Conclusion
I began this book by suggesting that the changes I saw taking place amongst students of the CWPD programme represented an increase in their sense of agency: their ability to be more self-directed and self-determining in their writing and learning processes and in their relations with others. And indeed agency has been a central concept throughout my explorations. By focusing on underlying structures of students' experience and attempting to understand them within a bio-psycho-social conceptual framework I have learned that agency emerges in the context of structures that are simultaneously robust and flexible and that these structures are both in the psyche and in the learning environment.
It turns out that agency is about having psychic space, but also being able to ‘hold’ that space so that the imagination can move freely. We learn to do this ‘holding’ when we let go of trying to control our thinking; when we allow our thoughts to emerge spontaneously out of the feelings that are constantly being generated by our bodily engagement with the environment and only then bring to bear more focused, critical thinking. Learning to do this in an educational context requires that the ‘holding’ is provided in the first instance by the learning environment. This is because loosening control over our thinking often involves confronting difficult feelings about ourselves and our relations with others. It involves confronting who we actually are rather than how we have come to think about ourselves, which can be uncomfortable or painful.
It turns out that creative life writing is a particularly helpful tool for engaging in this process because its flexible cognitive structures press us to relinquish our familiar, sometimes defensive ways of thinking and being and to get closer to what experience feels like. At the same time these structures help us to trust the not-knowing that is intrinsic to creativity and independent thinking, and in that process we begin to learn how to ‘hold’ the space for the imagination and manage the emotions. It turns out that collaborative, experiential group work similarly challenges us to be more in the moment, but can also provide safe-enough transitional spaces for bringing who we actually are into the open and trying out new ways of being-in-relation. Reflecting on this experience through diaries and learning journals can provide us with further opportunities for ‘holding’ whatever arises into the space for the imagination, and critical reflection can bring clarity and conceptual understanding to our bodily-felt experience. Engaging in these multiple modes of learning within a containing community of learners can generate a sense of the learning environment as ‘a vast space encompassed in which to play and explore’.
The question that remains is to whether the approach discussed here is easily transferable to other adult learning contexts. After all, whilst the people who participated in the CWPD programme were in some ways quite diverse, in other ways they were a very specific group, which arguably made change more likely. Not only were many of them explicitly seeking personal development, but many also had some knowledge of the workings of the literary text, were highly selfreflective and familiar with the therapeutic process. Whilst further research will be needed to answer this question fully, what I can say at this stage is that it has proved possible to use some elements of this approach, with care, outside of the creative writing context. For example, I and others have successfully adapted some of the writing exercises for use in professional development workshops (Hunt, 2010b) and in short courses aimed at helping university students to be more creative in their academic writing (e.g. Creme and Hunt, 2002). And others have been developing similar work (e.g. Bolton, 2010). But it is crucially important, particularly in short workshops, for the facilitator to ensure that participants are aware of the challenges, and to create an environment that is sufficiently ‘held’. This can be done by making a group contract at the outset and using group writing activities, such as the ‘web of words’, which can quickly generate cohesion. In short workshops it can also be helpful for participants to share their reflections on doing the exercises, rather than sharing the creative writing itself. Letting participants know at the outset that there is no pressure to share the creative writing unless they choose to do so can help reduce tensions. It should not be underestimated how powerful these exercises can be in opening people up to thoughts and feelings normally out of conscious awareness, so great care does need to be taken, and facilitators would be well advised to have some basic therapeutic training.
Ultimately this work is about developing a robust but flexible sense of self that frees up the mind for engaging more creatively in learning and participating more fully in the world. Through the research I have become more acutely aware of how difficult thinking is. Of course I already knew this from my own experience: much of my life has been a painful struggle with not being able to think, and I am clearly not alone in this. How paradoxical that the thing that makes us most human is the thing we find most difficult! And yet perhaps it is not surprising in the context of the vicissitudes of extended consciousness – the fragility of early relationships, the anxieties of upbringing, the consequences of trauma across the lifespan, and the power of language to embed us in its concepts. But I have been particularly struck in exploring students’ material by how often formal education has instilled an unhelpful top-down model of thinking. This may be a consequence of what McGilchrist sees as the dominance of the left hemisphere in Western culture, the legacy of post-Enlightenment thinking with its privileging of disembodied reason at the expense of feeling. Discussing the source of thinking in core consciousness, Claire Petitmengin says: ‘If our ideas draw their meaning from the preverbal dimension of our experience, then there is no real understanding which does not attain such depth’. And yet:
at present, teaching consists in most cases of transmitting conceptual and discursive contents of knowledge. The intention is to fix a meaning, not to initiate a movement. Which teaching methods, instead of transmitting contents, could elicit the gestures which allow access to the source experience that gives these contents coherence and meaning? Such a teaching approach, based more on initiation than transmission, by enabling children and students to come into contact with the depth of their experience, could re-enchant the classroom.
(Petitmengin, 2007: 79)
At its best the approach we developed at Sussex both elicited the inner gestures that allowed access to the source experience and transmitted ideas, but not so much in the attempt to ‘fix a meaning’, rather in the attempt to enable students to think for themselves about the meanings of those gestures. For many – although not for all – it did re-enchant the learning environment. As I was completing this book, a former student from the post-research period emailed to say that the radio play she had written for Independent Study was shortly to be broadcast by the BBC. She also said, without knowledge of my findings, that ‘the MA changed my life and my internal framework’. Having completed the research, I have a better understanding of what that means. Despite the discontinuation of the MA, I very much hope that the approach we pioneered at Sussex will be taken up by others and, if it is, I would very much like to hear about it. I can be contacted at www.celiahunt.com.