Week Nov. 23
We are moving into the era of human potential, or as Adam Curtis puts it, the second half of the "century of the self." If you want to see what a (conventional) encounter group looked like, you can watch "Journey into the Self" - linked on MyCourses. The video of Moreno conducting psychodrama provides a view on what the precursor to T-groups looked like. (I will do a short lecture on the original human relations trainings.)
Based on what you've read so far, please address the following:
1) Describe any similarities you see between human relations trainings ("laboratories," "encounter groups," etc.) and contemporary outdoor experiential education. This can relate to either the rationales given for the approach, the practices they contained, or both.
Outdoor and experiential education share with human relations trainings a sense that insights gained through experience and underpinned by natural consequences and a felt sense of ownership are more real and impactful than insight and awareness gained through other avenues. Both experiential education and earlier human potential efforts consider the manner in which “one shows up” in a group to be the font of the awareness and insight targeted by interventions and initiatives. Outdoor and experiential education, at least through heritage and pedigree, take an approach similar to that of the human potential movement in that both attempt to ameliorate social ills through self discovery. The self discovery, awareness, and insight associated with human relations trainings and outdoor/experiential ed are located within the experience. While facilitators offer general direction in most interventions, intersubjectivity, meaning, and subsequent integrations are the responsibility of participants to negotiate through and within the experience. Interestingly, outdoor educators and facilitators of early human potential movement group leaders mirror one-another in their ability to attenuate their influence in the experience. Ranging from psychodynamic somatic reexperiencing group facilitators (like Moreno) engaging directly,and often physically, to Rogerian group facilitators who often represented themselves in a group at the peer level.
2) All the phases of this course are meant to contrast different logics behind the main educational movements/traditions that have informed "experiential education" over the late 20th century. Outdoor education has borrowed heavily from these traditions, and, consequently, has incorporated their logics. Each tradition (a) assesses a problem with the current social order and the system that props it up, (b) imagines a more desirable social order, (c) and proposes a remedy using education as the instrument of change using experience.
Experiences:
Sensitivity training - broad term for early training groups
Laboratory training - educational method that emphasizes experience-based learning. “Learning by doing.”
T-group - provides the opportunity to learn ways in which one is seen by a group, which roles they either step into or into which they are placed. Greater sensitivity to the feelings of others and greater understanding of group behavior is part of the learning. Transfer of skills is important - opening remarks may recognize bearing on work “back home.”
Focuses less on the individual, evoking more moderate emotional responses. Focuses on and modifies more on peripheral attitudes
With personal growth focus - accentuating the desire to experience people and events more accurately, supports feelings of personal adequacy.
Of a T-group: After initial remarks, the trainer takes a peripheral role. It is up to the group to establish goals and procedures. The trainer represents themself as a professional but does not increase social distance.
Encounter groups - intensive small group experiences emphasizing personal growth and expanded awareness through sharing. Intended to plumb both the psychic and social experience in order to move away from maladaptive strategies and limiting inhibitions. Not uniform in their characteristics or implementation - considerable diversity among these groups.
Existentialist-humanist beliefs: man functions at a small fraction of his potential. Removal of blockages can release this potential, allowing greater “integration” and higher functioning. “People can grow… man is capable of receiving warmth, love, and trust… Growth.. Is freeing of [the] inner self.. An emergence and fulfillment of an unguessed inner potential.”
Leader occupies a central position - focuses group attention and suggests interventions.
Resembles group therapy in that change is sought
People have the expectation of “peak experiences” (Maslow)
Engaging the immediacy of the experience (which may include touch, guided fantasy, somatic work i.e. muscle tension/relaxation, meditation) is prized, and cognitive activity or conceptualization is discouraged and thought of as ‘defensive’
Marathon Groups (Human potential movement) - time extended encounter groups that use experience and fatigue to break through defenses. Facilitated in growth centers, and part of the Human Potential Movement
Based on what you have read for this week, discuss the human potential movement's
(a) diagnosis of social ills,
Prejudicial, discriminatory thought, feeling, and behavior in both personal conduct and institutional/ vocational domains was the major concern of early CCI/ NTL work. Understanding group and social dynamics in order to build a less prejudiced and less hostile society was the central task of early action/research efforts.
