Enchantment for Inclusion

Learning Together Booklet – UK 1993

Judith Snow

1993

Great Questions - Judith Snow - cover image

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.