Inclusive Facilitation and Capacity Building

The brief — and what it contained

A mid-sized university faculty commissioned a professional learning series for academic staff on inclusive assessment: six workshops, ninety minutes each, focused on Universal Design for Learning and its application to assessment practice.

The facilitation team's first step was to sit with the brief rather than design immediately to it. Briefs of this kind carry significant unstated content: who decided this was the entry point, what had made it a priority now, and whose presence or absence in the room would shape what could be said.

What the intake conversations surfaced

Conversations with the faculty's equity office, department chairs, and disability services coordinators revealed the immediate trigger: a formal complaint from a student cohort — primarily students with disabilities and students whose first language was not English — about assessment practices in required courses. The complaint had been resolved through individual accommodation processes, but those processes had been slow and inconsistently applied.

The faculty leadership had responded by commissioning the professional development series — a genuine attempt to address a systemic problem. Without careful facilitation design, however, it risked failing in a specific way: staff arriving to a workshop on inclusive assessment in the wake of a complaint would arrive with defences activated. The facilitation challenge was not content — the content of inclusive assessment practice is well established. The challenge was designing a learning environment in which people who felt implicated could genuinely engage.

Designing the arc

The series was redesigned from a content-delivery model to a facilitated inquiry model. The first workshop did not begin with UDL. It began with a question: When have you been in a learning environment where the conditions made it difficult for you to do your best thinking? Participants wrote in silence for three minutes before any discussion. This was a designed intervention: locating the facilitator and the faculty in the same position — people who know what it is to be constrained by design — before anyone was asked to examine their own design decisions.

This is what it means for the form of facilitation to enact its content.

The moment the facilitation became uncomfortable

In the third workshop, participants were asked to analyse one of their existing assessments: what does it actually measure? Is it measuring the stated learning outcome, or something else — facility with a particular format, performance under time pressure, academic writing in a second language?

One senior faculty member pushed back directly: "I've been designing this course for fifteen years. Are you telling me it's been excluding students the whole time?"

The facilitator did not reassure. Reassurance at that moment would have been dishonest and would have undermined both the faculty member and the purpose of the workshop. Instead, the facilitator named what was happening and invited the room to stay with the discomfort rather than resolve it prematurely. The silence that followed was held, not filled. Several participants spoke into it, including one who said: "I had the same feeling — and I think the honest answer is: probably yes, probably not intentionally, and that's actually the most important thing to understand."

This is what inclusive facilitation looks like in practice: not the smooth delivery of content, but the skilled holding of difficulty.

What the co-design session produced

The fifth workshop was a co-design session: faculty working in small groups to redesign one of their own assessments. One group surfaced the institution's assessment governance: faculty wanting to redesign their assessments were discovering that many proposed formats would require approval processes from committees historically resistant to assessment innovation.

The facilitators stayed with what the room had surfaced — because what had emerged was exactly the information that the structural domain requires. The barrier was not knowledge or will. The barrier was governance. And governance is addressable.

The conversation produced a set of recommendations the faculty group agreed to bring to the next curriculum committee, including a proposal for a streamlined approval pathway for UDL-grounded assessment redesigns. None of this had been in the brief. All of it was within scope.

What did not change

Not everything shifted. Several initially resistant faculty remained sceptical at the close. The governance barriers surfaced in the co-design session were real, and the proposal to the curriculum committee faced a longer road than participants had hoped.

Inclusive facilitation does not resolve institutional resistance. It creates conditions in which resistance becomes visible — and in which those ready to move can do so with shared language and commitment. That is a slower and more accurate account of what facilitation can achieve than most institutional briefs allow for.