Theme-Centered Interaction: Intersections With Reflective Practice In North American Religious Contexts
By Mary E. Hess, Luther Seminary, Saint Paul, Minnesota
Abstract
A variety of efforts in North America include frameworks for helping participants in learning events to listen more carefully, to attend more reflectively, and to speak more slowly. Here is an important intersection in which the work of theme-centered interaction (TCI), Ruth C. Cohn’s psychologically grounded and astute theorizing and practice, offers substantial affirmation of specific processes. There are clear resonances between strategies such as “being your own chairperson” and “knowing your theory-in-use.” Reflective teaching practices support putting learning at the heart of higher education, rather than too narrowly falling into teaching-focused interaction.
1. Our Current Context
It is difficult to overstate how tumultuous and confusing our experiences of the world are today, at least in the so-called advanced democracies. Amid the turmoil and complexity of global shifts in telecommunication, pressing environmental challenges, and massive refugee movements spawned by violent conflicts, the very nature of higher education is being fundamentally questioned.
I would point to three shifts in particular that are shaping our experience as designers and facilitators of learning experiences in these spaces: what constitutes authority, how authenticity is defined, and how personal and collective forms of agency are experienced (cf. Hess 2016). In these shifts, the central narratives of higher education are fundamentally being challenged. Is this form of learning primarily aimed at preparing young people for paid employment? Is it a space in which basic research is pursued for the development of more effective solutions to pressing issues? Is it an arena for sustaining memory over time, particularly of history? Is it a liminal space in which people of all ages come to retool and enter new forms of activity? Perhaps it is all this and more besides (cf. Richardson and Dixon 2017).
Clayton Christenson, who in many ways has been the spokesperson of disruptive innovation, notes that the university of today and tomorrow may well be the one that best manages three tasks – discovery, memory, and mentoring (cf. Christensen and Eyring 2011). In that phrase you can identify all the various goals I noted earlier.
While I generally agree with these analyses, I would point to a particularly urgent challenge that is readily apparent in the contexts in which I teach – that is, in North America. I want to start there, not so much because I believe I have diagnoses and prescriptions which are pertinent beyond these contexts, but because I believe that engaging a very specific context can prove evocative for others, it can be a starting point for dialogue and engagement.
2. Competing Epistemologies
At the heart of theme-centered interaction, at least as I understand it, is a deep commitment to, and recognition of, a dialogical form of knowing, an epistemological assertion, if you will, that we inhabit what Parker Palmer has called a “community of truth” (Palmer 2007, 100–107). Such an assertion recognizes that each of us has an authentic and valid experience of the world and no one experience can ever encompass all of reality. Further, to gain a solid grasp of the reality which we inhabit, we must find appropriate and effective ways to “pivot our standpoints,” to “shift our perspectives,” and to enter into spaces constructed so as to collaborate through difference (cf. Collins 2009; Bruffee 1993). Perhaps a shorthand way of framing this assertion would be that the more diverse the knowers, the more robust the knowing.
Such a way of viewing the world is not easily arrived at, and far too many of our default practices in higher education shy away from such a stance. Note, for instance, how strongly polarized our current spaces have become or how “tribal,” to use Jonathan Haidt’s term, much public discourse has been (cf. Haidt 2012). Maria Popova makes an interesting point here, when she notes that in social media-driven spaces, the “biggest social sin is not to have an opinion,” no matter how little experience or knowledge one has of a specific issue (Popova 2014, timemark 3:44).
Even within academic settings, at least within the United States, there is still a strong default assumption embedded in the structures of higher education that privileges expertise arrived at through focused and narrow individualized research. The strongest resistance to such an epistemological stance can be found in the various fields of science, but, as most people are aware, there is strong ideological pressure right now in the United States to resist scientific forms of inquiry, and the funding and other structural support for such inquiry are dwindling rapidly. Indeed, much of the funding for higher education in the United States is increasingly being tied to a narrow push for “job readiness,” for patterns of knowing that have narrow goals of helping students to “get a job” (cf. Pellegrino and Hilton 2012).
