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Facilitation

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 Facilitating games and simulations
 The facilitation of games and simulations in all disciplines and levels of learning

Call for papers for a symposium issue of
Simulation & Gaming:
An International Journal of Theory, Practice and Research.

Guest Editors:  Elyssebeth Leigh and Laraine Spindler
University of Technology of Sydney

As invited guest editors for a 2005 issue of S&G we seek contributions on the topic of facilitation in simulations and games.  In this context, the term facilitation refers to the skills and capabilities for managing simulations and games for learning.  Both the term and relevant skills, have received little attention in journals or conferences in the field. Yet facilitation contributes far more to the achievement of intended outcomes than is suggested by this absence of attention, and evaluation of facilitation receives even less.  Our goal is to publish a coherent group of resources to support skill improvement, research and understanding of this critical component of the field.

 As guest editors, who are researching facilitation, we hold the following propositions:

  1. Effective facilitation contributes to achieving relevant learning outcomes, but if done poorly, can destabilise even the best designs (there are no facilitator-proof designs).
  2. Facilitation requires an understanding of participants as complex human beings. You are facilitating far more that the sequence of events.
  3. Good facilitation may appear effortless but is highly conceptual, deeply analytical (even if not consciously so at any particular moment) and the result of extended reflective experience.
  4. Identifying opportunities to support - rather than control - learning is the basis of good facilitation.
  5. The facilitator’s style and the design parameters of an activity must be congruent.
  6. Different people have different approaches depending on their understanding of education, its various purposes and the ways that learning occurs, which influences their choices of activity.
  7. Where there is incongruence between facilitation style and activity design the learning potential is seriously weakened, and there is a higher potential for negative emotional responses to the experience. These in turn require an even more skilled response.
  8. The ability to facilitate can be learned – experience is vital, reading can only give conceptual awareness, not skilled ability.

 We are seeking articles that take up any of these issues and/or explore the following themes:

  • What are the basic group dynamics frameworks and theories about the human factors that facilitators need to possess to be able to operationalize the role effectively?
  • What are the skills and capabilities of an effective facilitator? To what extent are these context specific?
  • How do you learn to be a good facilitator? How do you help others to do so?
  • What are appropriate ways to research and evaluate facilitation and enactments of the role of facilitator?
  • How do you appropriately construct and manage the experience of a simulation or game where the intent is research as well as (or rather than) learning?
  • What are useful recovery strategies – how to bring a group back into focus after an event that disorients or otherwise inhibits the learning?

In the first instance please sent a short summary of your paper's theme and we will reply within 7 days of receipt, concerning how we would like to match it with the overall theme.  Please send such summaries by end of  autumn 2004. We would like to receive full papers by end of 2004. Where this is difficult please ask about how we can cooperate to make this an issue that can become a helpful resource for all those wishing to know more about successfully using simulations and games for learning.

Send proposals to both:

Elyssebeth Leigh, Faculty of Education, UTS PO Box 123, Broadway. NSW 2007 Australia.

elyssebeth.leigh  NoSpam  @uts.edu.au

Laraine Spindler, IIS, UTS, PO BOx 123, Booadway. NSW 2007 Australia.

laraine.spindler  NoSpam  @uts.edu.au