Chapter 9
Reflexivity and group process
The creative life writing exercises, then, with their potential for subverting cogni-tive control and facilitating the development of the relaxed intentional stance are perfectly suited to what I have called reflexivity work. By this I mean that they can facilitate both the fluidity and the stability of the dynamic system of the psyche; or in critical realist terms they provide a flexible but ‘holding’ structure for the development of bodily agency. But the effects of the creative life writing cannot be seen in isolation from students' experience of sharing it in groups throughout the programme. Indeed I fully concur now with Simon when he says that: ‘without the groups the thing wouldn't have worked’. This supports Brown's suggestion that ‘the group is both the condition for and the outcome of human agency’ (Brown, 2009: 31). Much transformative learning theory also highlights the key role of group work in the experience of change (e.g. Boyd, 1991; Mezirow, 2000; Dirkx, 2012). Thus in this chapter I discuss the contribution of the collaborative, experiential groups to students' shift to a more reflexive self-experience.
Developing trust in small reading groups
Collaborative group work was a central pedagogical feature of the CWPD programme, with different variants occurring in all courses. In Course 1 (Writing for Personal Development) students worked in the full group (maximum of 16) for undertaking the experiential writing exercises and discussing course readings. But they also spent about 80 minutes each session in small student-led reading groups sharing the creative writing they had written at home in response to the exercises.1 Students remained in the same groups for the whole term. They brought paper copies of their writing for each group member and could either read the work out or let others read it on the page. Whilst the groups were student-led, tutors would (with students' permission) spend a while in each, observing and offering guidance.
For many students the small reading groups are the primary site for beginning to open-up the psyche, for it is here that they bring their creative writing, and their self-on-the-page, into the light for others – and for themselves – to see. For some people this is initially very daunting, but finding that others are similarly daunted is helpful. Stacey's comment is typical: ‘Reading groups: initially a terrifying prospect; together we built confidence and trust’. Susanna echoes this: ‘The whole of the first year was a development of trust and discovery of each other and that we were all terrified of sharing our work’. The continuity of the groups through the term is an important factor in the development of trust, according to Jill: ‘The length of time [we spent together] helped in building up a very close reading group and enabled us to trust each other's responses and to really know each other's voices’. Ruth provides a good example of this: ‘the response I received [to my poem] championed what I sensed was the first emergence of my writing voice; the voice I grew up with; the voice of the little girl in the photograph’. I previously defined ‘writing voice’, from the writer's point of view, as ‘a metaphor for a style of writing that contains the author's sense of self’ (Hunt, 2000: 17). It will contain rhythms and tones deriving from speech and writing in the writer's social and cultural background, as well as rhythms and tones arising out of his or her individual temperament. The idea of ‘finding a voice’ is also associated with developing a sense of agency to ‘speak’ in one's writing (Hunt and Sampson, 2006: 24–39). All these elements are implicit in Ruth's recognition of the authentic sound and feel of herself on the page, and the group's support validates its emergence.
Something similar happens for Miranda:
I worried that my audience might find my writing absurd or dull. I had included some jokes in the piece. Would they find them funny or was my sense of humour as impenetrable to the rest of the world as my storyteller's voice might prove to be? Reading it to the group, however, I was delighted to find they followed my meaning, laughed at my jokes and that their criticism was positive, valid and honest. I had not written work to be read out loud before. I was experiencing what it was to have a reader, and the experience was exhilarating. Very quickly I was no longer afraid to read to the group, indeed I really came to look forward to our session. I always felt that, even if what I wrote was not what I hoped it would be, that it would be positively received, sympathetically criticised and that the criticism would be useful, not discouraging.
Here we see Miranda becoming more confident to bring her writing out into the open in the relationship with her trusted audience. As she does so, her writing process becomes more relational as she anticipates sharing with them what she is writing. In this way the space of the group, both its external reality and its internalisation as a benign structure, becomes a container for growth.
