Cultural politics and the role of the action learning facilitator: Analysing the negotiation of critical action learning in the Pakistani MBA through a Bourdieusian lens

Introduction

The notion that action learning (AL) participants should take responsibility for their own learning, with facilitators adopting a ‘passive role’, has long been at the heart of classical AL (Revans, 1983). Yet as Trehan (2011) has observed, as new forms of critical action learning (CAL) have developed – embracing a more reflective approach and acknowledging its political and psychological impact – questions have been raised regarding the need for a facilitation approach which is more engaged and pro-active.

Through an empirical study exploring both student and facilitator reflections on AL at three Pakistani business schools, we add to debates of CAL by challenging the passivity of Revans’ (1983) method. We suggest that his approach affords insufficient recognition of the culture, gender and power relations which complicate both facilitative and participatory processes in AL. By contrast, we show how a CAL approach offers greater potential in enabling facilitators to manage intra-group politics because it both recognizes and illuminates power relations in AL sets. Our article contributes to CAL literatures through highlighting the potential complexities of facilitation, and identifying the importance of negotiating learning set responsibilities among and between facilitator and participants.

In so doing, we add to the growing body of debate regarding the role of facilitators, and of facilitation, within CAL literature (Rigg and Trehan, 2004; Stead, 2014; Vince, 2012). Through our empirical study, we conceptualize the positionality of a facilitator (the lead author (F.M.)) within an AL programme designed to facilitate MBA students in Pakistan, in a situation where a newly introduced dissertation module precipitated a more considered approach to learning. We reflect upon F.M.’s experience of managing intra-group politics on an AL programme over a 4-month period with four sets of MBA students, at three Pakistani business schools. As part of their new dissertation module, students engaged in critical reflection about their interpersonal relations, learning practices and the content, approach and analytical nature of their MBA dissertations. Building on ideas of CAL concerned with the understanding of power dynamics (Stead, 2014; Vince, 2012), we offer insights to inform the practice of AL facilitation, outlining the role of asymmetrical relations with reference to gender, family and teachers that predispose action learners to engage in particular behavioural practices.

Our article uses part of Bourdieu’s theory of practice to inform our analysis, drawing particularly on his notion of ‘habitus’ (or the way in which people embody, interpret and respond to their social world), to provide a nuanced understanding of participants’ power relations and their political agency in AL sets. Bourdieu’s theory suggests that individuals are constrained and predisposed to act in certain ways, through the underlying schemes of culture that relationally position them with one another (Bourdieu, 1998). The participants’ accounts of practice within AL sets are, in fact, reflections of their interpersonal interactions, illustrated through the interplay of embodied gender and asymmetric relationships, providing insight into what are often taken-for-granted relations of power. The notion of embodiment, or the ability to internalize the social, is critical in unpacking the ideological system regulating these practices and specifically those that enable the acceptance of hegemonic relations in everyday lives (Jenkins, 1992). Bourdieu’s (1977, 1984, 1990) work, on habitus in particular, enables us to theorize the interrelationship of practice and the cultural logic of practice which manifested between Pakistani MBA action learners within each set, making facilitation challenging.

This study takes into account the complexities of working with critical pedagogy at the MBA level (e.g. Currie and Knights, 2003; Sinclair, 2007). It proposes that AL facilitators adopting a critical angle (e.g. Ram and Trehan, 2009) are required pro-actively to manage group dynamics (Vince, 2012) when participants engage in reflective practice, and especially in contexts where action learners are fairly inexperienced in organizing reflection (e.g. Vince, 2002). Our observations have wider application beyond the context of this study, extending and enriching perspectives on CAL theory by conceptualizing power dynamics in relation to the facilitation of interpersonal and group politics within AL sets, not only within a non-Western cultural context but also more broadly (see Rigg and Trehan, 2004).

The article first reviews the literature on AL, CAL and facilitation, before moving on to discuss our understanding of criticality and the Bourdieusian notion of habitus as a lens to conceptualize set dynamics. Second, we outline the programme and research design and introduce our analytical approach. Finally, our discussion presents and integrates the findings emerging from key themes to construct a meta-narrative which recognizes the challenges of the cultural, symbolic, forces which shape the participatory and facilitative process of AL. We suggest, in turn, that such challenges problematize Revans’ approach to facilitation (see Revans, 1983) requiring a CAL approach.

