How to cultivate a group-as-whole pedagogy?
How to cultivate a pedagogy where the group is the agent of change?
How to cultivate a pedagogy where all participants, teachers and students, learn from each other?
Group Pedagogy
"The group therapist’s job is to create the machinery of therapy, to set it in motion, and to keep it operating with maximum effectiveness."(Yalom & Leszcz, 2005, p. 117
Why not teaching in such a way? To paraphrase the above quotation:
The group facilitator’s job (aka teacher) is to create the machinery of group learning, to set it in motion, and to keep it operating with maximum effectiveness.
Systematic Group Work in face-to-face meetings.
The lecturing part during the weekly meetings is followed by intensive group work (face-to-face) to catalyze the group forming process.
A gradual transition scheme, from the individual to the whole group level, engages students in meaningful interactions: (a) lecture and individual reflection, (b) pair work, (c) work in small groups of three to five members, (d) sharing in a plenary session. (Brailas et al., 2017)
"Once a group is a physical reality, the therapist’s energy must be directed toward shaping it into a therapeutic social system. An unwritten code of behavioral rules or norms must be established that will guide the interaction of the group." (Yalom & Leszcz, 2005, p. 120)
Aiming to catalyze the development of a learning rhizome: A learning community always in the becoming and anotropic.
"In the proposed conceptual model, the aim of teaching is to form a learning organization: a knowledge community with emergent properties that cannot be reduced to any linear combination of the properties of its parts. In this approach, the learning of the participants depends not so much on their individual action, as on being the coevolving parts of a self-organized whole. In this design, the role of the educator is to catalyze emergence and to facilitate bottomup knowledge production." (Brailas et al., 2017)
Image “Men Therapy Group Scene from eMANcipation” By Philipp Müller-Dorn - PMD Films, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50127498
"I first acquired an understanding of the group-as-a-whole – in which the fate of the individual depended not so much on their own heroism ... but on being part of a successful group." (Agazarian & Gantt, 2000, p. 9)
"The group therapist’s job is to create the machinery of therapy, to set it in motion, and to keep it operating with maximum effectiveness."(Yalom & Leszcz, 2005, p. 117)
"Your first task is to help create a physical entity, a cohesive group."(Yalom & Leszcz, 2005, p. 117)
