The Drama of the Ontario Super-T

Eleventh Super-T, May 25-June 10, 2006

Summary notes from George Lakey, Training for Change

The setting was a camp on the shores of Lake Huron, where the last module of the Super-T was held. (The Super-T consists of four modules, and the last is the Advanced Training of Trainers.) The twenty-two participants were at work identifying conflicts which had arisen in the group. The plan was for teams of three to identify conflicts and choose one the team would like to facilitate work on in the whole group. The overall facilitators were Judith C. Jones, Ph.D., and George Lakey. The first team began its facilitation acknowledging that even its own team had some disunity; nevertheless a couple of members were willing to start. Hardly five minutes into the team's work a member of another team pointed to a conflict so profound that it proved to underlie the entire group's experience of this final module.

Bravely, the first team unfolded the conflict: the training was happening in a forest where First Nations People, the Wendat, had been massacred and driven from their land. Internationals in the second team generously chose to speak to the training group from their deep sense of community with the peoples of this land. Other participants were invited to experience fully the pain, anger and sadness of the violence, and to acknowledge our own cluelessness regarding our presence on the land. Participants were invited not to a place of personal guilt, but to a new level of awareness of how often we prefer to remain superficial, rather than to properly sense and acknowledge violence that has been done and how we may benefit from it.

Leadership was taken by an international indigenous person who led an all-night bonfire, to which participants were invited after confronting themselves in solitude.

The last day of the Super-T was spent in reflection and generalization, not only of the lessons from the previous night but from the entire journey from Day One of the Super-T. As participants worked creatively to integrate their learnings, they began to understand the previous evening as a storm (in group development theory) as well as an invitation to the spiritual dimension of life, for they had, finally, achieved the experience of community.

The Advanced Training of Trainers module also pushed us to a new understanding of mainstream/margin dynamics. Training for Change trainers learned this concept from Arnold Mindell and his colleagues in Process Work; all groups have a mainstream and one or more margins, no matter how much pride they have in their formal equality. This concept can be difficult for activists to learn, because activists tend to have a strong identity as a margin in the larger society, and none welcomes the truth that even within activist organizations there is - when we look with discernment - a mainstream and margin!

The seventeen days provided many opportunities for participants to work with this reality in their group, and to learn the implications of the concept. One implication is that it's possible for either a margin or a mainstream to seek to re-negotiate the relationship between them. A margin, for example, might want to retain its own identity (such as an artists' colony, the jocks in an Ivy League college) and still re-negotiate its relationship with the mainstream (to get respect, or better communication). Another implication is that mainstreams are inherently self-absorbed and clueless about the experience of those on the margins: they need to make extra efforts to become aware and re-negotiate their relationships with the margins.

The participants in the Super-T were learning much from reflection on their group dynamics and then were spun into confusion and pain when they encountered a hidden margin - the indigenous former occupants of the land who had been cruelly marginalized and whom we had completely failed to acknowledge! The last evening of the workshop, including the all-night fire, was the act of re-negotiation; those of us in the mainstream encountered a new dimension of how a group is impacted by what it ignores.

The Largest Super-T ever

This was the eleventh Super-T organized by Training for Change. TFC began the seventeen-day training of trainers event to enable U.S. activists to learn Direct Education side-by-side with people from other countries, and to enable trainers from around the world to gain this hands-on, in-depth experience. People from six continents "have been represented in the eleven Super-Ts, until this year held in Philadelphia. The move to Canada was motivated by the wish to get past U.S. governmental resistance to giving visas to internationals, especially those from the Global South. As it turned out, the Canadian government also refused to grant visas to some participants who are highly involved in democracy-building in their own countries.

Nevertheless, the four modules of the Super-T attracted the largest enrollment TFC has had, peaking at 38 in the Creative Workshop Design module. 21 participants went all the way through, and this core learning community included 7 participants from overseas -- Australia, India, Nigeria, West Papua, and Zimbabwe -- as well as Canada and the U.S.

"I was encouraged by how the Super-T continued to surprise and challenge me."

This evaluation from an experienced trainer (and self-described cynic) is representative of the enthusiastic response from participants. Other quotes from the evaluation: "I wish I had taken this years ago." "It is a great and memorable - and most important - empowering process." "Looking back, my goals seem very modest compared with what i feel I have achieved." "I want my college to send its most promising leaders to this training - it would transform our school and beyond." "I don't want people to come to future Super-Ts just for the tools - this is about transformation."

In the participant evaluation the top-rated features of the workshop were: hands-on practice in facilitation with coaching, "noticings" (observations without judgement on facilitator interventions and design concepts), theory and practice of emergent design, and the buddy system.

Some participants found the move from Friends House in Toronto, where most of the Super-T was conducted, to the camp by Lake Huron to be the least helpful aspect of the course.

Most participants named learning to lead an abundance of facilitation tools/activities as valuable, and some participants said "too many good ones to list." The training concepts rated as most important were: the four-step model of experiential education, the four learning channels, the importance of participants taking responsibility for their own learning goals, the stages of group development and dynamics of mainstream/margin within the group, and a more empowering relationship between the facilitator and the group.

All participants said they would recommend the Super-T to their colleagues and activist comrades, with some consideration of whether such persons were willing to go to a deeper educational level than simple transfer of skills and information. Largest number of facilitators

In 2006, Training for Change mobilized the largest number of its trainers ever to lead the modules of the Super-T: Karen Ridd (Winnipeg), Daniel Hunter (Philadelphia), Erika Thorne (Minneapolis), Judith Jones (Philadelphia), Matt Guynn (Richmond, Indiana), and George Lakey (Philadelphia).

An international team organized the Super-T: Marjorie Fulmer (U.S.), Lyn Adamson (Canada), and Holly Hammond (Australia), with support from others. Additional funding for this Super-T came from Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends, the Bentall Foundation, and the Evergreen Foundation, and a number of individual donors. Quakers and friends of Friends in Ontario were hugely helpful in making the Super-T a success, not least in responding to the myriad ways that a multi-cultural, international event provides opportunities for conflicts and growth.

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