AL, CAL and facilitation

AL is a pragmatic approach to developing people, organizations and society (Zuber-Skerritt and Teare, 2013), mainly through the interplay of reflection and action (Marsick and O’Neil, 1999). The key driver underpinning AL’s philosophy, originally coined by Revans (1998), maintains that ‘there can be no learning without action and no action without learning’ (p. 83). AL participants, metaphorically known as ‘comrades in adversity’ by Revans (1983), work collectively in small groups, called sets (Pedler, 2016), on real-world problems through collective reflection rather than passive acceptance of expert knowledge. Among his ‘gold standards’, as Willis (2004: 11) puts it, Revans limited the role of the expert (or facilitator) in the learning process to someone who ‘induces curiosity’ and kept their ‘hands-off-the-set’ (Pedler, 2016: 79).

What strikes us as important is the role and agency of the facilitator in managing the power dynamics in the set, which we believe is lacking in the Revanseque version. Revans’ approach rests on assumptions that the voices of set members may be heard and treated equally within the active questioning process, and that facilitators do not hold responsibility for managing inequalities within group interactions.

We demonstrate how, for our situation, the adoption of a CAL approach was crucial because this enabled the facilitator to support the MBA sets in collectively exploring the ‘underlying power and control issues, [among themselves by] actively engaging in an examination of political and cultural processes’ (Trehan and Pedler, 2009: 405). We highlight the suitability of CAL due to its capacity for shedding light on ‘the tensions, contradictions, emotions, and power-dynamics that inevitably exist both within a group and in individual [learners’] lives’ (Ram and Trehan, 2009: 306). In particular, we observe how CAL affords a higher visibility to power relations and the political dimensions of learning (Vince, 2004a) enabling sets to challenge the ‘taken-for-granted’ attitudes and beliefs, making these an object of reflection and a subject for learning (Rigg and Trehan, 2004: 150).

The employment of CAL, given its purpose of questioning taken-for-granted assumptions can be demanding in cultures where high student/teacher power distance or notable gender differences influence action learners in their quest for learning (e.g. Vince, 2004b). Yet, at the same time, the advantages of a CAL approach outweigh the challenges in contexts where understandings of underlying social practices are important in ensuring that voices within learning sets are heard equally (Dilworth and Boshyk, 2010). Power inequities in an Asian context, for example, can create friction among individuals requiring AL facilitators to mediate such group tensions (Dilworth and Boshyk, 2010: 205). Furthermore, research by Brook (2012) stresses facilitators, from a cultural perspective, ‘must be prepared to address and interpret the collective [psychological and political] impact of the learning’ (p. 6), which may go unnoticed in classical AL.

CAL foregrounds the significance of power as a key construct in determining learning relationships, illuminating how power relations can create tensions among learners yet may simultaneously provide opportunities for learning (e.g. Rigg and Trehan, 2004). This notion of power relations throws light on issues such as gender, asymmetries and situatedness that could either pose barriers to, or facilitate learning (Rigg and Trehan, 2004; Vince, 2008). At present, however, limited attention is given within the CAL field to facilitation in relation to gender (for exceptions, see Stead, 2014) and interpersonal relations (for exceptions, see Ram and Trehan, 2010; Rigg and Trehan, 2004; Vince, 2012). The contribution of our study to this literature is to provide a more nuanced understanding of the facilitator role by developing appreciation towards ‘power-relations’, such as gender and asymmetries (Rigg and Trehan, 2004; Stead, 2014; Vince, 2012), and facilitator agency in managing relational politics in AL where set members’ struggles in group working may be visible and a source of anxiety among learners.

On being critical in AL: reflective practice and MBA education

MBA pedagogies have attracted significant criticism. MBAs have been censured as overly directive, insufficiently reflective (Connolly, 2003; Mintzberg, 2004), and stifling of individuality and reflexivity (Currie and Knights, 2003). Revans, as cited in Pedler et al. (2005: 49), was found to be critical of the MBA format describing it as ‘moral bankruptcy assured’ due to the correlation of business success as synonymous to standardized, case study based MBA education in classroom settings (Pedler et al., 2005: 49).