2.1 Authority, Authenticity, and Agency
To some extent these default assumptions are being challenged by shifting dynamics amidst the influx of digital technologies. Media scholars note, for instance, that when authority is no longer conferred, let alone accepted, through structural means – such as conferring authority on the professor standing in front of a room simply because they are the professor – credibility becomes something which must be built anew in each setting, it must be crafted and demonstrated and deliberately shaped (cf. Hess 2015).
Similarly, what constitutes “authenticity” changes from moment to moment. Whole industries – entertainment, marketing, etc. – are built on figuring out what signals authenticity and then selling the tools and processes to produce such signals to the industries which rely on consumerism. For many of the students with whom I teach and learn, “authenticity” is the opposite of “manipulation” – and manipulation is a facet of nearly every experience they encounter, certainly in public or civic settings. These students have very highly tuned “bullshit detectors” – but their detectors rely on emotional clues and are often bound into hegemonic cultural forces which have blinded them to structural racism or, in the case of my students who are from marginalized or minoritized communities, have caused them to internalize the messages in damaging ways.
The final dynamic – that of agency – has been thoroughly shaped in U.S. contexts into agency experienced primarily, or even solely, through consumption. There are vanishingly few forms of collective agency in robust evidence in the United States right now. Labor unions have nearly disappeared, political action has been deformed into consumption of candidates packaged for particular constituencies to whom one can “donate” funds (so consumption through “purchase” of a candidate), and even the emerging rise of large rallies – the women’s rally immediately following President Trump’s inauguration, for instance – is, should be, are, moments of visible presence which are experienced as brief glimpses of shared energy rather than sustained and collective building of structural resistance.
Propaganda is increasingly the dominant form of public discourse, and in the U.S. media sphere, where news media have to produce profit in order to function, and even the so-called public media are dependent on corporate largesse, persons must work hard and intentionally to find and filter actionable information from the firehose pressure of data that is constantly being streamed to them (cf. Hobbs 2017). Perhaps there is some resonance here, or worthwhile analogies to be drawn, between the era in which Ruth Cohen developed theme-centered interaction and our own. Certainly, her work has some specific implications for and relevance to higher education in the United States.
3. Intersections with TCI
I need to be clear in this essay: as someone who teaches and does research in the North American context, my experiences with TCI have been quite limited. I first encountered the methodology in the work of communicative theologians Matthias Scharer and Jochen Bernd Hilberath, and, even then, it was primarily through the translation work and efforts of Catholic theologians Mary Ann Hinsdale and Brad Hinze (cf. Scharer and Hilberath 2008).
These four scholars led a team of Catholic theologians through an exercise in communicative theology at Fordham University in 2008. I was energized and inspired by that process and since then have been following the ideas and literature to the extent that I can in my own contexts. I am on the faculty of a Lutheran graduate theological school in the upper Midwest of the United States. I also teach in various other Catholic contexts (Seattle University, the University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto, and so on).
In these spaces, without ease of access to TCI trained facilitators, I have found analogous and resonant work in a number of other scholars, and in the rest of this essay, I will endeavor to note several of the more interesting intersecting points in this work. I will use the points on the TCI diagram as my organizing structure.
3.1. The Globe
Let me begin with the notion of “globe” in which this work takes place. There is strong consensus amongst theologians that context matters (cf. Bevans 2004). Yet, as anthropologist Michael Wesch has demonstrated, we are inhabiting a world in which context has collapsed (cf. Wesch 2009). When video, audio, or even simply Twitter texts, which arise in one setting, can be floated on a vast sea of data and come to rest in another setting minus any of their original context, it is more imperative than ever that we focus intentionally on the “globe” in which meaning is produced, in which it circulates, and how, if at all, we contest or negotiate with it (cf. Zuckerman 2013; Rheingold 2012). There are very few boundaries or borders any longer which mark, let alone obstruct, the flow of certain kinds of data.
