Part III
Facilitating transformative change through creative life writing
For the majority of students in Group 2 the initial opening-up of the psyche occurs in Course 1 (Writing for Personal Development), with deepening and/or consolidation taking place across the remainder of the programme. For quite a few of them Course 3 (Writing and Groups) is particularly important in taking the process of change further, and for many the two terms of Independent Study are a key period of consolidation. But what are the specific elements within these courses that facilitate the shift from top-down left hemisphere control towards a more flexible and bodily-based self-agency?
In my previous attempts to understand students' experience of change I have focused mainly on the role of the creative life writing and have not explored to the same extent other factors in the learning environment. In attempting to do so now, I take as my starting point critical realist Gordon Brown's conceptualization of the learning environment as ‘a semi-permanent, often episodic, complex ensemble of causal mechanisms that enable and constrain learning’.1 These causal mechanisms are a consequence of the ‘layered’ or ‘laminar’ nature of the ‘open or quasi-closed system’ of the learning environment with its physical, biological, psychological, socio-cultural, and curricular dimensions, with the possibilities for learning emerging from the way these work together for individual learners (Brown, 2009: 31).2 This conceptualisation is helpful in that it provides a broad, multifaceted way of thinking about the structures or mechanisms at work in a learning environment, although the terms ‘layered’ and ‘laminar’ are metaphorically rather too static in a dynamic systems context where the different dimensions are constantly subject to change (ibid.: 19). Nevertheless I use these ideas heuristically in what follows.
I combine with Brown's ideas two psychodynamic concepts: ‘holding’ and ‘containment’. ‘Holding’ is Donald Winnicott's metaphor for the way the ‘good-enough mother’, through a combination of attentive, emotional presence and detachment, creates a ‘holding environment’ for her baby, which enables it to feel ‘safe-enough’ to explore the ‘potential space’ between them (Winnicott, 1960). Safely ‘held’ by the mother's presence, the infant ‘is able to become unintegrated, to flounder, to be in a state in which there is no … external impingement’, which means that it can more easily receive its own sensations or impulses and feel real (Winnicott, 1958: 33). This is crucially important for developing independence and the ability to be creative in the ‘transitional space’ between psychic reality and the outside world (Winnicott, 1971). This idea has been extended to education, where the ‘good-enough teacher’ creates a safe-enough holding environment for pupils or students to open-up to the state of not-knowing that learning and creativity involve (Wyatt-Brown, 1993; Hunt, 2000: 47–9).3 ‘Containment’ is Wilfrid Bion's notion that the mother receives the baby's intolerable emotional states through appropriate caring behaviour, which enables it to reintroject them combined with the mother's containing presence, thus rendering them tolerable (Bion, 1962). Whilst these two ideas clearly have different meanings – ‘containment’ indicating a wholly inner process and ‘holding’ a process taking place between inner and outer worlds (Symington and Symington, 1996: 58) – both imply the development of beneficial mental structures, which contribute to the possibility of ‘thinking feelings’ or ‘mentalized affectivity’ in Fonagy's sense (Fonagy et al., 2002). I use them here not only in relation to the role of tutors but also in the way that other ‘layers’ of the learning environment can, in optimal circumstances, generate in students a sense of being ‘held’ and can then become internalised as a means of self-containment.
Applying the idea of a laminar or layered structure to the CWPD programme, I can easily identify the enabling and constraining role of the physical environment of students' learning. For example, in the period of Group 2 students' studies teaching largely takes place in a temporary, pre-fabricated building, with noise leaking between seminar rooms. When the two student groups taking Writing and Groups are located next to each other, the audible laughter of one group is a source of uncomfortable self-questioning for the other, quieter group, but this nevertheless provides a useful opportunity for group reflection, a key element in that course. A less positive example is the difficulty Susanna has in taking proper breaks in the full-day sessions, following her period of hospitalisation, because of the steep hill between the temporary teaching block and the café, which considerably impairs her learning experience.
The curricular dimension4 can similarly be seen to enable and constrain students' learning. For example, for some students the all-day fortnightly sessions generate a strong sense of being part of a ‘community of writers’, which contributes to a sense of being ‘held’ during their studies. For others, particularly for those taking Writing Practice and Projects: Practical and Theoretical in 2004–06, the gaps between sessions are too long, causing them to lose connection with the programme and their writing. This is also the case for some of the students during the two terms of Independent Study. The work for assessment – another curricular aspect – again has enhancing and constraining effects. For many students, the end-of-course essays are an important means of consolidating course learning (see Chapter 10), but for one student in Group 2 the institution's regulations associated with assessment mar her whole experience of the MA (see Chapter 11).
