immersive experience wiki / Powerful, memorable and magical experience

As part of our professional (social work) training we had to study ‘Group Work Based Intervention’. The programme offered by the University was academic, arid and with no direct application of theory in practice.

After discussion with the University teaching staff failed to resolve the situation to our satisfaction, a sub-group of 14 (out of 34) men and women decided to construct our own group work learning experience. We hired a Youth Hostel in the Yorkshire Dales, planned a curriculum with each one of us assuming sole or joint responsibility for a half day and/or evening session and took five days out from the official course programme to go away together. We shared all costs, cooked, cleaned, bathed and slept communally (this was the 1970s). The experience was and remains one of the most powerful, memorable and magical ones of my life.

What were the particular characteristics of the situation that engaged you in an immersive way?

The fact that each of us assumed responsibility for our own – and for each other’s learning. From the first, commitment was a given. The fact that each person took responsibility for a specific session allowed everyone to demonstrate their own particular expertise and interests and created an infinitely more diverse and profound learning experience than the one being offered by the two academic staff who had been designated to ‘teach’ the official group work programme.

Every individual enriched the session she/he ran by drawing upon their own experience in/with groups and applied specific theory to specific experience (e.g. someone who had worked with physically disabled people asked each of us to ‘live with’ a particular disability for an entire afternoon before the evening session where he showed how group work techniques were used to promote mutual and reciprocal respect and support; another drew on her own experience of living with a clinically depressed partner to explore the relief/release that she experienced through her partner’s participation in an anger management group).

In addition, the sharing of all physical tasks broke down barriers between us that we had scarcely even recognised up to that point and forged a sense of common humanity that overrode differences in personality, political ideology (again this was the 1970s) and gender.

What forms of learning / personal development / change emerged from the situation?

We all recognised, both at the time and in retrospect, that some profound changes had occurred that made a substantial and sustained difference to our understanding of the nature of the ‘professional task’ and of the need to work ‘alongside’, rather than ‘for’ our clients if we were to understand their plight and add value to their life experiences and/or ameliorate their suffering.

Technically this would be characterised as ‘Level II’ change (change in espoused and lived values) and was only possible because we were able to work on these issues at Level III (that inchoate and seldom shared level of relationship to the self and others which is unrehearsed, uncensored and generative – where pain and pleasure are both experienced immediately and intensely).

What words/concepts/feelings would you use to describe the immersive experience?

On the final evening, we all agreed to go off separately and write something that tried to sum up our individual experience. Although this was by no means a ‘literary’ group of people, all but two did so in the form of poems. Almost everyone was ‘shy’ at having written (for most people for the first time – and for some the only time) a poem – but on the last morning, as we awaited the transport that would take us back to ‘normality’ and the snow fell with outside the window conjuring the fantasy that we would remain trapped there together in some ‘dreamtime’ – we took it in turns to read the poems. I still remember a couple.

“If there were words, I would choose them;

if there were gestures, I would try to use them.

There are none

and yet I feel that we are one.

And when we part

and when we

and when

and

if there were words.”

“So much is trashing, crashing, thrashing

about in a fog of distress,

but tenderness too is possible,

Ah! tenderness.”

What principles or lessons can be drawn from this story?

Most educational process fails to educate (as opposed to impart knowledge) because it seeks to generate change of values and espoused belief through processes that are predominantly (if not exclusively) cerebral – when values, beliefs and actions are at least as driven from more visceral sources. Authentic Level II change cannot occur without engagement of the self at Level III.

Adults (like children) learn best when they have an internal locus of control and when the outcomes of learning are not predefined by ‘powerful others’ but emerge from a unique (and yet shared) exploration.

immersive experience

Powerful, memorable and magical experience

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