restriction and this took me back to previous experiences where people caught up in war conflict and trainees treated me as a ‘mother’ in the cultural sense of the word. I accepted the role, which in the literature is referred to as ‘transference and countertransference’ and turned it to good educational use. Introducing the review
In response to the disappointment that the home visits could not be dis- cussed directly with me, I expressed my appreciation for the enthusiasm with which they had tackled their homework assignment, adding that I was sure that the trainees had much to say that was of great interest. But I stuck to my decentralised teaching format, which I accounted for by stressing that the in- formation collected gets optimum attention and educational meaning if the trainees discuss their experiences together first. The trainees set to work on the assignment (see below).
Box XXIV Organising the review of the homework assignment Step 6 • 50 minutes
• Sit in groups of four
• Explain to each other how you introduced yourself to the ten families
• Explain what questions you asked
• Do not interrupt the other person during his/her account • Ask questions and explain to each other how you arrived at
your conclusions
• Choose someone to write the most important findings from this discussion on a flip-over
• Choose someone to present your results to the full group Step 7 • 50 minutes
• Take part in the full-group discussion about the visits • Justify the findings from your own group (Every group has
12 minutes for this) The first part of the execution
Various trainees needed to have explained to them a few times how I wanted them to work, which was a manner of working they were not familiar with. There were groups where the trainees did not sit in sub-groups. And where
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some trainees did sit apart, they did so rather carelessly. I there adopted a di- rective approach, re-arranged chairs and pointed out to the trainees that it is easier to see and listen to each other when the chairs are arranged in a cross. The trainees set to work, read each other’s lists of questions, exchanged find- ings and discussed summaries, which they then wrote on a sheet of paper. They did their best to keep to the discussion procedure and not to interrupt one another. Some trainees found this difficult because they were so very en- thusiastic. From the moment they could ask and answer questions I saw the surprise and light tenseness on the part of quite a few trainees turn to joy. The trainees told each other how the visits had gone and how they introduced themselves to the families. They said that they applied the lessons in greeting people that they had learnt in other training programmes.
The second part of the execution
After the work in sub-groups, I moved the tables and chairs to one side, and much to the surprise of the trainees, chalked on the floor of the training room a circle one and a half metres in diameter that was to represent a community. Having arranged the chairs around the circle, I invited the trainees to take a seat.
As in the exercise on rule-making, I gave every trainee the opportunity to call out the number of pyramidal, closed and/or open family organisations they had found and then explain their conclusions. To allow the memory of this moment to linger a bit longer I drew the results of ‘the investigation’ (see Table 8.1 below) one by one, as a pyramid, a closed circle or an open circle in the living environment. I thus enabled all trainees to tell their results to ‘the mother’ after all and experience appreciation.
Again, the method was met with a great deal of attentive interest as well as some surprise. The trainees closely followed the results, what they entailed and how the discussion continued: if I lost count, the trainees were very quick to correct me. They were well able to explain why of the total of 402 families visited, 30.6% were pyramidal, 36.06% were closed and 33.4% were open families.
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Table 8.1Results of the homework assignment
Nya-Ngezi A
5th day Nyamata A5th day Nyamata B5th day Kakata A5th day Kakata B5th day Total Visited 120
families families40 families36 families109 families97 families402 Pyramidal 48 12 9 36 18 123 Closed 46 24 18 32 25 145 Open 26 4 9 41 54 134
Reflections on the process
The trainees longed to tell their stories to the trainer, and thus cast her in the role of mother. I believed I could account for this in two ways. Assigning someone the mother role springs from the tradition of respect for the wisdom older women are supposed to have. Older women who are part of this tradi- tion know the tasks attendant upon this position of respect. Or, trainees’ own perception was perhaps accountable: they saw/experienced the intervention in relation to the prayer that had been heard (‘God has brought you here’) and thus as an assignment imposed from above. Seen from the perspective of religion, their enthusiasm to talk about the results of the homework assign- ment could be understood as an offering, a gift, a sign of worship addressed to a god. By viewing the tradition- inspired situation in these terms, I showed respect and I protected myself against the belief that the show of honour and respect were meant personally (for me).
The trainees only really understood that they were first going to discuss their experiences with the home visits with one another when I arranged the chairs in such a way that sub-groups were formed. The reserve in their words and behaviours indicated that they needed to have the explanation and infor- mation repeated so that working in sub-groups would become acceptable to them. Their reserve might be accounted for by their unfamiliarity with this way of working.
