The facilitator as gatekeeper: A critical analysis of social order in facilitation sessions

The acceptance of the need to facilitate an experience through group discussion is well documented in adventure education literature. While there is a considerable amount of material on how to process an experience, few studies have sought to explicate the nature of leader-student interaction and the resultant social order in a facilitation session. Using an ethnomethodological approach, this paper analyses the organisation of talk as a way of studying social order in a facilitation session. Particular reference will be made to how the leader in this setting structures the interaction that serves to regulate participants' opportunities to contribute, and how he acts as a gatekeeper for the admissibility of knowledge. Drawing on transcripts of audio-recordings, the paper argues that practitioners may employ practices that potentially restrict participants' contributions. The analysis of how talk is structured in this facilitation session in not merely a study of “turn-taking”. The findings call attention to how knowledge is articulated and whose knowledge is privileged in these settings, issues that are at the very core of adventure education theory, which is premised on the centrality of the learner's experience as the basis for valid knowledge.