Learning Together Booklet – UK 1993
Judith Snow
1993
Recently my friends invited me to be part of the teaching team at their brand new workshop, Creative Facilitation. We were supporting 24 people who were exploring their own abilities and techniques for helping others to discover their giftedness. Our common interest was and is to create a world where everyone is seen to be gifted and where no one is excluded from participation. This inclusive culture is to be established by ending prejudice, isolation and lack of practical support.
As the four days of learning and practice drew near to closing, one word kept coming up- enchantment. I have heard this word before in reference to our work or similar work done by others. But I heard it as a sort of romantic or cutely ideal expression. This time it caught my breath and my imagination. What are people saying when they say they are enchanted? What is the nature of enchantment? These are my thoughts on the matter.
The nature of our work, my many friends and I, is first of all to imagine ancient dream to be sure, but nevertheless a dream. It is simply a human dream of the world where equality is not an issue because difference is not an issue. It speaks of a world where difference and diversity are radically resourceful; where everything that is done or built is created out of the gift of opportunity that diversity provides. It is the world where exclusion is essentially unthinkable because to exclude anyone would be to rob the community of its most precious resource – the opportunity that that person’s difference makes possible.