For some organizations – certainly, those who rely on capital flows – this lack of border or boundary can be a boon. But for most of us, this liquidity can be problematic and even profoundly destructive (cf. Hylén 2015). Consider the challenges that arise around privacy norms, which vary by country to country, and yet which businesses like Google and Facebook regularly flout (cf. Rainey and Wellman 2012). Even financial capital is flowing without marker given the emergence of technologies like Bitcoin. How are we to understand let alone influence such flows? A first step might well be finding ways to intentionally, systematically, and thoroughly, keep recognition of “the globe” in our awareness. Theme-centered interaction invites that recognition, as does Parker Palmer’s “community of truth” framework (Palmer 2007, 100–107).
In the upper Midwest of the United States, where I live, teach, and work, there is a set of practices which has proven profoundly energizing, as well as empowering, in myriad contexts. I say “practices” to describe the Art of Hosting in the same way that I speak of the “practices” of yoga, rather than a specific form of yoga. The Art of Hosting is, as one popular website notes, “an approach to leadership that scales up from the personal to the Systemic, using personal practice, dialogue, facilitation, and the co-creation of innovation to address complex challenges” (cf. ArtofHosting.org ). The University of Minnesota, for instance, an R1 university with more than 50,000 students, has staff that work through a Center for Integrative Leadership on the Art of Hosting as a form of participatory leadership. They have published a guide to cultivating this kind of change in this sector of higher education and regularly host workshops and seminars for faculty, students, and staff, as well as other local constituencies (cf. Lundquist et al. 2013).
The Art of Hosting is specifically concerned with how to convene, facilitate, and harvest conversations that bring together people from disparate cultures, backgrounds, and contexts. It has spread throughout the world and now has practitioners who lead and train facilitators in many countries. A glance at one of the websites notes trainings taking place in Greece, Croatia, India, Australia, Belgium, Chile, Brazil, Switzerland, France, Austria, the United States, and so on. (http://www.artofhosting.org). Like TCI, these practitioners work on structuring conversations in ways that draw on a way of knowing that is thoroughly participatory.
3.2 The I
Another key intersecting point is the recognition Ruth Cohen brought to the necessity of supporting individual, personal awareness of one’s own interactions and embeddedness in discourse. This insight has long been a key element of many of the tools used within a variety of conversational practices focused within public conversation. Two have been particularly important in the theological contexts in which I work.
The notion of “being your own chairperson” can be supported through learning the difference between an “espoused theory” and a “theory-in-use.” Anita Farber-Robertson draws on the work of Chris Argyris to note that an “espoused theory” is what we say we do and what we think we are doing. She contrasts that to a “theory-in-use,” which is a theory that “explains the actual behavior we have produced, even though we have not expressed it verbally” (Farber-Roberston 2000, 5). An espoused theory is often what we aspire to, and it offers a narrative, a way of perceiving what we are feeling, which privileges our own internal self-story while submerging awareness of another person’s. People who are familiar with the language of nonviolent communication will note the distinction between an “observation” and an “evaluation” (Latini and Hunsinger 2013, 62).
An observation might be that someone has a furrowed brow, which could move to an evaluation that they were angry. But that same observation might be evaluated as concentration. How do we move from “directly observable data” beyond an “inferred meaning” to an “actual meaning?” (Farber-Robertson 2000, 42). Farber-Robertson offers a number of possible tools, and these are, in part, the kinds of practices that Cohen recommends, when describing what it means to “be your own chairperson.