Given these critiques, the MBA offers an interesting site for the introduction of learning interventions that encourage critical reflection. This was a particular challenge in Pakistan where teaching is typically classroom based, with little or no opportunity for reflection. However, the notion of an AL approach was attractive to the Deans of the three leading Pakistani Business Schools which took part in this study, as a possible means of encouraging reflection to cope with changing MBA curriculum (National Curriculum Revision Committee (NCRC), 2012). National imperatives resulted in Pakistani business schools introducing a dissertation module on MBA programmes, and teacher-led pedagogies were poorly positioned to manage this new demand (NQF, 2015). The notion of facilitated AL sets offered a means of operationalizing this curriculum change. As we show, however, the classical AL approach was unable to account for the innate group, cultural and situational dynamics, in terms of ‘who has the power and influence’ to decide the course of action in the learning sets (Lawless, 2008: 119). Specifically, it did not offer sufficient flexibility to accommodate the needs of Pakistani MBA learners, where value systems are embodied (e.g. in relation to gendered practices) and are culturally specific to both student and teachers (e.g. Skeggs, 1997).

Where our study builds on CAL scholarship is in its focus on the relational rather than the individual in the reflective process of AL, which can bring to fore the primacy of relationships (Reynolds and Vince, 2004). Revans’ philosophy, however, offered little direction to manage the organizing of reflection and relational dynamics, bringing into question the facilitator’s role and agency. This becomes more significant in the light of research (e.g. Reynolds, 1999b) warning practitioners about the pitfalls of reflection, including the potential isolation of learners who challenge the prevailing cultural order, or the silencing of some voices among set members who lack confidence or are discouraged from speaking (e.g. Reynolds, 1999a). The passivity of the facilitator, as emphasized by Revans, was problematic in the Pakistani MBA culture, particularly when personal values were subject to question and learners were required to construct arguments that critique the expert and theory in relation to personal experience (e.g. Vince, 2004a). CAL in this sense was useful in understanding the empowering and disempowering effects of reflection (Vince, 2008) within a certain cultural, social and historical context (Lawless, 2008), and contributed towards understanding the complexities of facilitation.

Social reproduction in AL: a Bourdieusian perspective

Applying a critical angle to study AL practice in the cultural context of Pakistani MBA invites an extension of concepts that essentially view learning and education as sites for reproducing social inequalities (e.g. Sullivan, 2002). Bourdieu’s philosophy of social reproduction is particularly useful in the context of this study as it enables us to construct a deeper understanding of social practices, for example, gender, class, race and identity, that regulate interpersonal relations (e.g. Brown, 1997). Bourdieu’s ideas challenge the relevancy of ‘doing’ in everyday lives, without discounting the transformative effects of culture in which the social practice is situated (Jenkins, 1992). He theorizes the gap between the situated and embodied culture, through his theory of practice, to expose dispositions (or tendencies) that ‘reproduce and legitimize social structural relations’ (LiPuma, 1993: 18). This theorization transcends the dualism of agency and structure to view practice as simultaneously structuring and structured, having power to shape individual and group behaviour (e.g. Bourdieu, 1990; Obembe, 2013).

Bourdieu’s theory of practice offers three perspectives to explain the reproduction of social practices: first, through the conceptualization of habitus, described as ‘a system of embodied dispositions which generate practice in accordance with the structural principles of the social world’ (Nash, 1990: 432); second, through the symbolization of capital as power that distinguishes and determines an agent’s position within a social space (Moore, 2008) and third, through the relational construction of a network of positions in an ‘objectively defined space’ called fields (Wacquant, 1989: 50).

In this article, we employ habitus as our theoretical lens for two reasons: to explore the system of meanings that organize interaction and to understand the constitution of ‘the person-in-action through a system of dispositions that is both objective and subjective’ (Postone et al., 1993: 4). Nash (1990) suggests that the logic of practice emanating from the habitus is firmly grounded within cultural norms, rules and homologous relations that provide meaning and order to an individual’s social life. We believe an understanding of participants’ habitus can enable agency and redefine facilitator role in engaging with the group, providing a broader understanding of the social context in which learning is situated.

Setting-up the programme: AL in the Pakistani MBA

The purpose of our study was to encourage Pakistani MBA students to think more critically about both their studies, and group relations among and between themselves. Initially, we envisaged a Revanseque style of facilitation as appropriate for this task, allowing students the space to reflect on research experiences as they progressed through their dissertation. We quickly realized, however, that a more engaged approach was required, drawing parallels with Reynolds and Vince’s (2004: 11) concept of ‘organizing reflection’: a structure which ‘supports a shift from a view of reflection as a key element of individual learning and the application of learning, towards a view of reflection as an organizing process, one that takes account of social and political processes’ and relations among and between set members. Our methods for facilitating the AL programme thus move towards a CAL approach.