An important part of this development are the guidelines for giving and receiving feedback on creative writing which students receive in Course 1.2 These suggest that students do not rush in with their comments, but take a few moments to reflect on the piece they have just heard and their felt response to it, trying to identify both the feeling it has evoked and what it was in particular that had that effect. Tutors model this approach for the students at the first session.3 The emphasis on listening is not only directed at the readers of the writing, but also at the writers, who are required to listen to the group's responses before saying anything themselves. This helps them to remain open to, and reflect on, what is being said, as Maria points out: ‘Receiving feedback and criticism means being open to receive something that is other and use it’. Tutor Christine echoes this. Learning to listen, both to themselves and to others, she says, is a centrally important part of students' learning. It involves them in ‘open[ing] up to a variety of voices … and what yours is’. It also helps them, tutor Sarah adds, to learn ‘what their feelings are and … what it is that they want to say’. If ‘finding a voice’ is, at least in part, being able to get one's own sound and feel into one's writing, then listening and feeling are key both to developing the writing and developing oneself. As Claudia says, the reading groups give her ‘the opportunity to hear how my voice is distinct, not better or worse, just different from others’. This gives her confidence in her writing, but it also helps her sense of agency generally, against the background of ‘being the seventh out of eight children [and not wanting] to let my light really shine in case it outshone others … and incite[d] my siblings' resentment or jealousy’, residues of which continue to haunt her learning.
Learning to listen to the writing – both literally if the work is read out loud, and metaphorically with the mind's ‘ear’ when readers engage with it on the page – and to feel one's way into it cultivates a bottom-up or embodied response in the first instance rather than a top-down, critical one; it is ‘receptivity’ in Boyd and Myers's sense (1988: 277). Like the writing exercises, receptive listening encourages the relaxing of the strong intentional stance (left hemisphere), the expanding of space for the imagination and the experiencing of the embodied intentional stance (right hemisphere) that holds the space open. It is another way of inhabiting the ‘dynamic now’ (see Chapter 8). It can also create a collaborative learning environment rather than the primarily competitive one writing groups often are, sometimes undermining participants' already fragile confidence. This is not to suggest that competitiveness is always a bad thing or that it is possible or desirable to eliminate it altogether; rather that in a context where personal development is as important as academic or professional development, creating an environment where students can feel safe enough to loosen the personas and strategies they bring to group learning and open up to new ways of thinking and being-in-relation is key.
When they work well – and they do not work well for everyone (see Chapter 11) – the reading groups create a receptive space for students to start bringing the sound and feel of themselves into the open through the creative life writing. But they can also challenge participants to delve deeper into themselves. I highlighted in Chapter 8 how using poetic and fictional techniques in autobiographical writing puts subtle pressure on the writer to go deeper into the feeling of an experience in order to fulfil the requirements of the form, but the group and/or the tutor as audience to the work are, of course, integral to that process. We see this at work in Jill's experience:
My overriding impression was that the group did not know how to respond or what to say [to my first poem]. I had baffled my readers. … When I submitted [my response to the ‘future self’ exercise] the group were more explicit. They could do with more about me. ‘Doesn't she feel anything?’ ‘This feels like the bare bones of something … I want some of her feelings’.
The pressure for a self-character that feels authentically real to the readers pushes Jill to ‘dig deeper and revise constantly’. This means ‘acknowledging’ her fear of self-expression that, she has come to realise, is at the root of her ‘frozen writing’. In Susanna's Course 1 reading group we can see some members explicitly challenging others to be more open:
the third session was a turning point in that the material was more exposing for two of us. In the discussion that followed our work we urged the other two to be more revelatory, and there was a very open dialogue about the content of our work and the way in which we commented on each other's work. The fourth week brought forth a very much changed approach in the writing of the remaining two people and our discussions.
