Beyond the Art: Facilitation Skills for Creative Practitioners (course)

Overview

A five-week online programme to design and lead creative workshops that are engaging, inclusive, and memorable.

Artists are often highly skilled at what they do - yet many receive little training in the craft of facilitating groups. This is a practical, reflective programme for creative practitioners who lead workshops and participatory experiences, and want to do it with more confidence, consistency, and care for the people in the room.

Across five weekly online sessions, you'll build your facilitation practice through discussion, live practice, feedback, and peer learning - testing ideas out with fellow practitioners, not just hearing about them.

This is for you if you:

• lead creative workshops for the public
• are an artist-educator working in schools or with young people
• engage the public in museums, heritage, science, or similar settings
• are a creative health practitioner
• work with communities in participatory ways
• already facilitate, but want a proper foundation rather than picking it up as you go

You'll leave with:

• a clear set of principles for facilitation that actually works
• practical approaches for designing your own workshops
• more confidence managing groups, and handling the moments that go sideways
• a working understanding of power, participation, and inclusion in creative spaces
• frameworks for supporting sharing and feedback within a group
• a clearer sense of your own facilitation strengths, and what to work on next

Five week flow:

1. Beginnings: the principles behind facilitation that actually works
2. Power, Presence, Participation: your role and responsibilities as a facilitator
3. The Room & Group Dynamics: managing groups and responding when things go off-script
4. Process & Sharing: who gets to participate, and how you make space for it
5. Ending & Integration: closing well, and mapping your own next steps

Five Monday evenings, online via Zoom, 6.30–8.30pm.
Monday 12 October - Monday 9 November.
Small cohort of 8 people maximum - live and interactive throughout.

"I needed some sort of map to explore the skills needed for holding space for groups, and this course has provided exactly that. Dan is a fantastic, skilled-yet-humble facilitator: you will learn a lot by observing him in action."
Anna Szmajda, Painter and Workshop Facilitator

About the facilitator

Dan Simpson has spent 15 years designing and running creative and reflective workshops for organisations including BBC Wales, the National Trust, the National Literacy Trust, and the Royal British Legion - drawing on training in counselling skills, Nonviolent Communication, and Liberating Structures. His own creative practice has seen him work as poet-in-residence at Glastonbury Festival and Imperial College London; commissioned by the Southbank Centre and Royal Academy of Arts; and regularly funded by ACE to deliver participatory projects. He facilitates the way he'd want to be facilitated: warmly and inclusively.