Our approach to the study

This study draws on principles of design-based research (DBR): a methodology which aims to empirically explore learning (design and practice) as it occurs in complex educational settings (Cobb et al., 2003; also see Barab and Squire, 2004). A data-driven approach to analysis offered flexibility to thematically arrange findings in allowing culture to be presented as meaningful, storied, accounts of practice (Braun and Clarke, 2006; Lewis and Ritchie, 2003). Through this strategy, we were able to examine the cultural character of power relations among the Pakistani MBA students to voice their experiences (e.g. Bourdieu, 1977): describing their ability to deal with newer forms of learning such as critical reflection (e.g. Currie and Knights, 2003). The data were audio-recorded in ‘Urdu’ language, which was further transcribed and translated into the English language for making sense of participants’ accounts of AL. The translated data were reduced and codified to formulate themes in three cycles (Saldaña, 2013): the first cycle consisted of making analytical memos and inscriptions; the second cycle involved assigning of codes to each of the transcripts; while the third cycle comprised of collapsing and recoding of data codes into superlative categories in light of our study questions. Code categories were then converted into themes by clustering similar concepts, keeping in view Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, which enabled us to make sense of participants’ social upbringing, their power dispositions, the pedagogic authority of arbitraries, and the cultural notions surrounding their learning relations and practices in the AL sets.

The findings: beyond facilitation – the embodied power relations in AL

The analysis generated two broad themes:

We present each theme and analyse our findings with reference to Bourdieu.

The facilitator’s perspective

Resisting the status of ‘Roohani Baap’ was a challenging aspect of AL facilitation in the Pakistani MBA, where participants were accustomed to teacher-led classroom activities. Studies in CAL also suggest that the role of the facilitator intensifies in attempts to mitigate relational tensions which exist between the participants themselves and their facilitator (e.g. Rigg and Trehan, 2004). Arguably, the task of the facilitator becomes challenging in situations which are power-driven and demand an active engagement with ‘emotional and political dynamics’ of the set (Ram and Trehan, 2009: 309). Facilitation was thus a difficult process to manage, as delegation of power to participants within a learning setting tended to fall outside the purview of the Pakistani MBAs, who expressed reluctance to take responsibility. Participants’ interview conversations reflected a consistent preference for teacher-directed learning activities. For example, Ibrahim, from the EBS, during his interview said that

I’ve never experienced such a learning activity before in which we were put in-charge of what we wanted to do instead of the teacher. It is unusual because the teacher is always in authority and in-charge of what is happening around you. (Ibrahim, EBS, Group I, Interview)

Ibrahim’s account shows how the facilitation he experienced in the AL sets challenged his previous perceptions of classroom learning. The facilitator’s attempt to democratize the AL sets was met with resistance and experienced as abrogation of authority. CAL redirects our attention to facilitative approaches which can cause political vulnerability and emotional discomfort, often leading to incapacitation and disempowerment (e.g. Vince, 2008). Self-directed learning was difficult for MBA participants to handle and was viewed (by both participants and facilitator) as a frustrating experience.

Post-reflection notes from the facilitator indicated tensions posed by students accustomed to treating the teacher as expert (with an expectation the facilitator would take the lead in learning sets) and the type of ‘passive’ facilitation advocated within Revans’ philosophy. In his notes, F.M. recounts,

Previously, I had noted that some of the participants were re-routing their queries and thoughts through me. I may have naively redirected these to the concerned set members, but I guess it dawned upon me later that what they were doing was quite strategic in enticing the facilitator to take the heat of how relationships (in particular between the opposite sex) progressed while their position remained neutral during the critical engagement phase. (Facilitator’s post-set reflection, Meeting 3)

Elsewhere (see Mughal, 2016), F.M. makes a note about his own habitus as a facilitator and also a product of the same cultural system. Through CAL, the facilitator was able to address the tensions of a passive facilitative approach by taking into account his own preconceptions to learning and organizing in the Pakistani MBA. This triggered a reflection over the role reversal, from being a Pakistani educated MBA and an academic teaching on the Pakistani MBA to experiencing Western education and becoming a facilitator of CAL. It also challenged his personal thinking and brought him closer to viewing his own practice as a struggle to disengage from traditional, embodied, modes of learning:

