In the Commons of Facilitation: A Place for Dialogue in Campus Conflict

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Acknowledgements

With thanks to my colleagues in facilitation and for critical feedback on this paper during the drafting and revision process, thanks to Sonia Belasco, Alison Cook-Sather, Anne Dalke, Jeremy Elkins, and Robert Goldberg. With special thanks to Ken Cloke, whose encouragement opened this path.

Abstract

A traditional definition of the commons refers to land held collectively, by a public – as a park, for example, or a field for grazing animals. It might seem paradoxical to consider facilitation, which is often needfully private and confidential, as having a public dimension. In this reflective essay, I argue that what can and should be public is not the content of a facilitated engagement but its imaginative scaffold: the commons of facilitation. As a professor of Education Studies at a liberal arts college, my work as a facilitator took me beyond the classroom when I found myself close to a campus conflict that I saw might have been well served by the facilitation of dialogue. While at colleges and universities such facilitation is often considered a special function for use in prescribed contexts, I argue that it is better understood as a commons: a reliably accessible space prepared for the skillful support of communication as an ongoing part of community life.

Imagined as a commons, facilitation is a resource for relating to differences in a way that values them in the service of learning, teaching, and community care. Through an account of what I have found and created in the commons of facilitation, including my personal framework and two “homegrown” models of practice, I invite readers to consider how dialogue itself can serve as common ground.

Introduction

As a professor of Education Studies at a liberal arts college, my work as a facilitator took me beyond the classroom when I found myself close to a painful conflict on campus. I observed that as tension and a sense of threat increased, those involved and working in response to the conflict became isolated from one another and their choices for continuing communication narrowed. The situation ended starkly, with harm to individuals and to the community that took a long time to heal. I saw that with the skillful scaffolding that facilitative support can offer, people might have engaged less fearfully and found ways to continue to work together through dialogue.

Dialogue is a pathway out of the defensive and regulated character of contemporary discourse. And yet, even to begin in dialogue people may assume that they must agree to certain beliefs or outcomes. When differences seem both fundamental and fundamentally incompatible, we often hear a call to seek “common ground” with the tacit assumption that to find it requires similarity, conversion, or domination.

Dialogue itself can serve as common ground. When people enter into their questions of one another (Volk, 2025), joint understanding and action are possible without the rejection of enduring differences. Of course, the quality of communication depends on the willingness of those involved, the skill, hope, and support they can call on, their negotiations of roles and power, and the degree to which their context supports their efforts. It takes stamina and some confidence in the viability of improbable outcomes to engage with dialogue in the midst of difficulty.

On college and university campuses, the intentional facilitation of such engagement is often limited, its role confined to classroom instruction and formal dispute resolution (occasional projects around intergroup dialogue notwithstanding). Lecture and debate, valued forms of communication here, do not necessarily guide people into a collaborative project of emergent meaning making. The skills involved in facilitation, like other kinds of care work, are also undervalued – both because they run counter to prevailing values of speed and impersonality and because when used well, they are hard to see (Lesnick et al., in press). A cultural presumption that needing help is problematic also burdens the provision of support. In an environment focused on individual achievement, a concern for interactive processes can seem naïve, inefficient, “touchy-feely,” risky, or just beside the point.

When we define differences that strain communication and our responses to them as extraordinary, it is harder to engage with them holistically, especially as organizational routines tend to inhibit reflection (Smith-Doerr et al., 2024). Nevertheless, the holistic qualities of crisis and response have grown more apparent. Scholars of permacrisis (Turnball, 2022) and polycrisis (Albert, 2024) perceive contemporary conflicts and crises as chronic and interlocking. In a parallel way, the field of conflict resolution has adopted holistic approaches that restore relationships and shared humanity (Zehr, 2002; Mahammad, 2019; Schrage and Thompson, 2008).

For all of these reasons, the facilitation of communication makes an important contribution – and could make a greater one. In this essay, I argue that rather than consider facilitation a special function for use in prescribed contexts, we begin to understand it as a commons: a reliably accessible space prepared for the skillful support of communication as an ongoing part of community life. Imagined as a commons, facilitation is a scaffold for relating to differences in the service of learning and teaching across campus, through a process that no one party owns (J. Elkins, personal communications, 2025). The facilitation of communication can thus be understood as normal and to play our parts in it, offering and seeking support thereby, natural.

In advancing the idea of facilitation as a commons, my purpose is not to critique or reform more familiar approaches to campus conflict, such as ombuds and human resources offices, deans and faculty advisors, bias response groups, Title IV and Title VI offices, peer mentoring, and so on. Nor do I mean to disregard the professional preparation, and concern for role definitions, legality, and confidentiality that should accompany them. Rather, I attend to the underlying, shared project in which they participate. As a commons, the facilitation of communication is the responsibility of the collective to maintain. In this way, the work itself and the individual and institutional growth it can foster are held in common – not simply to resolve individual problems so that a supposedly seamless order can be resumed, but as an ongoing project of education and community care.