(b) vision for social change, and
The vision for social change that emerged within the human potential movement was one in which defaming language, prejudicial behavior, and bias would no longer beleaguer society in general or the individual in particular. This social change was heralded by the removal of deep-seated blockages to compassion which pay present as intellectualization or denying of one’s social and emotional needs in order to stay engaged in relationship, vocation, or other major arena of life. In order to foment the behavior and introspection associated with the removal of one of these blockages, human potential practitioners would engaged participants in novel, immersive social environments where they were encouraged to emote fully and express themselves authentically. Through this process of relatively raw, direct contact some individuals come to identify that the intense affectivity that plagues them is associated with misguided reactions to the world around them, and recognizing in others what they wish to change about themselves. These experiential sessions were ruddered by a trained facilitator who may reflect affect, observe patterns, validate, and hold space within the group. By being in the group in these ways, the facilitator impacts the norms of the group and direction of group movement, directing the group to an unknown but ultimately helpful conclusion.
The vision of the Commission on Community Interrelations (CCI) used new methods of social inquiry to seek out the underlying causes of prejudice and to work out ways of removing them. Emphasis was on action - action tied to research
(c) idea of "experience" that is supposed to bring about the desired future vision. How was this logic supposed to work? How does this differ from Dewey's and Hahn's logics? What seem to be some benefits and drawbacks of the HPM's educational paradigm or model?
The “experiences” that came to be associated with the human potential movement come from a relatively diverse field, much of which was at first called sensitivity training. These experiences ranged from Laboratory trainings, associated a more remote facilitator who set initial expectations for the group as an expert, to encounter groups, which involved very immediate experiences characterized by somatic and mindfulness work which a facilitator lead (i.e. touch, guided fantasy, somatic work i.e. muscle tension/relaxation, and meditation). Lab trainings were sure to include opportunities for skill transfer in order to bridge from the intervention to “real life.” Lab trainings sprang from an educational background of learning by doing, and were of some utility to institutional and vocational stability - equipping participants with action skills. Later interventions, which were often therapeutic in nature, considered the encounter of intense emotions to generate much of it’s own behavioral staying power. Less were participants primed for more adaptive behaviors than they were availed to the emotional depth of life and richness and warmth of togetherness. This process was anticipated to dissolve many caustic cultural conventions which plagued society by bringing people to a place of greater tolerance while giving opportunities to engage difference. Education connects to the human potential movement through the avenue of experience. Conventionally, education implies the understanding of new ideas. The new ideas centralized by the human potential movement concerned how an individual could actualize oneself through the removal of defensiveness and emotional blockage. The education of these ideas was conducted through the lens of social experience in order to ingrain a felt sense of ownership in the conclusions drawn from the intervention.
3) What else is worth talking about in class, regarding this week's materials? What questions and reactions do you have? Please identify something you'd like to talk about with Bob McArthur, DOBC director from 1971-1984, who will be visiting. Bob was very involved in Outward Bound's uptake of human relations training ideas and practices during this time and then went on to work in national service (AmeriCorps) and youth programming (American Youth Foundation
) after his time at DOBC. He was also very involved in social movements during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
McArthur: course content on human relations and the laboratory experience concept
-The Dartmouth protests were part of a larger trend among once-stalwart Protestant schools where students rejected long-standing institutional assumptions as “inappropriate for an urban, polyglot world of many different, non-Protestant groups”
-OB model, faithfully executed, “contained few affordances for service beyond reproducing the model itself with younger, ostensibly needier populations.”
3) What existing vulnerabilities and opportunities for similarly situated organizations (those adapting to a changing social consciousness) do you see? NB
What is the future of national youth service? What would it look like to dovetail experiential place-based learning, conservation, and emerging trends in the social sphere? NB
Do you see the adoption of human potentialist elements at OB as a departure from the founding Hahnian dogma of OB?
How did the practice and function of OB programs (Including DOBC) change with the incorporation of human potentialist elements?
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