In fact this was Simon's group and, as we have seen in Chapter 3, it is in the fourth session of Course 1 that he breaks through to a deeper and more challenging self-experience, when he realises in the reader exercise that there is no imagined reader in his writing process. In view of his subsequent comments about the centrality of the small groups in his learning, I would suggest that it is the simultaneously challenging and ‘holding’ relationship with this first group and the feedback he receives from them, which enables him to start experiencing a sense of company in the space of composition that later renders this space more manageable.4
The small reading groups in Course 1, then, with their listening- and feelingled modes of engagement, can be thought of as small, enabling structures – self-organising sub-systems within the larger dynamic system of the learning environment (Davis and Sumara, 2001). By creating ‘disorienting dilemmas’ they challenge students to be more psychically open and in process but also, where trust and collaboration develop, provide ‘holding’ for that process. They equip students with a methodology for participating in subsequent courses, which is particularly important for those opting for the more intense relational work of Writing and Groups.5
Creating a structured space for deep change
Writing and Groups was introduced into the programme specifically to provide training for people who wished to facilitate developmental writing groups in healthcare and the community (see Chapter 1). But we soon found that it was also helpful for those seeking personal development, whether or not they wanted to facilitate groups. As in Course 1, the collaborative group work in Writing and Groups was a mixture of experiential learning and critical reflection, but there were significant differences. Here the working day was divided into two discrete halves, with the mornings taking the form of a tutor-led developmental writing group and the afternoons consisting of a tutor-led seminar for reflecting on the experience of the morning with the aid of course readings. Students worked in one group for all activities (maximum 10 members), rather than dividing into smaller groups. The sessions were designed to imitate the typical stages of a group as suggested by Corey and Corey (2002) – beginning stage, transition stage, working stage, ending – with critical readings appropriate to each stage, and the specially-devised sequence of writing exercises for the morning workshop (see Christine Cohen Park's Appendix) providing a means of responding to these stages experientially. Students were required to keep a learning journal, to capture in the moment their own learning process and that of the group as a whole, and to use the resulting material as a resource for writing the end-of-course essay (see Chapter 10).
Like the experience of entering into the shared space of the reading groups in Course 1, the transition to Writing and Groups is daunting for some, as it involves the dismantling of the familiar learning groups of Courses 1 and 2 in order to create new groups for Course 3. Stacey notes in her journal a general ‘sense of dismemberment as we said goodbye to friends we had studied with for two terms’. But this ‘dismemberment’ is another disorienting dilemma, designed to stimulate students' reflection on how a new group takes shape. By contrast there are pedagogical techniques designed to generate cohesion in the group. For example, at the outset the tutor leads the students in drawing up a contract for how they will work together supportively.6 Claudia finds this particularly helpful:
I liked the fact that everyone contributed something to [the group contract], we weren't just told by the facilitator [tutor of Group A]7 what was expected of us. We generated ten group norms, which I felt was significant because there were ten group members including the facilitator, who was fully participating in the ice-breaking exercises and felt very much as though she were one of ‘us’.
The contract covers matters such as confidentiality, mutual respect and collaboration, the importance of listening and being heard, so is fundamental in generating trust and a sense of safety. Listening is also emphasised by the requirement that group members respond to each other's creative writing just by hearing it being read out rather than having paper copies to look at. This is very demanding, but again is aimed at creating a group that is intensely focused on the ‘dynamic now’ (see Chapter 8). The writing exercises similarly emphasise this, with their focus on: ‘This is who I am, now’; ‘This is where I shelter’; ‘This is where I risk’; ‘This is what I remember’ (see Appendix).
The process of intensely listening to, and feeding back on, each other's creative work in the full group can be seen to generate a more cohesive dynamic as the course develops. This is particularly visible where, as Maria notes, students ‘[link] creative writing assignments with group process, and learning in general, [which helps] produce very original writing pieces’. A good example is Jill's response to the final exercise – ‘This is what I remember’. Here she takes as her focus the metaphor of food in the word ‘feedback’, exploring not only its power to nourish (‘…I lick my lips at the thought of/Feedback; a starving audience, eager/To devour my prose, salivate over puns and laugh at alliterations’), but also its more visceral dimension (‘…the/ignominy of exposing our open hearts to/ The sharpened butchers' knives’), both necessary parts of the dynamic process of change involved in group learning. In Tess's response to the same exercise the seminar room is her focus (‘A stark, staring straight ahead room/with flimsy white walls and a vacant expression …’), which is given life by the group (‘…flexing/its muscles warming up/with games and stretching/exercises’). In fact the room becomes the group in search of itself (‘A room reaching for its identity … a crowd forming and re-forming …’, one moment ‘hotting up/flushed with excitement’ and the next ‘filling up/with tears and disappointment’).8 The writing exercise here provides an opportunity for students to write to and for each other, creating metaphors that bind them together into a dynamic but containing whole, generating for some a strong sense of community.
