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  • Foundations of Facilitation // with Amanda Faye Lacson & Tracie Nichols

Foundations of Facilitation // with Amanda Faye Lacson & Tracie Nichols

  • 05 March 2025
  • 29 April 2025
  • online
  • 32

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This course introduces the foundations and best practices of facilitation to TLA practitioners.

You will learn about yourself as a facilitator and explore principles for designing and facilitating effective workshops that carefully consider ways to support different populations.

You will emerge from the class with a Capstone Project, a detailed workshop proposal that covers the content and structure of your program; considerations for marketing, ethics, technology, and moving in the physical space depending on the populations you plan to welcome in; and how you might facilitate the work beyond the workshop space and connect to a larger community. 

Weekly Zoom sessions and Wet Ink lessons with extensive resources will cover course content and offer opportunities to engage with and practice facilitation principles. Weekly assignments will include readings, written responses, and self-care practices.

Week by Week

Week 1: Roles & Rules: Introduction to Facilitation

In this opening session, we’ll introduce ourselves, the course, and the foundational principles of facilitation. These principles are rooted in the idea that whatever the subject or situation, the goal of facilitation is to support individual and collective transformation. We’ll also cover the importance of establishing ground rules and prioritizing self-care.

Week 2: Good Bones: Structuring Workshops for Effective Facilitation

Effective facilitation depends on a program that has “good bones.” In this session, we’ll explore   foundational principles and techniques for planning, organizing, and reviewing facilitation sessions. We’ll focus on ways to build a solid yet flexible structure that supports your goals and meets the needs of your participants.

Week 3: Considering Power Dynamics of Rank and Class

As a course designer and facilitator, you bring a position of privilege and higher rank into a room from the beginning. Tied up with rank, especially in our society, is class, which isn’t just salaries earned, but what access people have to good education, meaningful employment, and safe communities. In this week we will discuss what ranks we live with on a regular basis, and the ones that we take on and off, depending on the situation. We will also discuss perceived power, and what you may or may not want to do to take on or cede power in the groups you facilitate.

Week 4: Facilitating across Identity: 

In this session, we will look at different ways to facilitate groups of mixed identity, including affiliations with race, gender, sexuality, generations and parenthood. We will learn how we are socialized to think about different identities; if/how we have had experience with conversations across identities; and what considerations we can adopt when creating a space that will be welcoming across identity. 

Week 5: Facilitating across Disabled, Neurodiverse and Aging Bodies:

In this session, we will discuss how to prepare for and facilitate across disability, neurodiversity, serious illness, and aging bodies. We are operating from a social model of disability, which says “individual limitations are not the cause of disability. Rather, it is society’s failure to provide appropriate services and adequately ensure that the needs of disabled people are taken into account in societal organization.” We want to discuss how we can create spaces that do not “disable” our participants. How can we structure access in our workshops from the beginning, instead of having to create accommodations as issues arise?

Week 6: Trauma-Informed Facilitation

No matter what kind of workshop or event you facilitate, a majority of your participants will have experienced at least one traumatic event in their lives. And as transformative language artists, we often work with specific survivor populations to offer tools and opportunities for personal and communal healing. In this session, we’ll discuss trauma, its impact, and why a trauma-informed approach is so important in facilitation. You’ll learn the key principles of trauma-informed facilitation as well as practical steps to take before, during, and after facilitating. You’ll also be reminded of the importance of self-awareness and self-care as a trauma-informed facilitator.

Week 7: Facilitating for Community Transformation:

One of the unique tasks of a Transformative Language Artist is that we use words not only for personal transformation, but to effect change in our communities. In this session, we will discuss ways to bring your work and the work of your participants out into the community. How can you continue the conversation beyond the workshop space? Who, in your community, needs your work? What is the change that you wish to see in your community? Through reviewing examples of TLA in the world, we will consider ways you as a facilitator can contribute to community dialogue and transformation. 