Entering the Commons

Though I didn’t think of it this way at the time, the conflict referenced at the start of this essay led me into the commons of facilitation. Hoping to build the resource (and recourse) I had wished were in place, I proposed to work with a group of faculty and staff colleagues to start a program supporting workplace communication on campus. Called “workplace advisors,” this model is now starting its eighth year. The goals of the program are to serve individuals and the community as more people learn from the experiences of variously positioned colleagues and gain confidence approaching conflict. While this program arose quite idiosyncratically, I am aware of similar projects having grown up at two other colleges.

A team of five to six faculty and staff members coming from a range of departments, ages, backgrounds, and years of service, workplace advisors offer staff and faculty colleagues – always at their initiative – informal, confidential, impartial, and independent support such as listening, coaching, resource brainstorming, accompaniment, and facilitated dialogue. Appointed by the president and paid a modest stipend, workplace advisors usually serve for about three years (a couple of us having stayed on since the beginning in informal leadership). Team members bring varying prior training ranging from clinical, legal, pedagogical, pastoral, and mediation and restorative approaches and share in campus-based training with human resources and college counsel. Engaging with approximately 10 cases annually, workplace advisors also meet together monthly for mutual support and reflection.

I also now work as part of a faculty facilitators group that came into being more recently on our campus. This team of 2 to 3 faculty colleagues serves by inviting people – colleagues and students — to allow us to work with them in specific forums and projects. As with workplace advisors, the faculty facilitators bring varying preparation and support to each other in the work, offered as a form of service.

The point of introducing these homegrown models is not to describe them in detail in order to urge others to adopt them. The point is that in what I have come to see as the commons of facilitation, each model has arisen and continues organically. This opens questions organizations could do well consider: What has the facilitation commons given rise to in your setting? What might come about were this commons to be more apparent and better supported? What kinds of agency and shared responsibility could become ordinary with facilitation normalized as a feature of community life?

Understanding Facilitation

To think about these possibilities, we need some shared understanding of facilitation. Informed by others’ work (Charles, 2010; Cloke & Goldsmith, 2011; Brown, 2017; Dass & Gorman, 1985; Gadlin & Welsh, 2020; Miller & Cutshall, 2001; Muhammad, 2019; Rendon, 2023) and by my own experience, I define facilitation as the intentional support of a process enabling people to communicate with one another other with increasing honesty, clarity, and imagination, taking the risks necessary in dialogue to arrive at shared understanding and joint action that do not presume unanimity of premises or goals. Facilitation supports communication in furtherance of mutual learning through connection (Doornbosch-Akse, L. & van Vuuren, M., 2019), agency (Mayer, 2000), and hope (Brown, 2018).

While the classic image of facilitation may be a mediator sitting with two people concerning an interpersonal conflict, facilitation actually takes many forms. Often working in teams rather than solo, facilitators engage with groups as well as individuals, including multiple constituencies in a given situation, and at various stages. At base, facilitators support a creative process, its timeline and outcomes co-constructed and not able to be known in advance. The tools available in the commons of facilitation are many (and not for me to catalogue here in detail); they include practices such as developing guidelines, active listening, strategic summarizing and querying, and collaborating to realize possibilities that grow out of conversation. Contextually specific discussion prompts and the use of other modalities such as writing and drawing, together with caucusing and other participant structures, also inform the process.

The work of facilitation demands critical thought and personal creativity – doing it, like participating in it, is not a tick-box exercise, but rather a form of learning and teaching. My own framework for facilitation is as follows. Again, I share it not to urge others to adopt it, but as an example of what grows in the commons.

Figure 1: A Framework for Facilitation

In my experience, facilitation interweaves the processes of witnessing, interchanging, and reorienting in order to support people to build trust and co-create action.

These terms are defined as follows:

Witnessing: being present and carefully attending to as well as sharing in one’s own and others’ experiences, thoughts, and questions. In witnessing, people share and receive each other’s expressions. The term “witness” is meant to apply to self as well as others: what we have witnessed and what we give witness to are important to our experience and resulting standpoint.

Interchanging: drawing the experience of others and their perspectives into one’s own story and drawing and hearing one’s story drawn into the stories of others. The term “interchange” is meant to suggest the give and take of dialogue, of seeing again as we see between.

Reorienting: shifting the positioning of oneself and one’s stories in recognition of others and others’ stories. The term “reorient” is meant to suggest a change in how people locate each other and/or ideas.