Another useful framework comes from the work of Lisa Laskow Lahey and Robert Kegan (2001). They have compiled several different “languages” for becoming reflective of, and intentional about, one’s self. Four of these “languages” they describe as “internal” or primarily directed to one’s self-engagement. To wit: • Moving from a language of complaint to commitment (13–32):
Moving from a language of blame to one of personal responsibility (33–46)
Moving from a language of “new year’s resolutions” to one of competing commitments (47–66)
Moving from a language of “big assumptions that hold us” to one of assumptions we hold (67–88)
In each of these shifts, Kegan and Lahey (2001) offer ways to move from the narrative overlay of behavior from a narrowly focused individualist, and what Kegan would define as “third-order form of knowing,” to a frame which invites reflective practice which is grounded in community. A “language of complaint,” for instance, emphasizes specific wounds, injuries, microaggressions, and so on. The shift to a “language of commitment,” which identifies the underlying norms which have been transgressed or harmed, deepens and strengthens, relationality. This shift has several very important and constructive implications for working with students in higher education contexts and sheds further light on why “being your own chairperson” is such an essential practice (Kegan and Lahey 2001, 13–32). In the midst of turmoil over racial incidents, fears about immigration, concerns about difference, and so on, inviting students to reflect upon the hurts they experience as pointing to underlying commitments can transform the discursive terrain from one of focusing on the hurt – which often magnifies it, evokes debate about whether it is “real” or not, and can stimulate too quickly moving to “fix” something – to focusing on seeking to draw out shared norms of communal respect and mutual accountability. As Kegan and Lahey note, this language does not deny the harm, nor does it seek to minimize or excuse it, but rather, deepens mutual accountability.
So, too Kegan and Lahey’s discussion of moving from “a language of blame” to one of “personal responsibility” (ibid. 33–46): here there is a clear recognition that truth telling is essential, but the truth being told is intimately bound into relationship. The narrative overlay deepens that relationship, rather than contributing to dynamics which promote “othering” or processes which further split and divide people. There is much more in their theoretical and research-based work to explore, but the two points I want to make here include noting the similarities to TCI and emphasizing that Ruth Cohen’s insight about the power of “being your own chairperson” can fruitfully be employed in higher education classrooms.
3.3 The We
Context collapse (the globe) and personal reflection (I) – both must also flow into how it is that we engage notions of group identity, or “we.” In the U.S. context, particularly in higher education, there is increasing recognition of the need to support students who have been externally identified by group into racial, sexual, class, or other oppressive dynamics, as well as developing affinity groups which students choose to belong to as a way of finding support and belonging in the midst of these very painful dynamics. Thoroughly permeating all of these groupings, however begun, is also the pervasive and almost subliminal grouping which is deliberately engineered by neoliberal ideologies which seek to “market” consumption to ever more narrowly defined “target markets” (cf. Brown 2015).
How do we learn and explore, discover, and mentor, in such dynamics? Ruth Cohen’s emphasis that one of the nodes of dialogical/relational forms of knowing is the “we” – the group – is a key insight. Here again Kegan and Lahey (2001) have offered helpful insights suggesting that we need to move:
From the language of prizes and praising to the language of high regard (89–91)
From the language of rules and policies to the language of public agreement (103–120)
From the language of constructive criticism to deconstructive criticism (121–145)
Each of these shifts resonates strongly with Cohen’s discussion of “we,” but let me focus on the final one because the terminology might be somewhat off-putting. Many teachers in higher education contexts are familiar with “constructive criticism,” that is, with offering feedback on student work which highlights what might be changed to be more effective, more appropriate, more insightful, and so on. The intention of such criticism is to support growth and learning. Such feedback, however, often reinforces that the giver of the feedback is the expert knower and that there is a “right” answer. Of course, in matters grammatical or otherwise factual, there is a right or a wrong answer, an appropriate or an inappropriate element. But in far too many of our learning contexts, particularly those in which we are seeking to support reflective and/or transformative learning, there is much more interpretation involved, and the potential for conflict that submerges or silences learning is high.
Kegan and Lahey offer a set of what they term “deconstructive propositions” which ground this shift in a more relational and dialogical epistemological foundation:
There is probable merit to my perspective.
My perspective may not be accurate.
There is some coherence, if not merit, to the other person’s perspective.
There may be more than one legitimate interpretation.
The other person’s view of my viewpoint is important information to my assessing whether I am right or identifying what merit there is to my view.
