Transforming Communication Through Intensive Group Experience, Communication Workshops, and Open Case

Abstract

In this chapter, we present three settings that stand at the core of transformative communication: the intensive group experience, communication workshops, and the open case setting. If facilitated properly, these settings have in common that they support community and team building and have the potential to improve participants’ dialogical and problem-solving capacities. They help communicative exchanges to reach states of improved understanding, taking several perspectives into account. As with active listening, it is not the particular techniques that stand in the foreground, but rather the attitudes that people hold and express through words, body language, gesticulation, intonation, and behavioral ways that matter most for co-forming an atmosphere in which people feel safe to learn significantly, experientially, and sustainably. Thus, pure training of skills would be insufficient, unless it can build upon interpersonal attitudes that underlie the people-oriented agenda. Due to the significance of experiential learning, rather than just writing about methods and settings, this chapter provides case examples, exercises, handouts, and participants’ reactions and calls upon readers to explore, select, and use those resources. Participation in one or all of the settings would provide most valuable first-person experience. As the chapter contains all guidelines needed to conduct open case sessions, it is only the interested peers who are needed to try this innovative setting.

The intensive group experience the encounter group—whatever you wish to call it—is when well managed well facilitated I think one of the most significant inventions of this century. I think it has had—and still continues to have—a tremendous impact.

Rogers and Russel (2002, p. 194)