June 23, 2023
Relational and Social Constructionist Consortium of Ecuador (IRYSE)
Diego Tapia Figueroa, Ph.D. y Maritza Crespo Balderrama, M.A.
“What kind of resources do you need to continue with your daily life that allow you to sustain relationships? What kind of language do you need to use to sustain relationships? What do you say, how do you say, what do you do? For me this is a question about the dialogue, and how we take care of it; there can be many ways. How are we responsible for relationships? It is about responsibility and relational ethics.”
Kenneth Gergen, 2017
“We can create the conditions so that those who dialogue can dialogue feeling as if they were at home. We can ask a group that does not want to dialogue: What resources can you generate to be dialogical? How to use those resources for different dialogues?”
Sheila McNamee, 2017
We base ourselves for this series, on this thesis, from which we extract -adapting them- the proposals and invitations to a different relational position for the construction of the process of transformative therapeutic dialogue.
How are social constructionism and collaborative and dialogic practices useful for the relational co-construction of space for therapeutic training and supervision? Tapia Figueroa, Diego, Thesis (2018) for the Ph.D. with the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and the TAOS INSTITUTE of the United States.
How can we care for our relationships so that we can jointly create life, meaningful life.
When uncertainty, complexity, fears, and insecurities called for certainties and recipes disguised as easy theories -as modernist alibis- the “best” thing to do is to act, and since words are actions, act while talking, to develop relational criteria.
Valuing what does work and imagining what could be. Inviting us to ask ourselves each time: What do we contribute differently in this local context? With a relational ethic, which makes us ask ourselves: How can we take care of our relationships so that we can jointly create life, meaningful life? What kind of future can I contribute to? Seek that dialogue is understood as a new way of accepting differences. Expanding relational contexts, generating new possibilities; respectfully coordinating complexity; curious about the diverse; fostering a creative look in favor of resources and strengths; talking about the necessary social transformations.
Our purpose: to promote connections, meaningful dialogues, transforming dialogic relationships with genuine curiosity, human sensitivity, creativity in action, responsible participation, recognition, and legitimation; joint learning, co-responsibility, acceptance of differences, critical reflection, permanent innovation, possible futures, and worlds.
This relational process is transforming us in many ways, especially in the understanding of how being with others makes us embody the difference so that we can articulate questions that generate and build universes of meanings that transform us relationally.
Participating in collaborative conversations (dialogue is multidimensional) is a challenge to be in a different way with others, to share, trust, and foster the generation of new meanings. To do this, we learn to listen actively -each time- in a different way; to understand the needs of others.
It is a mutual learning to coordinate conversations and actions to decide to commit ourselves assertively in processes that allow us to develop this relational sensitivity to the specific moment of the relationship, of the context.
We are open to listening to the questions of each participant, the questions to the relational process, and also the questions of our internal dialogues; risking being questioned without fear, trusting in the connections we created, in relational collaboration, adding our voice in joint dialogue; without claiming that ours is the last word or the most important.
The intentions when describing this co-investigation process (a story dies if you don’t tell it) continue to be to promote and intensify critical and self-critical reflection; by looking for the continuous co-construction of new meanings; the creative generation of possibilities and other futures, as a way to honor these relationships, and to honor differences.
By letting ourselves be surprised by the lived and shared experience, we have gained freedom from an attitude of constant curiosity and respect for others. With an open, understanding, and non-judgmental position. Displaying good humor and de-dramatizing the complex issues that were presented. Letting ourselves be touched by the contradictions of the cultural context; due to the uncertainty of the questions and the conjunctural solutions; by searches and explorations, often confused and tentative.
It has also meant, according to the reports of the technical teams (the experience of mistreatment, lack of appreciation and recognition regarding the fair payment of technical and professional workers) a serious questioning of the economic policies, organizational culture, salary, and labor of these institutions, which often with their evident inconsistency and lack of honesty, prefer the culture of stinginess, hypocrisy, and hierarchical abuse to take advantage of the need and social vulnerability of professionals with cynicism, abjection, and stupidity. They do not take care of human capital; they burn it, by exploiting it for work.
To talk: joy, curiosity, and desire to learn, share and grow together.
This flexibility and fluidity in the conversational processes have mobilized the emergence of resources in the participants; they have spread a positive feeling of appreciation and value to all those present, consolidating a sense of belonging -which motivated them to get involved and participate by making them share the co-responsibilities of the relational and co-investigation process.
The construction of the collaborative/generative learning space has meant the co-construction of a new space between us: a nexus, a link, a relational connection to listen, reflect and jointly generate the meanings that the dialogues we produced, each time gave rise to.
We learn to enjoy a process in which the relational climate (the permanent style) for conversation is joy, curiosity, and a desire to learn, share, and grow together. We are surprised to discover that the passion with which we try to contribute to facilitate these thoughtful dialogues, and the enthusiasm with which we want to infect doubts and questions, leave us with more will, responsibility, and commitment to continue this work with the communities of Ecuadorian society.