Building Trust: Participants build a working level of confidence in the stability of their and others capacity to listen and respond with more generous attention to one another’s needs, desires, and questions. From this platform they can create shared ground, not as agreement but as something between them that enables them to think and work together.

Co-Creating Action: Participants work together to design and take practical steps to address a situation.

Working where participants often bring a sense of urgency, facilitators hold time as well as space for communication. Voluntary and emergent, a facilitated engagement seeks to build enough confidence and patience with the process that people allow it to accommodate competing needs, desires, and questions (Weisman, 2024). Guiding people to speak on the level of their desires, needs and values, facilitators help them reorient their initial positions – the imagined solutions, often expressed as demands, thought to be necessary to advance their underlying interests (Fisher, et al, 2006). In supporting such communication, a facilitator’s responsibility is to be fair, non-judgmental, and multi-partial. To be multi-partial, a facilitator is aware of their own positioning as one among a broad range of perspectives, is mindful of power in shaping perspective, language, interaction, is equally supportive of all participants, and is confident that out of difficulty new possibilities can be created (Assegued, 2018).

Conclusion and Further Questions

It takes a capacious mind to play host to others and to find new ways to combine what they have to offer, a mind willing to be taught, willing to be inhabited, willing to labor in the cultural commons. – Lewis Hyde (in Smith, 2008, n.p.).

A traditional definition of the commons refers to land held collectively, by a public – as a park, for example, or a field for grazing animals. It might seem paradoxical to consider facilitation, which is often needfully private and confidential, as having a public dimension. In this case, though, it’s not the content of a facilitated engagement that is public but the imaginative scaffold for the engagement. Hyde’s (2008) term “cultural commons” in the passage quoted above marks out this imaginative space. Hyde suggests that to enter the cultural commons requires a kind of receptivity: “a mind willing to be taught.” In the commons of facilitation, too, being willing to be taught is vital, as is being willing to teach – not didactically (“this is how it is”) – but generously (“this is what it means to me” and “what does it mean to you?”).

In a description of our work we wrote for our colleagues, the faculty facilitators group describes our project this way:

We work together as a team on campus to support facilitated conversation to enhance our community. We’re all deeply interested in dialogue as a form of mutual education, and in understanding what makes dialogue possible. One of these conditions is a shared understanding that differences of experience and role position people to see things differently, and that everyone is thus potentially both a teacher and a learner. In working as facilitators, we see value in developing conversations on campus where differently positioned people learn from one another and thereby grow new possibilities for imagination and action.

Still, facilitated conversation is not a walk in the park. Care for a fair and generative process means that individuals— facilitators, too — will be uncomfortable and uncertain along the way. (This is one reason the models I have nurtured in the commons are team-based; the support of peers helps.) The difference facilitation makes is not to eliminate difference or discomfort but to diminish the threat they pose. It is this feature of facilitation that seems most conducive to growth.

This work can carry high stakes. Some might not use a resource they see as overly idealistic or risky, so in this way the openness of the commons is conditional. Some might suspect facilitators of stirring up trouble to keep themselves employed. Trust must be earned, and if it falters, remedies must be found. But isn’t this true of most work that matters?

To claim an essential role for trust in facilitation does not mean to expect participants to be credulous or to abandon their own or their sense of others’ sophistication. In this context, to trust does not mean to engage in a process of dialogue with uncritical belief or total confidence. It means, rather, to accept the possibility that the process could lead to meaningful, welcome outcomes as yet unknown because not yet in existence. Trust, like learning, in this sense pertains not to what is currently defined but to going beyond current definition. Thus rooted in uncertainty, trust entails risk – in contrast to the “ethic of control” (Welch, 1990) that pervades modernity, “characterized by a suspicion which seeks to create security through mastery . . .” (Illich and Cayley, 2005, p. 57). The commons of facilitation is an open system where the circulation of gifts, to use Hyde’s (1983) terms, contrasts with prescribed systems of exchange.

In the commons of facilitation, the gift is mutual learning through a process in which readymade answers take a back seat to creative inquiry, sensitive to people and contexts, with time to revise questions and space to revisit experiences and ideas. Like other forms of skillful improvisation, the work is both precise and responsive. As interpersonal and community care, facilitation fosters relationships of learning and teaching where differences of thought and experience are valued. It goes without saying that colleges and universities are places for teaching and learning. The role for dialogue beyond as well as within classrooms needs to be well understood and protected.

I close with questions readers might use to discern the potential of and to practice within the commons of facilitation:

• Where do you see potential opportunities for facilitation in your setting?
• When you consider the goals under which you gather with others for conversation, which could be served by facilitation and the risks it entails?
• What thought partners might you work with to recognize and possibly cultivate the commons of facilitation in your context?

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