Transforming Lives That Transform America
Transforming Lives That Transform America
This three-day group relations conference offers a unique opportunity to study the conscious and unconscious dynamics involved in how groups organize themselves and interact with each other. This conference is not a passive learning event that relies upon lectures. Instead, the learning is experiential. Participants study how leadership, followership, authority, task, boundaries, and roles operate in the different group experiences they enter during the conference. The conference will weave art and other non-verbal forms of expression into the conference events to illuminate unconscious dynamics operating in the system of group interactions that members and staff will create together.
LCE 2020 The Experiential Webs We Weave:
A Group Relations Application Event
This three-day Group Relations application event is an opportunity to explore how Group Relations (GR) and various forms of creative expression might come together to provide some insight or illumination of the
conscious and unconscious intergroup dynamics
characterizing the current social, political and economic contexts in which we all live and breathe...and weave.
While various opportunities for creative expression will be offered throughout the weekend, a Group Relations workshop directed by Rev. Jaime J. Romo, Ed.D. on Saturday February 29, 2020 from 9am to 6pm is the centerpiece of this larger event. The GR workshop will offer a unique experiential educational opportunity to study the conscious and unconscious dynamics involved in how groups organize themselves and interact with each other and how the arts can be an important representation of complex social systems.
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Group Relations (GR) is a high impact, experiential learning methodology that emerged out of World War II and the urgency people felt to better understand complex social problems. As described in The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Present, the relationship between art and the sociopolitical landscape is as complex, intricate and natural as a spider’s web; the arts have played a significant role in social, political and economic movements, and successful movements (i.e., cycles of progress) require artful, strategic planning and reclaiming of one’s freedom for creative expression as a form of inclusive leadership and followership. Passion for a cause is important, but people also need the competencies and skills required for effective action in real-world contexts including (but not limited to) applications in
social and environmental justice.
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We are living in a time of intense social, political and economic disruption. Inspired by Cuba’s Fabrica de Arte, the three-day GR application event calls upon all branches of the arts to weave together an intergroup experience in real time - an interdisciplinary, experiential laboratory for exploring and studying "here-and-now" relationships between and among groups - with an eye on the themes of leadership, authority, responsibility and freedom of expression in the 21st Century.
This GR application event will begin in the afternoon on Friday February 28th with a review of a
400 years of social movements timeline developed at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Individuals, groups and organizations interested in participating on Friday, Saturday or Sunday
by creating and displaying art, performing and/or leading an experiential exercise related to the abovementioned themes have submitted proposals and the emerging schedule can be found here.
The GR workshop on Saturday from 9am to 6pm requires pre-registration (space is limited).
On Sunday, there will be an opportunity for reflection and meaning-making as we examine together the "experiential webs" we weave together over the weekend and their application to real world issues, including but not limited to the "theater of politics."
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