Fw: [Ailist] Transparent Facilitation

[Peggy Holman]

This was too good not to share!

from sunny Seattle,
Peggy

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Samuels, Neil D" <SamuelND at bp.com>
To: <Jane at appreciativeinquiryunlimited.com>; <Ckingsbery at aol.com>; 
"Ailist at Lists. Business. Utah. Edu" <ailist at lists.business.utah.edu>
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 6:03 AM
Subject: [Ailist] Transparent Facilitation


> Dear all,
> This excerpt from a wonderful book "A Language Older Than Words" by 
> Derrick Jensen, came immediately to mind. It is lengthy, and worthwhile.
>
> Neil
>
> Neil Samuels
> Senior OD Consultant- BP
> 630-605-4610
>
>>>From A Language Older than Words by Derrick Jensen
>
> When I returned to school in 1989 I began to teach. Or rather not to teach 
> but to participate in classes. I knew from my own experiences in school 
> that I wanted the classes to be different than what I had been put 
> through. I knew that the most important words any instructor had ever said 
> to me were, ¡°Never believe anything you read, and rarely believe anything 
> you think.¡°¡­ I knew I was somehow supposed to be helping students become 
> better writers, but I knew also that the best writing springs from 
> passion, love, hate, fear, hope. So by definition the class had to be as 
> much a class in life ¨C in passion, love, fear, experience, relation ¨C as 
> in writing. I knew also that we teach best what we most need to learn, so 
> thinking of the lessons of Crohn¡¯s disease I knew I¡¯d have to strive my 
> hardest to get members of the class, including myself, to begin to feel, 
> and to express that feeling through writing, and perhaps even our lives. 
> And finally, the night before I was first to enter class, I encountered 
> words by Carl Rogers, in his book On Becoming a Person, that seemed to 
> speak to my experience as a learning human being:
>
> ¡°It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively 
> inconsequential, and has little or no significant influence on behavior. 
> ... I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly 
> influences behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning. Such 
> self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated and 
> assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another. As 
> soon as the individual tries to communicate such experience directly, 
> often with a quite natural enthusiasm, it becomes teaching, and its 
> results are inconsequential. ... When I try to teach, as I do sometimes, I 
> am appalled by the results, which seem a little more than consequential, 
> because sometimes the teaching seems to succeed. When this happens I find 
> that the results are damaging. It seems to cause the individual to 
> distrust his [or her] own experience, and to stifle significant learning. 
> Hence I have come to feel that the outcomes of teaching are either 
> unimportant or hurtful. When I look back at the results of my past 
> teaching, the real results seem the same ¨C either damage was done, or 
> nothing significant occurred. ... As a consequence, I realize that I am 
> only interested in being a learner, preferably learning things that 
> matter, that have some significant influence on my own behavior. ... I 
> find that one of the best, but most difficult ways for me to learn is to 
> drop my own defensiveness, at least temporarily, and to try to understand 
> the way in which [another¡¯s] experience seems and feels to the other 
> person. I find that another way of learning is for me to state my own 
> uncertainties, to try to clarify my puzzlements, and thus get closer to 
> the meaning that my experience actually seems to have. ... It seems to 
> mean letting my experience carry me on, in a direction which appears to be 
> forward, toward goals that I can but dimly define, as I try to understand 
> at least the current meaning of that experience.¡°
>
>
> Of course I did not accept Roger¡¯s words merely because he said them, but 
> I fit them to my own experience of learning, and soon, of ¡°teaching¡°.
> I walked in that first day of that first class, and the first thing I did 
> was to change the name from ¡°Principles of Thinking and Writing,¡° to 
> ¡°Intellectual, Philosophical, and Spiritual Liberation and Exploration 
> for the Fine, Very Fine, and Extremely Fine Human Being.¡° Many of the 
> students reached for their class lists to make sure they were in the right 
> room. As I took role, I asked each person what he or she loved. At first 
> suspicious, they began to open up within minutes.
> I soon realized I could not give grades: it would be immoral to ask 
> someone to write from the heart, the give the writing a C. This created a 
> problem, since the department required I assign grades. I suggested 
> assigning grades randomly, but neither the students nor the department 
> liked that idea. So I suggested giving everyone a 4.0 This was fine with 
> the students, but not the administration. My next plan was to give 
> everyone a grade of 3.1415, or ¦Ð. Math majors in the class thought this 
