Listening as transformation: Facilitative Listening Design

Facilitative Listening Design

“Storytelling is a mosaic, a quilt of narratives that is coming together.”

What is Facilitative Listening Design (FLD)?

“FLD is a methodology that we have co developed, starting since 2017, so it's one that we started in practice in peace building. It was during a situation where we were trying to learn more about a conflict situation in Cambodia, and we were looking for a way to both produce new knowledge on the conflict, and leverage the method as a way for to bring the conflict parties together. Through that, it has evolved quite a bit over the years, and we noticed that we were able to get very reflexive insider knowledge and also contribute to changing the conflict context with everyday community members.

FLD taps into everyday, local people from any walks of life and facilitates them to become researchers themselves. We call them listeners, and we gather them and train them in the method, which is focused on active listening, to people in their own communities, or people that they associate themselves with as part of a shared culture, language, or group. In turn, they connect with people in their community and have conversations; they're essentially unstructured interviews, but they're not recorded. They're actually having conversations which they later recall, and they retell that conversation in a template that we developed, so it's based on memory. This positions the listeners as both participants and researchers, and their knowledge of the conversation is retold in their words and through their own connection to the participant, which we call the sharer. So, it brings together different ways of knowing and the knowledge of multiple people in the research process, including the participant researcher.”

What is the lived experience of using FLD like?

“Listening is very hard to do, real listening, and it's even harder when you don't like what you're listening to, especially in issues of social justice in issues of conflict. When you listen to someone that has a polar opposite view to you, and you're forced to listen to it, it's extremely difficult, and it causes embodied emotional responses. We also consider our method as a way for all of us to be able to listen better to people that we both enjoy listening to in the echo chamber, but also listening to people that we don't necessarily have a chance to listen to.”

“It's not about agreeing or disagreeing, but being acknowledged. This allows participants to feel that, by the end of the process, their perceptions have been transformed”. “It's allowed us to really create a more transformational intervention at the end of the day, For example, through all our peace programming here at Women Peace Makers, the programming that we do is very much influenced by the result of the FLD. We deal with the real human experience, and it affects us in a positive way.”

What advice would you give to someone who wants to use FLD?

“We look at conflict very broadly as Conflict Transformation practitioners. So for us, almost everything is a conflict, but we see that there's a positive way to work through any conflict if it doesn't lead to violence. In other situations where there might be social injustice or sensitive issues that people do not want to discuss, I would say the most important thing is to ask why you would choose a method like like FLD. I don't think FLD is is right for every research, but I do believe it is a method for everyone to engage, inquire on questions that they have, and to be able to listen to something that they might not normally have the opportunity to listen to.” “Consider whether you are more focused on the knowledge that you want to generate or focused on using research as a way to to transform the conflict or the situation.”

“Find the right collaborator. It is so important to find someone who you are working with on the issue that you want to address that can find and mobilise the right listeners, because the listeners are the ones that are holding all these conversations with the sharers.”