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Chapter Six – Part of a Session – Page 197
realise that there has been far less thought in the understanding of teaching about issues
of the break in the session (such as how the break is used, what phenomena take place,
and how they might be understood) than there has about issues of the session per se,
(although, even in that case, there has been almost no overt theorising).
On reviewing the themes and issues that I am describing, I am noticing how the eruption
in the session is (if anybody’s) maybe Tom’s rather than Heidi’s, and in that sense
comes before rather than after the break. Perhaps Heidi is making use of the rip that
Tom has torn in the fabric of connection in order to come forward for a time. I am also
noticing that Bill and Judi don’t refer directly to the challenge for the group of what
Tom has said, although they do reflect briefly (albeit in their break, so in a kind of
private space) on the challenge to themselves.
The culture of the group
Obeyesekere suggests that the work of culture is,
... the process where symbolic forms existing on a cultural level get created and
re-created through the minds of people (1990, p. xix).
The task of the group, in this study of how people acquire the capacity to use the
immediacy of their experience to effect change in others with whom they are present, is
cultural work. A particular question for the study is how this cultural capacity is evoked
and developed by the chosen teaching method, a particular type of focused discussion.
The Sticky Moment considered in this chapter is particularly important from the
perspective of the culture of the group. Arguably, although continuous reflection on the
task of the group is ostensibly encouraged throughout the semester, it is as if this
reflection had relatively disappeared from consciousness until the moment of the