Other doubts and new questions have been produced; this has strengthened us in the decision to continue contributing and investigating to the construction of a society in which social justice is not just rhetoric, demagoguery, or ideological instrumentalizations to preserve power and privileges. This is one of the results in us, in ethical and political (and poetic) terms.
They return in search of new interlocutors (an infinite process, of internal and external dialogues, which continue), questions like these, which we share with the different teams of technicians and participants in these processes: How does the language of the therapist -expressed as a curious, intelligent and respectful question- expands the language of the other (the consultant, the co-investigator); and gives confidence and security for their own and new questions, reflections and meanings?
This proposed question posed in the Taos Institute’s International Network for Relational Research invites us to understand the type of relational process that matters to us and the way to build it: What kind of conversations and relationships do we have to build to know the identities so conversations can be transformed; And in doing so, does everything else -relationships and contexts- change?
The feeling remains that after each encounter with this community (with these teams, and culture) we are becoming more than we were at the beginning. Thanks to the fact that we were able to co-create new relational conditions (open to what is different) in which all the participants can mobilize their resources. A joint dialogue to broaden and expand alternatives. In a qualitative leap that goes from modernist reductionisms (deficits, judgments, and objectified truths) to the complexity of postmodernist practices (curiosity, generating processes, possibilities, transformation).
Social constructionism and collaborative, dialogical, and generative practices have been a way of opening the horizon of relational meanings; from this perspective, we have come to understand that it is essential to highlight the creation of active meaning, the importance given to changes in perspective and language in the process of creating meaning.
This learning has allowed us to experience that meaning, makes sense in relation to a context. For this reason, our position was consolidated in this conviction: consider each one as competent and consider all the participants as valid and legitimate interlocutors. Guiding us with perspectives like these:
“Where we find ourselves, let’s reproduce the world we aspire to and avoid the one we reject. Minimal policies, resistance policies…” (Onfray, 2008, p. 212).
We have transformed our perspective and, in fact, instead of proposing a supervision space in the future, in which I assume the responsibility of facilitator, I will now propose a multi-vision space; a space in which multiple ways of understanding, fit perspectives and points of view. Because as long as hierarchies are maintained, people are prevented and blocked from accessing their creativity.
In May 2017 while participating in one of the Taos Institute’s seminars on relational research, I posed these questions in two separate meetings to Kenneth Gergen and Sheila McNamee:
1. How to understand ethics and politics from the social/relational constructionist perspective for research?
Kenneth Gergen replied:
On the question of ethics and politics: from a constructionist perspective there are no limits to creating the future; and, here is a program (the Taos Institute Ph.D. studies) that questions those limits and goes beyond them and expresses multiplicity and polyvocality.
The questioning of the ethical and the political is the sense of the traditional and rigorous measure, a kind of imperialistic quality of doing it, which says that I am assigned to measure you, I put you under the microscope and tell you who you are, I’ll go with you. To measure according to my standards of what is good. Constructionism is not very happy with these ethical ways of doing research and neither with the political issue if realistic methods are used. There are many methods, there are ways to measure, and also constructionism, if you want to understand the reality that you are creating. Many constructionists say that I do not have the essential truth; I have a point, however, I want to leave space for others to speak, and I want to leave space to have a dialogue about this. So, work on it a bit, don’t try to say it can only be this way and there is no other way really.
2. If constructionism invites us to new ways of understanding and acting: how would this be related to caring for others, caring for relationships to create possibilities for the future?
Kenneth Gergen stated:
Your question makes a lot of sense, it is crucial: How do you take care of relationships? In practice, how do you care for relationships? Not yourself, not the other; but to the process of the relationship in each way in which those relationships are sustained and strengthened. Now, the question is about how we should face these challenges today. By engaging with the community, you have the opportunity to have an engaging perspective on how communities work. If you go to another community, you find that they have problems related to relationships. And that’s the challenge: this is the question that I think everyone should try to work on. It means seeing that the other party too, even in daily life, always faces complexities, problems, interruptions, and disagreements about relationships, all of which cut and hurt relationships. What kind of resources do you need to continue with your daily life that allow you to sustain relationships? What kind of language do you need to use to sustain relationships? What do you say, how do you say, what do you do? For me this is a question about the dialogue, and how we take care of the dialogue; there can be many ways. How are we responsible for relationships? It is about responsibility and relational ethics.
3. What to do when the other does not want to, is not interested in, and does not accept the dialogue?
Sheila McNamee replied:
It has to do with the intention of the dialogues, and I think that there is the answer to this question. If we adopt the position of understanding the intention and the position, and what the other can do that reaches me, then it would be seen how this process can involve a person so that we can talk about a difference, a difficulty, another opinion; and if the other person still emphasizes that they don’t want to have that conversation with you, if the other person doesn’t want to talk, it’s important to appreciate and understand that position. Be curious to understand how he doesn’t want to. If the other does not want to participate, ask yourself: how does the dialogue to which they are invited makes them think that the dialogue to which they are invited is not a safe place?
