Our aims and goals as Communitas tutors
What are we bringing ? What are we committing to ? What are we trying to do ?As tutors, our expertise is psychological depth, human interaction and group process. Together as a tutor group, we will be running the plenary sessions of the learning community, unless specifically negotiated otherwise. Through this work, we will attempt to generate and co-create an unusual group climate, quite unlike anything you are used to at work or in social life - a group climate that is conducive to the group's full potential. As a result you will not be only drawing on the tutors', but on the whole group's organisational expertise to develop cutting-edge best practice.
The group's expertise arises from its diversity and complexity as a real-life organisation and the vast knowledge and wisdom that is available in such a collection of human beings.
As tutors, our aim is to be present with and within the learning community in such a way as to allow for the full potential of the group and individuals within it to manifest. We are committed to give of ourselves, to contribute, provide input, intervene, model and lead, but are wary of imposing, short-circuiting or aborting emergent processes in the group. We hold the tension between structure and structurelessness, intervention and participation, doing and being.
We are experts at dealing with the psychological blocks and counterproductive patterns which interfere with the unfolding of the group's potential. As we work in the plenary, we will suggest and model interventions, as well as disclose our thinking and rationale. This will give you relevant insights into the psychological perspective from which we operate, in the immediacy of the group interaction.
We will deal with habitual patterns (of being and relating, of feeling, acting and thinking) in ourselves and in others in a way that brings empathy and understanding as well as depth of engagement and attention to the reality of pain and conflict in human experience.
We commit ourselves to paying particular attention to the parallel processes which inexorably arise between the participant group and the tutor group, and to access the learning inherent in these processes.
We see each participant's identity, previous life experience and skills as a resource to the community as a whole, and as such consider each participant in possession of authority, whether they consciously experience and inhabit that or not. For us the group process is an empowering and transformative experience for everybody.
Posted by Michael Soth in