Week 8: Capstone Project Presentations:

The final week will include the opportunity to present your Capstone Project, a document that outlines the offering you would like to present in your community, and what considerations you plan to take in your facilitation approach. As this is a living document that you will work on throughout the class, we will discuss: How has your vision evolved from the beginning of class? What challenges or barriers do you anticipate in fulfilling this work? What considerations have you most appreciated? What considerations may you have missed?

Who Should Take This Class

This class is required for the Certification in TLA Foundations. It is appropriate for beginning and seasoned facilitators who are new to TLA; TLA practitioners who are seasoned in their art and looking to facilitate work in their community; and TLA artists and facilitators who want to update their practices with current language and best practices around community identities.

Format

Weekly Zoom sessions are scheduled for Saturday March 8, 15, 22, 29 and April 5, 12, 19 & 26, 2025 from 1-2:30 p.m. EDT (UTC -4). Click here to convert to your time zone.

Because we are dedicated to making the course as accessible as possible, all sessions will be recorded. All class materials (lessons, assignments, and extensive resources) will be shared each week in Wet Ink. Students who cannot make a live call have the option of watching or listening to the recording and responding to the prompts/questions in the asynchronous classroom platform, Wet Ink.

About the Facilitators

Amanda Faye Lacson (she/hers) is a Filipina-American writer, photographer and historian. She examines how our identities are shaped, how they impact the way we move in the world, and how we write our history through her creative nonfiction and playwriting; photography documenting the artistic process; oral history-oriented podcast interviewing; and by creating and facilitating community-based workshops for the family historian. Amanda is a board member and Membership co-chair of the Transformative Language Arts Network; writer, performer and director with the Playful Substance theater company; and producer, host and editor of Goddard in the World Podcast. She is also the founder of FamilyArchive Business, a studio designed to support the family historian at any point in the archiving process, from organizing photos in boxes to creating a final product to share with the family.

Recent projects include: writing and performing work based on her experience as a Pinay child and mother in the devised theater piece Raised Pinay: The 5th Generation; presenting a generative writing workshop on using Transformative Language Arts to create and deepen one’s family archive at the TLAN Power of Words conference; writing a satirical monologue from the perspective of Christopher Columbus reckoning with his legacy in the afterlife, for Playful Substance; and photographing classical Indian dance performance by Brooklyn Raga Massive for Chelsea Factory. Keep up with Amanda's work at amandafayelacson.com.

Tracie Nichols (she/her) is a poet, facilitator, HSP, over-thinker, introvert, and woman of deepening years. When she's not doing managing director things for the Transformative Language Arts Network (TLAN), she writes poetry and creates seasonal word adventures for shy but curious people. 

Tracie’s appreciation for the power of words to heal and transform started decades ago when she began writing poems to navigate early trauma. She knew she'd found home with the Transformative Language Arts Network community when she realized it merged the principles of her graduate degree in Transformative Learning and Change with her passion for writing as path to healing and growth.

Today, she lives in southeastern Pennsylvania with her husband, occasionally her adult children, and a very large ginger tabby cat named Strider. She writes poems from her tiny desk under the wide reach of two old Sycamore trees. Tracie is honored that her recent work has appeared in kerning, Rogue Agent, Text Power Telling, and The Weight of Motherhood anthology.

Connect with Tracie at tracienichols.com.

The TLA Network exists to support and promote individuals and organizations that use the spoken, written, or sung word as a tool for personal and community transformation.

The Transformative Language Arts Network (TLAN) is committed to diversity, equity and inclusion in our offerings, organization, and aspirations. Words have the power to question, subvert, and transform limiting cultural narratives as well as reinforce entrenched stories and stereotypes. The TLA Network wants to make clear that we celebrate and uplift conversations across identity and difference, whether rooted in race, religion, social class, ethnicity, disability, health, gender, sexual orientation, age, military service, and other identities. In the past we have responded to a lack of diversity by actively recruiting underrepresented groups to: present and keynote at the Power of Words conference; serve on the TLAN board; teach classes; and contribute to our publications. We will continue to look at ways to incorporate greater access and representation in all of our projects, not just through the power of words but through the specifics of our practices.


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