If we keep our attention on the dialogue, we will appreciate and try to understand the resistance to dialogue. I am not saying that all this is bad, but that there are people who do not want to be in the dialogue. We’re saying it’s staying curious, trying to understand what this dialogue means. It has nothing to do with correcting the other, but entering their space and knowing the type of vision of the world they have. Because those who oppose dialogue try to persuade themselves that they have nothing to do with their truth or their thoughts. Understand that the steps to dialogue with them are to accept, like them, that position that there is only one truth; those beliefs lead us to a dead end. When they both think they have the absolute truth. It is a way of positioning oneself, of being so that in some way we can get to know the other who does not want any dialogue. If we force the other to have a conversation, we are not being dialogic but imposing the idea that we have a better way of doing things. Therefore, we should help create a space for a new dialogue to emerge, seeking a common space for people’s stories; seeking to talk about perspectives, and recognizing that you may disagree because you understand that it is not collaborative to maintain rigid perspectives.
If you start from that position, you can have the idea that dialogue is not a matter of superiority, because if you act like that, you are not being dialogical. We can create the conditions so that those who dialogue, can dialogue feeling as if they were at home. We can ask a group that does not want to dialogue: what resources can you generate to be dialogic? How to use those resources for different dialogues?
The answers of Kenneth Gergen and Sheila McNamee allow us to trust these processes of creating relationship networks that contribute in a humanly intelligent way, with ethical consistency, to generate well-being, equity, and justice in this complex world that we responsibly build every day.
Dialogue, and conversation, are the different ways of inviting to generate positions, alternatives, and possibilities regarding how work is conceptualized and practiced, seeking the joint creation of new senses and meanings, to promote other social realities and the opening of new possibilities. It is crucial to favor responsible cultural and social practices, in a horizontal, democratic, participatory, and inclusive context in which it is possible to judiciously question the hierarchical forms of the dominant culture, valuing and recognizing the human needs of the participants, before the objectives of standardized bureaucracies.
People must commit themselves differently, incorporating reflective conversation -online- as one of the ways of being and doing their work, enriching themselves with the perspectives of social/relational constructionism, to understand their practice. Participating as part of a cultural and historical context that can be constructed and transformed by the interrelationships between professionals and communities.
These collaborative/generative learning practices are understood as conversational constructions produced in relationships between people. And the practices can be seen and understood in different ways and can be assimilated and given new meanings in relationships with others.
What is significant is to contextualize the actions, to make it possible to understand the needs of families, communities, and professionals, and the co-construction of alternatives to solve them. Possibilities that are coordinated in a joint process between all the participants.
Opening creative and reflective spaces for the production and generation of new dialogues, for the joint construction of relationships in a co-responsible way, and fostering sensitive, present, and significant styles, makes it possible to carry out different actions that are not “technical”. but free and intelligent acts committed to transformation and hope.
SUGGESTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Fried Schnitman, D. (Ed.) (2017), Diálogos para la transformación: desarrollo de proyectos e investigación generativa orientados a la construcción de futuros en Iberoamérica – Volumen 3. Ohio, USA: Ed. A Taos Institute Publication. WorlShare Books.
Gergen, K (2016). El Ser relacional. Más allá del Yo y la Comunidad. Bilbao, España: Editorial Desclée de Brouwer, S.A.
Gergen, K (2014). From Mirroring to World-Making: Research as Future Forming, Recuperado de: https://taoslearning.ning.com/groups2/global-relational-research-network/virtual-symposium-2018
IRYSE (2018) Blog del Instituto Relacional y Socioconstruccionista del Ecuador (IRYSE): https://iryse.org/
Mc Namee, S (2016). Resources for Facilitating Differing Worldviews, Taos Institute December 2016. Recuperado de: http://www.taosinstitute.net/Websites/taos/files/Content/5868649/Resources_for_Facilitating_Multiple_Worldviews_(McNamee).pdf
McNamee, S. (2013). La poesía social de la investigación comprometida con la relación. La investigación como conversación. En Deissler, K. & McNamee, S. (Ed) Filo y Sofía en diálogo: la poesía social de la conversación terapéutica (pp. 102-109). Ohio, USA: Ed. Taos InstitutePublication.
Shotter, J. (2001). Realidades conversacionales: la construcción de la vida a través del lenguaje. Buenos Aires, Argentina. Editorial Amorrortu.
Tapia Figueroa, Diego, Tesis (2018) para el Ph.D. con la Universidad Libre de Bruselas (VUB) y el TAOS INSTITUTE de EEUU.
English translation of Bruno Tapia Naranjo.
