A Practitioner’s Guide for Facilitating Inquiry Lessons Learned from the Middle Ground Project

This guide presents a facilitation model developed through a collaboration between the Exploratorium science museum and Urban Alchemy, a community-focused nonprofit organization. The model was developed and tested at Middle Ground, an outdoor social science exhibition in San Francisco. It integrates the Exploratorium’s inquiry-based Spark, Sustain, Deepen framework with Urban Alchemy's trauma-informed practices.

The model establishes safety and trust as the essential foundation for learning. It demonstrates how facilitation strategies built upon this foundation can foster more inclusive and meaningful engagement for diverse public audiences.

The guide provides practical, adaptable strategies for sparking curiosity, sustaining engagement, and deepening reflection, along with dialogue examples from the Middle Ground exhibition. It is intended as a resource for in-person facilitators aiming to enhance their practice, managers seeking a training foundation, and researchers examining community-centered engagement models.