Transformative Learning through Creative Life Writing

Chapter 9

Reflexivity and group process

 

 

 

The creative life writing exercises, then, with their potential for subverting cogni-tive control and facilitating the development of the relaxed intentional stance are perfectly suited to what I have called reflexivity work. By this I mean that they can facilitate both the fluidity and the stability of the dynamic system of the psyche; or in critical realist terms they provide a flexible but ‘holding’ structure for the development of bodily agency. But the effects of the creative life writing cannot be seen in isolation from students' experience of sharing it in groups throughout the programme. Indeed I fully concur now with Simon when he says that: ‘without the groups the thing wouldn't have worked’. ...