mccomas, August 10, 2002 at 6:23:09 PM CEST

Morning Pages: August 5, 2002

Injustice and oppression are complex issues rooted in social policy, the environment and the economy. Social action workers understand people may experience problems as individuals but these difficulties can be translated into common concerns.

Images of the teens at the writing camps are crowding my mind now. I see a young male, not quite sitting at the table, not quite sitting away from the table. His body is turned towards the window as if he is poised for flight. I see a young woman, dressed in the uniform of her culture, open enough to write of what she doesn't like, yet frightened enough of saying the words out loud, calling upon a friend to finish reading for her. I see a latecomer, a tall young woman with cascading wavy light brown hair hanging down around her face, which is always looking down, as if it were a brocade drapery pulled to keep things out or maybe to keep things in. I see their words splashed cross page after page screaming about this loneliness, this isolation, this desperate way of life. I see these teen years as the time when we learn that one doesn't talk about certain things except we know from their writing that not talking about htem doesn't make them go away. And so these unspeakable things churn beneath the surface causing internal damage slowly, steadily, until somehow, someway, we each find our own way of speaking about the unspeakable pain. That voice, the one that spoke about my unspeakable pain, was alcohol and for ten years, alcohol abuse spoke my pain. When finally the pain caused by the new voice became greater than the pain it spoke of, I had no choice - it was either die or speak for myself, of my own isolation, my own loneliness - which had grown larger while the alcohol was on watch.

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mccomas, August 10, 2002 at 6:11:31 PM CEST

Morning Pages: August 4, 2002

It's 10:50 am. I'm sitting at Borders, two hours after I left home this morning. I came here hoping to meet Beth and write. I've been here since 10:00 am, have finished a cappuccino, looked at two Michigan guidebooks, reviewed Tom Romano, and am just now settling down to write.

My purpose this morning is to think about the social action process, perhaps with regard to the Summer Institute, perhaps not. According to the CSA, the Social Action worker is to facilitate a group through the 5 step social action process. As a social action worker I am a facilitator, not a provider. The participants are not just consumers but are active agents for change.

CSA goes on to suggest that social action workers must be able to plan and prepare well, be creative, to listen actively, be patient, be disciplined, be interested in people's lives.

These aren't too hard, or are they impossible? It seems so easy to do on the surface, but I'm reminded of my "shut up," "let go," and "listen" mantra. Those things are not easy for me to do because I always want to butt-in, take over, or some other non-facilitative-like activity. It is really difficult to Trust the Process, especially under certain conditions - and one of those conditions is when the 'community' is not expecting a facilitator but is expecting a provider. When expecting a provider, people can be rather shocked to discover a facilitator has arrived instead.

So, in what ways have I facilitated? In what ways have I stepped over the line to provide? Clearly, all the writing we do in the summer institute is facilitative...it helps people discover what they think, what they know. The use of prompts is facilitative, not providing. We negotiated the final product and while I worry that Toodie and I said too much, nobody can really say they didn't have a voice. What they could say would be that they chose not to exercise their voice, which is different from not having a voice.

How have we tried to ensure social justice, fairness, and equality in our work? We've modeled? This one is hard - I'll try more later.

The summer institute is good at the second principle, recognizing that teachers are the experts on teaching and using teachers to teach other teachers. We also know that who we are as teachers are only stories that each of us can tell. We cannot, dare not, leave it to others to tell our stories because nobody knows our individual stories as well as we do and nobody can be as committed to tell our stories as we are. I have the most interest in telling my story because I want it told right and I want it told true.

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