As I prepared to [… engage] with the Pakistani MBA participants about their experience of working as action learners in a learning set, I expected that my position as a male academic who knew the MBA process would aid in acquiring data from male participants, but [likely to struggle in connecting] with the females. My expectations were grounded in the assumption that individuals with similar identities connect well (e.g. Fries-Britt & Turner, 2002). However, what I found was the opposite: the female participants were forthcoming in their interviews about how they were treated as individuals and learners, while the males generally described events and process without digging deep to connect with their emotions. Here my assumptions about positionality both as a facilitator and researcher were indeed reversed, as I was taken aback at times when the females discussed their family, social and personal lives. (Mughal, 2016: 324)

The previous classroom experiences of both the MBA students and facilitator (from schooling through to their master’s degree) had dominated their own ability to either assume or relinquish responsibility for their learning. The classroom culture, as described by participants and also experienced by the facilitator from his MBA education, was one of ‘overwhelming control’ (Freire, 1993: 261). In contrast, the set culture was expressed collectively as ‘unusual’ by participants and raised questions of how to negotiate the effects of power and transformation in tightly knit cultures in relation to CAL.

Discussion

Our analysis highlights two key challenges for managing, engaging and facilitating AL in the Pakistani MBA context. First, the challenge of addressing male members’ reluctance to engage directly with women, and vice versa, in the sets was particularly overwhelming. The findings attribute this challenge to familial and institutional habituses (Reay, 1998) embodied by participants during upbringing. Bourdieu suggests that power arises from culturally created symbolic values (Wacquant, 2004) that impose gendered power relations. Gaventa (2003) further explains that cultural ideologies ‘provide the means for a non-economic form of domination and hierarchy’ (p. 6). In the case of the Pakistani men and women in the MBA learning sets, this stemmed from cultural upbringing that legitimized the predominance of men within a segregated society, in which men are not allowed to directly engage with women but rather look down upon them (Malik, 2012). Those men, who did manage to engage in direct communication with female participants in sets, nevertheless respected gendered boundaries by avoiding critical questioning in their dialogue. This particularly led towards questions which could be categorized as red herrings – strategic in avoiding gender differences (e.g. Vince, 2012). The Pakistani MBA AL programme presented itself as a form of social space where men and women occupied different positions based on the nature of gendered capital they had acquired while growing up at home, challenging the facilitator to break the silence of cross-gendered interactions in the set.

Second, the findings direct our attention towards the reflexive dualism created by AL, which can often be disorienting for participants, that is, reflective practice versus what is predisposed as routine practice. Bourdieu (1986) argues that ‘social order is progressively inscribed in people’s minds’ through “cultural products” including systems of education, language, judgements, values, methods of classification and activities of everyday life’ (p. 471). This explains how such symbolic inscription, evident in the accounts of and behaviour among learning set participants, results in the unconscious acceptance of those power relations, resulting in social inequalities, difference and power hierarchies. Earlier we observed that critical thought emerging from heterodoxy has the ability to break with such inscriptions given that the arbitrariness of orthodoxy is exposed (Wacquant, 2004), which in the case of AL is possible through the organization of reflection. It was further observed through findings that CAL can create a field of opinion for the habitus, which can be disconcerting for learners in taking responsibility for their own learning.

Our findings illuminate that reflexivity does not only impact participants when engaging in reflective acts but is equally imposing upon the facilitator, also a cultural agent, in the process. The creation of a field of opinion, that is, heterodoxy, invites both participants and the facilitator, to explore together the ‘unthought categories of thought that delimit the thinkable and predetermine the thought’ (Bourdieu, 1990:178). Deploying reflexivity, at the level of facilitation, requires the ability to bring into question the interests and beliefs which drive the AL process and to manage transitions between the role of facilitator as either passive or active agent of change. Therefore, the habitus of the facilitator should be called upon in CAL to assess their capacity ‘to construct practical understandings (workable, everyday models) of the location of self within a social system, to act accordingly (strategically and tactically), and to reflect further and refine understandings in response to events and the consequences of actions taken’ (Maclean et al., 2012: 388). The meta-narrative underpinning our findings points towards the centrality of facilitation that recognizes the interplay of embodied dispositions and the politics of culture in organizing reflection in AL.