The arrangement of the chairs can have a positive or a negative impact on how a conversation proceeds. In all situations I made sure that every trainee in each activity was seated in a ‘first-rate’ place. Meanwhile, the trainees had come to understand the intervention of arranging the seats for the morning and afternoon assemblies. But they did not as yet grasp the procedure of
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working together in sub-groups. And since repetition yields results, it usually was eventually the trainer(s) who ‘organised’, with a wink and a little com- ment, the most functional and therefore motivating arrangements. It was im- possible for the trainees to discover and apply all the details all by themselves in just sixteen days of training.
Now that the quantitative part of the homework assignment had been drawn on the floor, trainees evinced surprise at having gained a new insight in this way. For they did not so much give a summary of the trainer’s knowledge in their presentations as knowledge that they did not possess earlier but had now acquired themselves. This experience yielded material for discussions about trainees’ own living environment as well as material to increase the training groups’ cohesion. This again had a positive effect on trainees’ mo- tivation to take on responsibility for fleshing out the training programmes. Any training in coaching and supervising sociotherapy groups in post-con- flict contexts requires examples from the local area. The presentations of the sub-groups’ results more than met this requirement. For instance, the train- ees learnt that tensions tended to increase in families when both spouses worked outside the home. During the home visits they heard stories of men hectoring their wives if they did not keep house properly, in their view. But if both spouses worked outside the home, there was less excuse for lecturing the women. The trainees noted that pyramidal families tended to much less engage in dialogue. They found that children in this type of family were not taught by their parents, that they were shown less love and that there was hardly any mutual trust. The trainees described the open families in opposite terms, using the words ‘free’ and ‘democratic’ to make clear what they meant. It had struck the trainees that the children from closed families were some- times asked for their opinion, sometimes not. And they noticed that in closed families, children as a rule do not take part in conversations. They proudly recounted how the families had appreciated their visits.
The trainees’ ‘simple investigation’ did not make clear whether they men- tioned the specific tensions in families because these were frequent or be- cause the training had given them the mental space (courage) to note the tensions between spouses. Whichever, the trainees had an important point. It is tempting to offer knowledge on this subject that has been gained in very different places in the world. The point of the sociotherapy training is that the trainer leads the trainees to learning by doing situations where they first learn for themselves how to attribute meaning to the situations they observe as well as any changes in them.
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The floor drawing and the ensuing discussion showed me that the trainees had little difficulty in linking up their knowledge of the principles and phases of a group process and the games to the new information. The homework as- signment had, as it were, provided them with material that helped them dis- cern a ‘basic pattern’ or template. And this brought home to various trainees in a number of places how they could take on responsibility.
The review of the homework experiment showed how proud the trainees were. They had practised what they had learnt and had ‘just like that’ proved to themselves that they had been able to carry responsibility and discharge it well.
8.6 The exercises and their significance for learning about the phases and principles
The power of repetition enabled the trainees to predict what questions I was going to ask when I drew the circle and the phases. They had also learnt what
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there was to say about the characteristics of the development phases of a group.
The questions I asked about the phases:
• Did the explanations, the discussion of the family organisations, the homework assignment and the review meeting help foster feelings of safety and mutual trust and care, and did these bring forth new insights about respect and control?
• What examples could the trainees mention in this respect? Questions about the principles:
• What did the trainees say about the space they took up in relation to each other as they learnt to explain and state matters clearly, learnt to conduct a conversation about families, carried out the homework assignment and took part in the review meeting in sub-groups?
• What did the trainees’ answers say about learning to take on responsibili- ty for further fleshing out and detailing the training programme?
• In what ways did the giving of explanations, thinking about family organi- sations, the visiting of families and the discussion in sub-groups strength- en trainees’ motivation to take on responsibility for further fleshing out and detailing the training programme?
• In what ways did the activities increase trainees’ responsibility for their own actions and their own decisions?
What is interesting about each reflection was that it kept providing the train- ees with ever more insight into how they themselves could structure a sizable number of thought-provoking themes.
8.7 Reflections on the role of the trainer
The practicable and repeatable activities enabled me to help the trainees re- tain their motivation to start coaching and supervising sociotherapy groups, preferably the next day. The realisation grew that they could implement and use the method themselves if they continued to give and ask for each other’s feedback while they worked in practice. As a result, my role increasingly was to encourage rather than regulate tension.
I enabled the trainees to attribute new meaning to existing phenomena with- out interfering with content. I visualised this in how I acted when land dis- putes were explained, when family organisations were discussed, when set-
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