> was a hoot, but the administrators didn¡¯t get the joke.
> Eventually here¡¯s what we (the students and I) devised. Because the way 
> to learn to think is by thinking, we would spend most class time in open 
> discussions of important issues: What is love? What is the difference (if 
> any) between emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and physical intimacy? Is 
> there such a thing as a universal good? What do you want out of life? If 
> you had only a limited time to live (which is of course the case), how 
> would you spend your time? Is the universe a friendly place or not? (This 
> last question, by the way, Einstein thought to be the most important a 
> person can ask.) Irish students took it upon themselves to teach us about 
> the Irish Republican Army, and African-American students taught us about 
> their own experience of racism. A Samoan man told us of his earlier life 
> in a gang. The sons and daughters of farmers told us what it was like to 
> grow up on a farm. Volleyball players told us of volleyball, and football 
> players of football.
> Similarly, the way to learn how to write is by doing plenty of it, so my 
> main job in the classroom would be to cheerlead them into writing more. 
> The students could, of course, write anything they wanted about anything 
> they wanted. I would not judge any papers, but merely give the writers 
> positive feedback, and I would try to guide them wherever they wished to 
> go in their explorations. I asked (not told, but asked) students to write 
> about the thing they¡¯d done in their lives they were most proud of, and 
> asked them to write about that which caused them the most shame. We took 
> the latter papers (mostly unread) into the hall and burned them, causing 
> police to show up one quarter to question us about vandalism. One student, 
> getting married the next summer, wrote her wedding vows as well as a 
> letter to her fianc¨¦, to be delivered moments before he walked down the 
> aisle. Another, a wine salesman by trade, spent the quarter writing sales 
> pitches. Many people explored their own abuse, some wrote fiction. For 
> each piece of writing a person did, he or she received a check mark 
> (longer pieces received more). The final grade corresponded to the number 
> of check marks. If a person had thirty-four check marks by the end of the 
> quarter, for example, the grade was 3.4. Simple enough. The people in the 
> class wrote about five times as much as people in other sections, but 
> loved the work because it pertained to their own lives. When people wrote 
> pieces they particularly loved, we scheduled private conferences to go 
> over these pieces again and again until every word was magic. In the 
> context of sharing an important piece of themselves, suddenly even grammar 
> became crucial: the bride, for example, didn¡¯t want the pastor stumbling 
> over her sentences or her groom wondering what the hell she was trying to 
> say. Given the opportunity to express themselves, these people wanted to 
> learn how to do that.
> I asked each student to hand in a couple of pieces composed in different 
> forms of expression besides writing. Many brought in food, some paintings, 
> a few tape-recordings of their own music. A chef from Kuwait cooked us a 
> seven-course meal and showed us pictures of his country. Another student 
> brought a video-tape of himself doing technical rock climbing.
> It took us a couple of quarters to realize something was still missing. 
> Experience. It¡¯s madness to think all learning comes from putting pen to 
> paper. What about life itself? We decided that people would get check 
> marks every time they did something they¡¯d never done before. People went 
> to symphonies, rock concerts, Vietnamese restaurants. They watched foreign 
> films (¡°That Akira Kurosawa guy can be pretty funny¡±). They get in car 
> wrecks (not for the check mark, but it having happened, they may as well 
> get credit). They got counseling (I hope not as a result of the class). 
> One fellow told his father for the first time that he loved him (a big 
> baseball fan, he watched the movie Field of Dreams over and over that day 
> to psyche himself up).
> Something else was missing. I still had too much control of the class. How 
> to let go more? I didn¡¯t know. Finally it occurred to me to break them 
> into groups, and ask each group to run the class for one two-hour period 
> (we generally met two evenings per week). They could do whatever they 
> wanted. One group wanted to play Capture the Flag. I thought, ¡°What does 
> this have to do with writing?¡± But we did it, then wrote about it, and I 
> felt closer to that class after our group¡¯s physical activity than I had 
> even after intense emotional discussions (besides, my team won).
> Next class period we talked about the relationship between shared physical 
> activities and feelings of intimacy. Another group had us eat Popsicles 
> and watch cartoons, then draw pictures from our childhood with our 
> opposite hands (it broke my heart when one fellow shared his picture with 
> the class: ¡±This is my father taking me out in the woods to smoke my 