Implications

Our study has demonstrated how facilitation driven by ‘idealized version[s] of equality’ among set participants can unconsciously reinforce structural inequalities (Reynolds, 2000: 78). To address the potential for action learners to feel constrained about contributing within their set, facilitators need to be acquainted with the cultural politics of organizing reflection (e.g. Vince, 2002) within the context in which they practice AL. Specifically, through the findings of this study, we observe how ‘the power and emotional dynamics provoked within the action learning process’ are contextual (Rigg and Coghlan, 2012: 165). A facilitator seeking to adopt a CAL approach is likely to find their practice impacted by their own, and participants’ experiences of learning, which are often filtered through cultural, social and political history (e.g. Vince and Martin, 1993; Willmott, 1994, 1997).

In our case, for example, the position of the facilitator as a Pakistani, male academic with a European research background, influenced both his own and participants’ interactions and perspectives regarding who should take lead responsibility for group learning. Thus, the facilitator’s plans for (and his role in) developing student-led debate were challenged within the sets. The complex landscape of gendered, interpersonal and cultural relations obliged him to introduce greater flexibility regarding how he managed set meetings, and learning interactions, among participants.

As a consequence, we suggest that developing facilitation skills to recognize the sensitivity of cultural factors such as gender segregation, class hierarchies, power positioning and the submissive ‘self’ of individuals could be of fundamental importance in enabling self-directed learning, especially among those new to AL. The implications of our study direct attention towards not only the cultural challenges in the process of reflection but also the complexities and competing discourses that reflection creates in challenging expectations and norms in AL (e.g. Vince and Saleem, 2004).

Through our findings, we propose three actions to inform practice. First, that facilitator training includes cultural and political awareness. This suggests that facilitators take responsibility for getting to know the context within which they are working including norms, processes and so on. Cultural awareness can facilitate deeper ways of engaging with politically sensitive issues which are often embodied as routine and negotiated with avoidance (e.g. silence, red herrings). Developing an ability to detect strategic avoidance of cultural and political differences, which inevitably are mirrored within group dynamics, can enhance the facilitator’s agency for pro-actively managing group functionality (Vince, 2012). Second, that facilitation needs to be gender aware, an area that has received little scholarly attention (Stead, 2014). Our study in particular highlights how gender combines with cultural norms to affect the learning experience. It is therefore important that practitioners and developers include gender awareness in the development of facilitators, not only in relation to group composition but importantly, as revealed in this study, with regard to intra-group relations where cultural norms may dictate certain conventions. Third, our findings point to the need for the facilitation process to be adaptive and co-constitutive recognizing both facilitator limitations (one person is not able to challenge and resolve all intra-group tensions) and the responsibility of the group as a whole, that is the facilitator along with the participants, to be responsible for group management and learning. Taking into account the complexity of cultural contexts, we propose that inexperienced facilitators work alongside more experienced facilitators to observe facilitation in action.

Conclusion

This study contributes to CAL research through conceptualizing the dynamics of facilitation in managing group politics within AL sets among MBA students in Pakistan. Identifying the complexities of facilitation theorizes the position of an AL facilitator, reflecting on the tensions between the cultural preferences among the students for more traditional, teacher-led forms of facilitation, and the type of self-directed, AL advocated by Revans (1983). In so doing, the study first identified the challenges of mediating predisposed gendered dispositions embodied by Pakistani MBA students, who had to learn how to communicate with one another before they could interact as a group to engage in critical reflective processes. Then, it further highlighted the political implications for encouraging self-directed reflective practice among AL sets where participants have been used to exclusively teacher-led classroom experiences.

The article, in its focus on group power relations, adds to wider debates that are concerned with adopting critical perspectives in management education (Elliott, 2008; Gray, 2007), including surfacing the complexities of the relationship between student and facilitator (Dehler, 2009). The insights from this study also suggest that the Pakistani MBA participants felt uneasy in assuming power and taking responsibility for challenging the facilitator. Our study provides insight into culturally influenced social practices with the intent of illuminating the challenges of AL facilitation within a non-Western context (which could, if participant anxiety of reflecting over their social practices is not appropriately mediated, result in ‘inaction’ of learning; Vince, 2008). Our theorization highlights the complexities and tensions inherent in developing participants’ critical awareness of their beliefs and practices, thus recognizing participants’ interactions (through their language, behaviour or practices) should be a responsibility shared among facilitator and participants.