Taking the Charisma Out : Teaching as Facilitation

The author provides a personal account of his transition from attempting to use charisma to transmit knowledge to students to removing it so that students can themselves experience knowledge as a basis for learning. Consistent with inquiry-based democratic pedagogy, the author demonstrates how he became more a facilitator of learning than its transmitter. He shows how putting charisma into unscheduled classroom inquiry rather than into the teacher’s delivery can produce knowledge collectively and concurrently co-constructed in service of action