The receptive learning environment of Writing and Groups makes it possible for many of the students to feel more at ease with their newly expanded sense of self and to start exploring it more thoroughly. As we have seen in Chapter 4, it is here that Maria feels most safely ‘held’ in her fragmented state. This makes it possible for her to start giving shape to the different parts of herself in fragments of poetic prose and to feel more authentically present in the group in all her complexity. By the end of the course she is beginning to learn how to be a more effective container for her own learning, to ‘hold’ herself open for the change that learning involves, which indicates that she has internalised the ‘holding’ provided by the group. It is here too that Susanna feels safe enough to disclose her illness identity, although ultimately she does not disclose directly to the group; rather she allows aspects of her story to become visible through the series of connected autobiographical poems she writes. Like Maria, she uses the creative writing here to work at herself in fragments that constitute a whole, which provides another level of ‘holding’. Writing and Groups is also where Susanna's more open and accepting stance as a learner, which she sees modelled by the tutor, begins to take root, and which has a profound impact on her facilitation of others' learning (see Chapter 5).
In fact, the shift to a bottom-up, embodied learning process, which clearly begins for some students in Course 1, becomes in Writing and Groups a central feature of many students' learning. From their essays it is obvious that this is enhanced by discussing the course reading, including John Keats's notion of ‘negative capability’ in the creative process, a state in which the writer ‘is capable of being in uncertainty, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ (Keats, 1958: 72). But I would suggest that it is putting this into practice through listening intensely, not only to the others in the group but also to themselves through the creative life writing, which enables students to become more deeply aware of processes at work within them: what writing feels like, what learning feels like, what it feels like to be themselves in the moment, what it feels like to be in relation.
Exploring the self-in-relation
Within the more complex ‘holding’ structures of Writing and Groups some of the most significant – and most difficult – learning takes place.9 With the emphasis on what is happening in the present of the group, the focus of students' attention shifts from relations with parents, siblings, and other significant people in their lives as in Course 1 to relations with their fellow learners. This focus is sharpened by the course readings, including emotionally-laden topics such as the silent person in the group (Coltart, 1996) and the role of the ‘shadow’ (Jung, 1983). Judging from its presence in students' essays, the latter is one of the most significant of these readings. The ‘shadow’, in Jung's thinking, is the lower or primitive level of the personality with its ‘dark aspects’ and ‘uncontrolled or scarcely controlled emotions’, which can impair moral judgement. Often repressed and projected onto others, these dark aspects have to be recognised ‘as present and real’ if self-knowledge is to be achieved (ibid.: 91–2). However, the shadow can be thought of more broadly and productively than simply as a primitive area of the personality. In a Horneyan context it can be understood as a part of the personality that conflicts with the dominant life solution and has been repressed, but continues nevertheless to be experienced as a vague, troubling presence in the psyche; or as the Pride System waiting to punish contraventions of its rules, which Horney calls an inner source of danger (Horney, 1951: 153). In a socio-psycho-logical sense the shadow can be those thoughts or tendencies we keep hidden, from ourselves or others, because they are socially disapproved of. In a group it may be unspoken tensions hovering beneath the surface of behaviour, or a particular group member who bears the group's negative transference.
With the ‘normative’ constraints of the academic learning environment suspended (Bhaskar and Danermark, 2006) through the shift of focus to what is happening in the group, students become more aware of their shadow sides. For example, when the tutor of group B asks students to think about whether everyone is getting their fair share of the talking time, Harriet is challenged to think differently about her disgruntlement with her reading groups in Courses 1 and 2, where she did not get the in-depth critical feedback she needs, and to reflect on how her own behaviour contributes to this:
I always find it difficult to talk up in groups, I always let noisier ones talk, so I think it was only by objectifying it that I was able to look at myself objectively and realise how I had to change my way of working, otherwise I would have been stuck with feeling embarrassed about not being able to cope in a group. … I'm much more aware [now], and I can also see what sort of group I need and what I need from the group and what I have to give to the group to get back [what I need].
Harriet's learning involves becoming aware of her conflicting needs in the group: on the one hand to be liked and valued by the tutor and the other students and, on the other, to get in-depth feedback on her writing. In other words she sees that she has to ‘change [her] passive behaviour and become more assertive’ if her needs are to be met. This means breaking out of her tendency to be ‘good’, whether the good daughter to the tutor or the good mother to the other students; in other words she has to experiment with bringing her assertiveness and anger into her relations with others in the moment.
