Student Facilitators in Community: Experiences, Insights, and Practice Implications from Theatre for Development in Ghana

Theatre for Development (TfD) scholarship has produced rich accounts of facilitation methodology,
community participation, and social change. Yet one group has remained largely invisible in this
literature, specifically the student facilitator, the emerging practitioner entering a real community for
the first time, with genuine responsibilities and limited field experience. This study addresses that gap.
Drawing on field notebooks, project reports, and in-depth interviews with fifteen of thirty student
facilitators who completed community-based TfD placements at the University of Education, Winneba
(UEW), Ghana, between 2022 and 2025, it documents and analyses what student facilitators experience
during their community immersions. Findings reveal a complex and layered picture organised around
six themes of the practical realities of community residence; the structural tension of the
campus-community shuttle; community entry and the identity crisis; cultural navigation across
dimensions of language, gender, and authority; facilitation breakdown and the development of adaptive
intelligence; and deep personal and professional transformation. Across all themes, the data reveals
important gender-differentiated patterns. Male and female facilitators encounter different forms of
challenge, develop different adaptive strategies, and undergo different but equally significant
transformations. Together, these findings establish the student facilitator as a distinct and under-studied
category whose formation demands more deliberate institutional support, more responsive supervision,
and a curriculum that prepares student facilitators honestly for the realities of field practice.