> first vial of crack¡±). In the same group we played Duck Duck Goose and 
> Hide and Go Seek in the basement of the near-empty building. Many of the 
> people were continuing students, and thus were older. Looking back, I don¡¯t know how anyone could possibly say that he or she has successfully run a 
> writing class without having played Hide and Go Seek with overweight old 
> men, twenty year olds, middle-aged mothers of five, and a half-dozen men 
> and women whose native language is not English, all of them dead serious 
> about finding or not being found. One group taught us how to do the 
> Country and Western dance, the Tush Push. This was especially difficult 
> for me, a confirmed non-dancer. Because the room was too small, we did 
> this in the building¡¯s central courtyard. Midway through one of our times 
> pushing our respective tushes, a couple of the department¡¯s most 
> humorless administrators walked by, evidently having worked into the 
> evening. I smiled and waved.
> Even this class taught me much. I had been working on letting go in my 
> writing for years by this point, and I sometimes became frustrated at the 
> baby steps many students were taking toward manifesting their passion in 
> words. But when it came to me attempting to let go in dancing, I suddenly 
> comprehended their inhibitions: I would push my tush only three or four 
> inches, while many who were too shy to open up in words were wildly 
> swinging their hips (including a fifty-year-old sheriff¡¯s deputy I never 
> would have pegged for a tush-pusher). In another class we made marshmallow 
> figures representing our hopes and dreams. One fellow, a bow hunter, made 
> a big marshmallow buck with toothpick antlers, and a huge toothpick arrow 
> jutting from its chest; mine was a broken marshmallow dam with marshmallow 
> salmon swimming in a river of marshmallow (surprise, surprise). We played 
> blindfolded soccer in the classroom, with four people at a time 
> blindfolded, being told where to move by sighted partners (¡°Left, left,¡± 
> my partner shouted as I ran into the wall. ¡°Oh, sorry, wrong way¡±). We 
> broke into groups, each group picking out of a hat the rough plot for a 
> screenplay (our group was to come down from a mountain to find that 
> everyone else in the world had disappeared), and then each person in the 
> group picked from a different hat a character to be played in the drama (I 
> was to play the actress Sharon Stone), after which we had an hour to write 
> our scripts, to be performed and videotaped in what we later dubbed ¡°An 
> Exercise in Embarrassment.¡± For Halloween, we plopped sleeping bags on 
> the floor, sat around a flashlight surrounded by small pieces of wood 
> (simulating a campfire), ate s¡¯mores, and told ghost stories. For 
> Valentine¡¯s Day, we wrote stories about first loves, and memories of 
> hearts broken or overflowing. Mainly we had fun.
> I did assign one topic each quarter that the people in the class had to 
> write on. It was the final paper. The assignment was for each of them to 
> walk on water, and then write about it. They had to decide to do something 
> impossible, do it, and then describe what it was like. A few people filled 
> their bathtubs with a quarter-inch of water, walked across that, and 
> considered themselves done. Other walked across frozen lakes. But one quit 
> smoking, another ended an abusive relationship, a very shy woman asked a 
> man out (he said yes), another woman for the first time admitted her 
> bulimia and sought help, one man told his parents he did not want to be an 
> accountant but instead an artist.
> The people in my class, including me, did not need to be controlled, 
> managed, nor even taught. What we needed was to be encouraged, accepted, 
> and loved just for who we were. We needed not to be governed by a set of 
> rules that would tell us what we needed to learn and what we needed to 
> express, but to be given time in a supportive space to explore who we were 
> and what we wanted, with the assistance of others who had our best 
> interests at heart. I believe that is true not only for my students, but 
> for all of us, human and nonhuman alike. All we want, whether we are 
> honeybees, salmon, trash-collecting ants, ponderosa pines, coyotes, human 
> beings, or stars, is to love and be loved, to be accepted, cherished, and 
> celebrated simply for being who we are. Is that so very difficult?
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ailist-bounces at lists.business.utah.edu 
> [mailto:ailist-bounces at lists.business.utah.edu] On Behalf Of Jane Magruder 
> Watkins
> Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 8:34 PM
> To: Ckingsbery at aol.com; Ailist at Lists. Business. Utah. Edu
> Subject: RE: [Ailist] Re: [pcc-l] Summer reading
>
> Dear Colleagues, Hi all,
> I am looking for a scholarly article or two on the value  of "transparent 
> facilitation". In my mind this is participant based or  constructivist in 
> nature...any thoughts?
>
>
>
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> 

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