This is precisely what Megan finds herself doing when there is not enough time left to discuss her writing at the second session and she has a ‘sensation of being ignored’. Rather than pocketing her feelings and withdrawing as she would usually, she expresses them forcefully. In response a group decision is made to have a timekeeper to ensure everyone gets equal time. Being ‘listened to and heard’ enables Megan to feel ‘for the first time to be a part of the group’. However, subsequent tensions in the group again evoke her sense of exclusion, but reflecting in her learning journal on this tendency which, her researches reveal, is not shared by many of the other students, she links this feeling to her childhood when she was ‘sent away to boarding school whilst my sister remained at home and part of the group’. She also becomes aware that her past learning experiences ‘can exaggerate [a present] feeling, taking it out of place and leaving me feeling on the edge’. Opening-up to herself in this way ultimately enables her to feel that she has been ‘allowed to be myself and accepted’ in this group whereas ‘in every other group I have been part of I have felt [that I am] different’.
As noted in Chapter 2, anger is the dominant emotion students unearth in their self-explorations: anger at parents, siblings, partners, teachers, painful life circumstances, themselves. In Course 1 this anger is expressed largely in the writing exercises, but in Writing and Groups, with its explicit focus on the self-in-relation, anger becomes a more spontaneous presence, and this has a considerable impact on the dynamic system of the group and individuals within it (Chazan, 2001: 17). Megan's outburst, for example, is significant for Jill, for whom the expression of anger does not come naturally. She is convinced that the group will not go through Corey and Corey's stages, with difficult emotions emerging in the ‘working stage’:
I kept thinking well this isn't going to happen, oh no no no, then sure enough … there was one particular bit where [Megan] came in and started being really angry with how little time she'd been given, and then I immediately felt guilty myself because … perhaps I'd had an unfair amount of the time, I thought oh no, you know, but I was sympathetic to her and … but I think she was quite belligerent and of course coming from my sort of background where I would not be belligerent … first of all I was a bit shocked and then I thought well good on you, you know, fair enough if you feel this and you can then affect the dynamic of the group.
It is particularly important for Jill that: ‘the confrontation was allowed and the group didn't fall apart’. Whilst the equilibrium of the dynamic system of the group is disturbed, it proves robust enough to tolerate this and adjust itself accordingly (Davis and Sumara, 2001: 89).
Facilitating difficult learning
A key factor in this is, of course, the way the tutor facilitates the group. Whilst in Course 1 the tutors' role is to facilitate a learning environment within which students will work collaboratively in large and small groups, in Writing and Groups they are in addition modelling an approach to facilitating a developmental writing group. We have already seen an example of this in Claudia's mention of the tutor being ‘one of us’ by contributing to the group contract and sharing her own creative writing in the first session, which is clearly important for Claudia's sense of safety in this new group. A greater degree of personal openness on the tutor's part can in turn encourage students to be more open. But greater openness also means that tutors must be able to manage a potentially more turbulent learning environment. An example of this is tutor A's response when Claudia confronts her angrily about not sharing her creative writing in the second session as she did in the first. This is an important moment for Claudia, her ‘old feeling of rebelliousness [from] high school’, which got her into trouble with the nuns, re-emerging spontaneously. But this time, rather than being met with disapproval, Claudia's challenge is taken seriously by the tutor, who ‘openly examined her decision not to contribute her own writing’, according to Stacey, which ‘felt very honest and spontaneous, satisfying two of the group norms we had established’. Thus by responding in this way the tutor not only validates Claudia's self-assertion, but also models the reflective process for the students.
