Last, but not least, in this series highlighting lessons from experts in other disciplines relevant to how to navigate the chaotic “new normal” in legal education: Thursday’s concurrent session organized by Tennessee’s Paulette Williams: “A Commitment to Inner Development: Connecting the “New Normal” with Clinics’ Social Justice Mission”.
The session brought Edward Groody and Timothy Dempsey from the Community Building Institute in Tennessee. The Institute helps social service and criminal justice organizations become more effective by training participants in community building practices. Taking an evidence-based approach built on motivational interviewing, trauma-informed care, and pro-social supports, community building is a “highly experiential process that helps participants remove barriers to communication and unlearn unproductive attitudes and behaviors.”
Groody began the session with a detailed overview of a four-stage process for building community:
- Pseudo-community
- Chaos
- Emptying/Letting Go
- Community
That process adds an important step — emptying/letting go — to Bruce Tuckman’s familiar “forming, storming, norming, performing” model of group formation. My own interpretation of this additional, third step is that it provides space for participants to recognize, and learn skills to address, the emotional issues that so often get in the way of honest connection with others.
Dempsey then shared powerful stories of how that process helps ex-offenders with post-prison re-entry, allowing them to move past behavioral responses that may have seemed — and perhaps were — functional in their previous lives, but would block their efforts to move forward. Or, to put it another way, this step acknowledges that in order to take advantage of education or employment opportunities, people need to let go of fears, resentments or trauma. This is challenging work that is the foundation of many spiritual traditions, but can help build strong connections with others.
Time constraints prevented Paulette Williams from speaking in detail about how she makes use of this process in her clinical teaching work. I hope she finds other forums for sharing those experiences and insights.
The insights of this community building process struck me as relevant not only to social justice and clinical legal education work, but also to faculty interactions within our law schools. From another time and place, I well remember a year when every faculty meeting resulted in controversy, usually about something relatively minor that seemed to be a proxy for other, larger, but unacknowledged issues festering beneath the surface. I suspect that many faculties are experiencing something similar as they operate in the current climate of uncertainty and change, too often getting stuck in the fear those conditions foster. It’s difficult for me to imagine applying this model in the typical law school environment. But successfully moving through the “emptying/letting go” phase, as individuals and a group, could be oh, so helpful!
Filed under: Best Practices, Best Practices & Curriculum, Best Practices & Setting Goals, Best Practices and Clinics, Best Practices for Institutional Effectiveness, Best Practices, Diversity & Social Justice, Catalysts For Change, Diversity & Social Justice, Uncategorized | Tagged: clinics, community building motivational interviewing, Deborah Maranville, legal education, Paulette Williams, trauma-informed care |
Best Practices for Legal Education 