| Abstract: | The “hypothetical”, a panel game developed and popularised by Geoffrey Robertson on Granada Television in the U.K. and on Channel 9 (initially) and ABC Television (finally) in Australia, has proved to be readily adaptable into a technique for the training of adult educators. In the television version, participants play themselves in an imaginary scenario invoked by a compere whose role is to provoke them into making decisions about key social dilemmas of contemporary public concern, such as drug trafficking, marriage breakdown, AIDS, police corruption. In the training adaptation described here, the dilemmas are constructed around issues of concern in daily professional practice. The primary goal changes to the professional development of participants and (if present) of an audience who are also professionals, rather than the goal of mass entertainment or general audience edification as in the television version. This paper describes the adaptation of this popular 1980's television production into a training tool of considerable power, and gives an account of how it has been developed and used in one institution. It argues that, whereas the hypothetical is clearly a close relative of a number of familiar experiential training techniques, it makes its own unique contribution to the catalogue of training strategies available. |