A more serious challenge to the tutor occurs in group B when one of the students becomes distressed at the tutor's request that she bring writing for sharing that responds to the exercises rather than extracts from her novel in progress.10 This upset seems to provide a channel for the unexpressed anger of several other students and becomes a moment of high emotion and disequilibrium for the group as a whole. One student describes it as a ‘mini-rebellion’ against the tutor. Rather than being defensive, the tutor responds openly and honestly to the confrontation, as one student says, reflecting on her contribution to the events, and subsequently the anger subsides and the group settles down again. By the final session, as another student puts it, ‘the group seemed to have rescued itself from the chaos and become cohesive’. This is in part a consequence of the trust that has developed in the group through listening and responding to each other's creative writing: ‘patterns of relating having the quality of trust enable people to go on together despite the anxiety they feel’ (Stacey, 2006: 278). But the tutor's stance also plays a crucial role here. In Bion's terms one could say that by receiving the students' anger and not being destroyed by it, the tutor not only remains a good-enough container for the group, but she also enables the angry group members to ‘reintroject’ (psychically re-absorb) the difficult emotion now accompanied by her containing presence, which makes it more manageable (Bion, 1962).
In these examples the tutors are not seeking to control and keep out of sight the expression of difficult emotions for the sake of the comfort of the group, rather they accept them as part of the dynamic process and use them as an oppor-tunity for group members to ‘mentalize‐ the affects (Fonagy et al., 2002), or think their feelings whilst experiencing them. At the same time they model a reflexive approach to facilitation for students who will go on to facilitate their own groups. As Jill says, she is ‘amazed’ at the way the tutor deals with the minirebellion, and this constitutes a ‘big learning curve’ in her development as a writing group facilitator, in the context of her own lifelong tendency to avoid confrontation.
Modelling reflexive facilitation is a key way in which tutors ‘hold’ the students. For Christine this involves ‘[being a mirror for] the very thing that we're trying to teach’. By this she means bringing together in the teaching process ‘the way we're thinking of our work and the way we are as people’, which involves being more emotionally open and present to the students. This echoes the emphasis in transformative learning on establishing authentic relationships with learners (Taylor, 2009: 13–14). Of course, Christine adds, being able to do this will very much depend on the stresses and strains in tutors' lives beyond their teaching. Another important way that ‘holding’ takes place, in Christine's view, is:
through hearing and receiving [students'] work …; that was the thing that most deeply connected me to students, the kind of quality of attention, and that sense at its best of being able to be with someone with their work in a very quiet and concentrated way.
Sarah agrees that ‘listening and hearing … was one of the most important things we did as tutors’ across the whole programme, and she adds that this is one of the key differences between the CWPD programme and standard creative writing MAs where tutors are expected just to give a critique of students' writing. So it is not just hearing the work, but hearing the students as well: being with the students with their work, as Christine says. It implies that the tutor can be fully present and real, as Cheryl says, but I would also add the ability to get a workable balance between closeness and distance. A good example of this is the tutor's engagement with Susanna's ‘Future Self’ piece in Course 1, which is a ‘turning point’ for her (see Chapter 5). Discussing this piece in tutorial, she says it is ‘romantic fantasy’. However, ‘[the tutor's] interpretation was something entirely different …, he put it in quite different words which gave it a kind of weight. He said it's about desire and it's about future’, which enables Susanna to ‘begin to read myself in a different way’. Here the tutor ‘reads’ the work and says what he sees happening in terms of theme and imagery. He is not interpreting the student but drawing attention to something important in the work. Of course this involves him in a judgement as to whether the student is ready to hear what he sees (see Chapter 11).
Tara Fenwick, drawing on Davis, Sumara and Luce-Kapler's dynamic systems approach to learning (2000), suggests that educators need to be ‘catalysts of “playing” occasions, “planning” occasions, “adapting” and “varying” occasions. The role involves open-ended design but not control: making spaces, removing barriers, introducing and amplifying disturbances' (Fenwick, 2003: 136). This echoes in many respects the tutorial approach of Writing and Groups and indeed the experiential work of the CWPD programme as a whole. The idea of ‘open-ended design’ that is not a form of control captures the optimal reflexive stance of the good-enough tutor, where the structure of facilitation is soft but tangible at the level of bodily feeling. The idea of introducing ‘disturbances’ into the dynamic system of the group also resonates with the programme's aim of eliciting openness and change, in the context of the individual psyche's or the group's tendency towards inertia or stasis in the quest for safety or comfort. Disturbance – or disorienting dilemmas – comes not only through the writing exercises and sharing them in the group, but by the way the tutor gives individual students different ways of looking at their self-on-the-page, or encourages them to reflect how they engage with each other.11 At the same time tutors have to be able to ‘hold’ individual students and the dynamic system of the group as a whole in moments of disequilibrium, as well as the disequilibrium of their own psyche that might result from it. Needless to say this can be very challenging (see Chapter 11). As Dirkx says of his experience of facilitating transformative learning, ‘I am challenged on a regular basis by dramatic and potentially disruptive emotional dynamics that occur within and among the learning teams’ (Dirkx, 2012: 127).
