a diversity of ECOIs, and with an insight into the dangers of indoctrination, they ought to become more and more aware of these possibilities themselves, and bring them to light as procedural concerns like any other – particularly if it is an open part of any issues that might be canvassed in a debriefing. These two aspects, educational understanding and a long-term and diverse participation in ECOIs, should make them self-regulating.

In addition, it has already been suggested that all learners, over the long course of ECOIs they engage in, should learn to facilitate them, and practice doing so from time-to-time as an adjunct to their mentoring roles. These issues would, of course be a part of the protocols of training, and facilitators would be mentoring each other as they learned the facilitation process. Heightened consciousness of these issues and practice in appropriate observation should be inevitable.

Facilitators can enhance their appreciation of these issues by brainstorming where, from their own experience, a discussion might conceivably go, considering those points where clichés might come up, examples might be needed, or arguments may consolidate, needing a devil’s advocacy challenge. As they consider these things, they need to consider countervailing devil’s advocacies, examples or stories that could be brought into play, where also appropriate, making it clear (and true) that there is not a “facilitator position” on any of these things.

This is not to draw up a “plan” for the discussion, but merely to anticipate, since some points of view are often predictable, but the brainstorming will also help to reinforce the importance of the neutrality of facilitation in the minds of facilitators, as well as helping their minds to be lively when others are stumped. Advanced ECOIs are likely to render such brainstorming ineffective. But then they will also very likely be highly skilled and self-regulating.

Crucial to mitigating the problem of indoctrination is the frequency of discussions, how long they are and how persistently they are sustained over the years. Such factors obviously effect the skill and creativity of the participants, the rigor that the discussions can involve, and their educational integrity.

It needs to be born in mind, however, that the considerations we have been entertaining above about the problem of indoctrination, though they would be important ones in a genuinely educational environment, are almost inconsequential in comparison to the significant processes of indoctrination that bedevil our contemporary practices. Compared with anything else that we do, nothing could do more to enable people to take charge of their own minds – their own beliefs, their own values, their own lives, than putting ECOIs at the centre of our educational practice.  Nor can we hope to do more to learn how to talk things over with each other, with respect, anywhere in our lives. It is an excellent context in which to experience productive and safe challenge to our settled assumptions about life and thought, and to make them more powerful and effective. We all need to be doing this a lot.

© R. Graham Oliver, 2018