Seeing that the physical and curricular dimensions of the learning environment relate to the programme as a whole, they could be thought of as ‘macroscopic’ or ‘overlying’ (Bhaskar and Danermark, 2006: 289), in the sense that they frame students' overall experience, although students will experience their enhancing and constraining effects differently. I would also include in the macroscopic dimensions the organisational role of the programme convener, who holds together the programme, the student body, and the tutor group administratively, managerially, and to an extent pastorally (more than one student refers to the convener as ‘the mother of the MA’).5 Similarly, for some students the ethos of the programme generated by the tutor team creates, as one Group 1 student puts it, ‘the sense of a vast space encompassed in which to play and explore’. What Bhaskar and Danermark call the ‘normative’ dimension (ibid.: 288), which can be thought of here as the expectations students will have for how a higher education learning environment operates, that is, the mode of engagement with their learning and with other learners, can also be seen as macroscopic.
By contrast the bio-psycho-social dimensions at work in individual psyches could be said to be less macroscopic, or underlying, in the sense that their enhancing or constraining effects on students' learning will vary considerably between individuals. For example, if the biological dimension relates to bodily matters such as health or sexuality, then Susanna's chronic illness impacts more significantly on her learning experience than that of others. A similar point applies to the psychological dimension, with fears and anxieties from previous learning environments impacting on some individuals more than others; and to the social dimension, with considerable differences in how students conceptualise themselves as writers or learners. But whilst the bio-psycho-social dimensions are more individual, they inevitably influence the environment as a whole in gross or subtle ways. They are also potentially more in process during the actual period of study than the physical, curricular, and organisational dimensions (at least in CWPD), as these latter change as a result of the tutor team's retrospective reflections on the running of the programme and students' feedback. However, in CWPD the macroscopic ‘normative’ dimension is also set in motion, in the sense that the learning environment is often a hybrid, somewhere between an academic seminar and a play space (Creme and Hunt, 2002) (see Chapter 11) and therefore quite different from what students expect.
Whilst some of the macroscopic dimensions in the CWPD programme – the overarching curricular structure (see Chapter 10), the organisational role of the convener (see Chapter 11), and the sense of being part of a community of learners – can be seen to provide an important element of background structure or ‘holding’ against which the bio-psycho-social and normative dimensions of the learning environment are set in motion, it is the curricular and pedagogical dimensions at work in individual courses that do the main work of both challenging the dynamic system of the psyche (i.e. opening it up and keeping it in motion) and ‘holding’ it (i.e. preventing a collapse into chaos). These include not only the creative life writing exercises, but also the collaborative, experiential groups for sharing this writing, and the reflective work students engage in. Although it is quite difficult to separate out the effects of these different elements, as will be obvious from the case studies, Chapter 8 focuses on the creative life writing, Chapter 9 on the collaborative, experiential group work, and Chapter 10 on the role of reflection. Throughout these chapters I relate my discussions to key ideas in the theory and practice of transformative learning. Mezirow's idea of ‘disorienting dilemmas’, by which he means events in a person's life that trigger the process of transformative learning (Mezirow, 1981), is particularly useful when applied to triggers operating within the learning environment.
Notes
1 Brown uses ‘constrain’ here in a positive sense to indicate the way a learning environment enhances learning by limiting the range of things to be learned. In this sense it has a similarity with my use of the terms ‘holding’ and ‘containment’ (see below). However, the more usual meaning of ‘constrain’ is to inhibit, and I use it primarily in this sense.
2 The terms ‘layered’ or ‘laminar’ to describe the multiplicity of mechanisms at work in open systems derive from Bhaskar and Danermark (2006).
3 I note that Gunnlaugson (2007) also uses this idea in a transformative learning context, drawing on Kegan (1982).
4 Brown defines curriculum as ‘what we teach’ and pedagogy as ‘how we teach’ (Brown, 2009: 8). In the CWPD programme I understand curriculum as the structure of courses and sessions within courses, and mandatory course content, including the creative life writing, the reading lists, and the end of course assessments. I understand ‘pedagogy’ as the facilitation of the learning environment and the tools and practices employed.
5 The research project also acted, for some Group 2 students, as an overarching and containing macrostructure (see Introduction).