Reflexivity and group process
It is clear from the above that the collaborative, experiential group work, particularly in Writing for Personal Development and Writing and Groups, is for many of the students a key factor in their experience of change during the MA programme. In conjunction with the creative life writing, these groups simultaneously challenge participants to be more spontaneously in the moment and are, at their best, safe-enough to ‘hold’ the often difficult emotions that emerge so that change can take place. Brown's description of the learning environment as ‘an open or at most a quasi-closed system’ (Brown, 2009: 31) is particularly useful here, with the latter term capturing the ‘relative disorder’ (Siegel, 2003) of the dynamic system of the group: it is neither completely open and therefore in constant flux, nor is it fully closed and controlled, rather it is open within certain flexibly ‘holding’ curricular and pedagogical structures. Jill aptly describes these structures as ‘soft’:
I think the group structure certainly this term [Writing and Groups] and certainly the first term [Writing for Personal Development] I was very aware of a very soft structure of the group and again something that I wasn't used to dealing with in business or, I was used to much more fixity, much more goal direct [sic]. Obviously there were goals and obviously there were things to be achieved, but I'm much more aware of fluidity and sort of, you know, watery-type things now rather than something very hard.
Jill's distinction between group structures that are ‘goal-directed’ and those that are ‘softer’ or more fluid evokes again the distinction between top-down and bottom-up structures within the framework of dynamic systems theory and my conceptualisation of the experiential groups as bottom-up or embodied in a similar way to the writing exercises. Indeed McGilchrist refers to evidence indicating that ‘shared mental states in general activate the right hemisphere’ (McGilchrist, 2009: 168). Being ‘soft’ structures means that, whilst they create a framework for change for those working within them, they are themselves visibly open to change as agency develops in individuals or in the group as a whole. For example, in Writing for Personal Development mutual trust in Susanna's reading group facilitates beneficial change in the way the group operates; in group A of Writing and Groups Claudia's self-assertion causes the tutor to reflect on her actions; in group B Megan's anger changes the group rules, and the ‘mini-rebellion’ causes the tutor to open up emotionally to the group. Thus in the reading groups structure and agency are constantly in process, mutually influencing and changing each other. This is consonant with the critical realist idea (morphogenesis) that structure and agency each have their own distinct properties and powers and mutually act on each other, giving rise to constant change (Archer, 1995). In a dynamic systems context this can be thought of as circular causality. This combination of dynamic openness and soft ‘holding’ structures makes the learning environment a fruitful space for the development of reflexivity.
Notes
1 The student-led reading groups were also a feature of Course 2, Creative Writing and the Self, and Course 4 Option 1, Contexts for Practice.
2 These were devised by Cheryl Moskowitz and Christina Dunhill.
3 Modelling is highlighted as an important technique in transformative learning (Taylor and Jarecke, 2009: 286–8).
4 This is later enhanced by some of the critical readings (see Chapter 10).
5 12 of the 15 Group 2 students took Writing and Groups, with the other 3 taking Writing Practice (see Chapter 11).
6 This was introduced initially into Writing and Groups and later extended to other courses.
7 I refer to the two groups taking Writing and Groups that year as A and B.
8 This is a good example of how the physical space can become internalised as part of the holding environment for students' learning.
9 ‘Significant learning’ is Carl Rogers's term for learning that involves change in the organisation of the self (Rogers, 1951: 390). ‘Difficult learning’ borrows from Deborah Britzman's idea of ‘difficult education’, which involves negotiating self-other relations (Britzman, 2003: 1–32).
10 This was in part the consequence of some students' confusion about the nature of the writing group in Writing and Groups, arising out of the tension in the CWPD programme between using creative writing for personal development and developing writing skills (see Chapter 11).
11 The idea of actively ‘amplifying’ disturbances is not so applicable to the work of the CWPD programme, as the work can be disturbing enough without the need for amplification (see Chapter 11).