
Books & Papers
Inquiry into Dialogue Facilitation
Mirja Hämäläinen and Kati Tikkamäki
Where do you hit a dead end as a facilitator? Mirja Hämäläinen and Kati Tikkamäki of Tampere University convened a small group of practitioners at an AofPD conference to reflect together on what works, what stalls, and what remains just out of reach in dialogue facilitation.
Held on the second day of the conference in the Ash Room, this session invited up to ten participants to share one eye-opening facilitation experience each — awakening in good or bad ways, but meaningful — then reflect on it together through dialogue. The structure moved from sharing to reflection to further reflection, the whole process audio-recorded to support both a subsequent paper and ongoing practitioner inquiry. Hämäläinen, a lecturer in English at Tampere University's Language Centre who came to dialogue through Bohm's On Dialogue over a decade ago, and Tikkamäki, her colleague at Tampere, framed the inquiry around John Dewey's proposition that learning comes not from experience itself but from reflecting on it. The session was designed to continue beyond the conference through Zoom calls, with the recorded dialogue made available in AofPD's members' resources. The paper arising from this process draws directly on those conversations, making the facilitation session and the paper continuous acts of the same inquiry.