Our conflict may be the result of the separate commitments each of us holds, including commitments we are not always aware we hold.
Both of us have something to learn from the conversation.
We need to have two-way conversation to learn from each other.
If contradictions can be a source of our learning, then we can come to engage not only internal contradictions as a source of learning, but interpersonal contradictions (i.e., “conflict”) as well.
The goal of our conversation is for each of us to learn more about ourselves and the other as meaning makers. (Kegan and Lahey 2001, 141).
These propositions can feel quite uncomfortable to faculty who are used to premising their authority on their position as a professor or their role in an academic discipline as an expert. But even experts – perhaps particularly experts in this postmodern world we inhabit – can be open to new insight, new perspectival grounding, and new ways of engaging specific content. I hope readers can sense the resonance between this approach, and Ruth Cohen’s commitment to having “we” be one element, one node, in the dialogical dance of knowing which Parker Palmer has labelled the “community of truth.”
3.4 The It or Theme
The final node in the TCI dynamic is that of the “it” or the overall “theme” which focuses the work. I have less to say about this node, even though for many TCI practitioners, it is perhaps the most important, the “theme” of theme-centered interaction. I have less to say in part because in the settings in which I work, the “it” has the further complication of being the “logos,” the “Word,” “divine revelation,” and so on. That is to say, in theological contexts the “it” takes on an element of revelation which speaks to transcendence breaking into human knowing. The “it,” at least as I have encountered this work through communicative theology, is the node in which God’s active communication is engaged, recognized, and drawn in (cf. Hess 2010).
Unless you are a professor teaching in a theological context, this way of engaging the “it” will be odd at best, and highly problematic at worst. Still, I think it is worth noting that there is congruence between the humility, respect, and wonder with which theologians and other members of communities of faith approach the “it” in this work, and the epistemological humility of which scientists write in their descriptions of profound scientific inquiry (cf. Palmer and Zajonc 2010). Further, pedagogical scholars (or to be more precise, “andragogical” – focusing on adult learners – scholars (cf. Knowles et al. 2015)) recognize that higher education professors need to find ways to approach the subjects they are teaching with what Buddhists term a “beginner’s mind” or Stephen Brookfield labels “critical inquiry” if they are to be effective in supporting learning (cf. Brookfield 2017). Here again Palmer is useful, for his “community of truth” model emphasizes the ways in which the “subject” or “topic” at center of a given learning event has its own agency (cf. Palmer 2007).
In the mist of digital ecologies, in the midst of the competing epistemologies all around us, our task as professors supporting learning is no longer – if it ever was – simply unearthing and collating facts to be shared (i.e., the content, the “it” of our work) but has to begin with a prior step: that is, catalyzing inquiry. Why would a student want to learn that which is at the heart of our discipline, our subject matter? I have found that TCI’s dynamic dance between the “I” and the “we,” in the midst of the “globe,” invites that kind of catalytic curiosity around the “theme” and invites a form of wonder which supports reflective and even transformative learning.
4. Spectrum of Reflective Practice
To return to where I began in this essay, in a world awash in competing “facts,” in the midst of context collapse, Cohen’s theme-centered interaction process offers a flexible yet structured, open yet bounded, hospitable yet charged, framework through which to shape reflective practice. In many higher education settings, it is difficult to discern how best to move toward this kind of work, and that is one reason why – at least in the theological/religious studies environment – we have found a table useful (cf. Hess 2008).
The Art of Hosting, Liberating Structures, Essential Partners, Circles of Trust, Civil Conversations Project: all these grassroots efforts in North America include frameworks for helping participants in learning events to listen more carefully, to attend more reflectively, and to speak more intentionally. This is an intersection in which the powerful work of theme-centered interaction, Ruth Cohen’s psychologically grounded and astute theorizing and practice, offers a substantial support to these forms of pragmatic engagement. Ultimately such reflective practices support putting learning at the heart of higher education, rather than too narrowly falling into teaching-focused interaction.
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http://www.liberatingstructures.com
https://www.whatisessential.org