FACILITATION | EDUCATIONAL REFORM

Three profound lessons I learned from Yoshi Oida about facilitation

or: how to be an invisible facilitator

on the shelf: Yoshi Oida with Lorna Marshall: The Invisible Actor, 1997

1

There is Yoshi Oida, the incomparable teacher of Noh and Kabuki theatre and erstwhile collaborator of Peter Brook, who taught me to keep focusing on the framework, format, structure, choreography even, of the activity I am offering to the participants in my workshops — and not on the content.

As a consequence, the facilitator keeps a lot of open space ‘inside’ her — some kind of inner void, which allows for the participants’ imagination to enter, and where they can make up their own stories, store their own knowledge and skills, let emerge their own insights about the training content, and grow and nurture their own emotional and attitudinal learning outcomes.

2

Here is another thing that I learned from 笈田ヨシ Oida Yoshi San, something that profoundly changed my work as a teacher, or rather: a facilitator of learning. This is a teaching from Kyūi (Nine Levels), a classic by 世阿弥 元清 Zeami Motokiyo, the famous aesthetician, actor, playwright, educationalist and Zen Master of the 14 century AD.