Groups as gardens

In the workshop run by the permaculture research group, we spoke about applying principles of permaculture to group dynamics, and how, within this, it can help to compare groups to gardens. I found this a very powerful analogy, and for this reason I have chosen to reflect on our group dynamics within the course using the ideas of social permaculture. My aim is to evaluate to what extent the dynamics worked well as well as what could have been better.

I personally have very little experience with permaculture and am sure others in our group know much more about these things, but that is already the first example of the opportunity to be inspired by and learn from other members of the group when we’re all coming from different backgrounds. As the course was open to people from all subject areas and all year groups, as well as members of staff participating on an equal basis to the students, the group definitely provided a diverse learning environment. The idea behind social permaculture is that just as all different plant species have their niches and their functions within a garden, so do all different backgrounds and personalities within a group. Different people can take on different roles, and the aim is to provide an environment in which each one of these people and their roles can flourish. Just as gardens need sunlight, water and fertile soil, a group needs the external factors that can nourish and nurture it.

There are elements of these external factors that we did really well in my opinion. The straightforward points of always sitting in a circle so everyone is able to look at each other and has an equal opportunity for input as well as finding a space that we all felt comfortable very much shaped the experience of this course in a positive way. The size of the group allowed for us to all get to know each other individually, and alternating between the different roles of planning the sessions, facilitating and taking notes allowed for balanced and diverse group interactions. However, placing this course in its wider system of the university meant that people often had to prioritise other obligations, and the fluctuating levels of attendance that followed sometimes made it hard to build on ideas and processes over the course of multiple weeks. In the last group meeting we had, we also discussed and came to a consensus on the value of an extra hour, in order to allow for more time or different activities, such as discussing readings or getting to know each other better and sharing food. It was clear that within a system where time is so pressurised and value is measured through quantifiable outputs, creating a cohesive sense of community in which we could develop our ideas to their full capacity was made a lot harder. This shows itself in how our ideas of little breaks in which we all energise ourselves by moving our bodies, as well as the closing circle in which people had the opportunity to share how they felt the session had gone eventually got abandoned.

Moving back to the idea of diversity within the group and people flourishing within their differences, it is interesting to think about what kind of diversity in ideas and thought processes we had. I have already mentioned our different places and stages within the university, but what brought us all to this course in the first place was maybe a shared idea about the university, the idea that things can and should be done better than they are done right now. Within that however there were very different ideas about what this course specifically could do about it, with a strong divide between people wanting concrete outcomes that would make a difference in the university and people wanting to learn about and through alternative methods to make the difference within themselves. Navigating this divide made decision making and course structuring difficult, as at first we hadn’t even explicitly realised this divide was present. Once discussed however, it also became clear that there is a lot of value to both approaches, and neither needed to stand in the way of coming together in a productive manner. To bring back the garden metaphor, while diversity is beneficial, it also has to be meaningful diversity. Some plants don’t fit in certain ecosystems, and instead of adding to diversity will just shrivel away. In the same way there are certain core values and beliefs that hold a group together, and some other values are incompatible with this. In order to create meaningful diversity, one must therefore be self-reflective and figure out which values are of core importance and cannot be compromised, and which ones are secondary. I think that while some of our decision-making conversations could at times feel somewhat tedious and draining, we did really well in coming together and allowing for different personal goals within a wider collective set of values.

In conclusion I think we all held each other well, I personally very much felt I was given the space to develop in many ways, to bring whatever I felt I could bring and take whatever I felt I could take. Any group, by nature of being a combination of people who all bring with them their own personal universes, is going to be socially complex. Especially when having to navigate working towards a certain goal, and even more so, as I think was the case with us, when the group isn’t even really sure what the goal is, but is more driven by a shared curiosity and a shared ideology. Through all these complexities, the course has taken us to this point, and how this point feels again will be different for each individual person as the experiences we shared assimilate differently into our personal universes. But, amazingly enough, for a whole year all these universes came together and formed a beautiful garden, and that is something I am grateful for.

Groups as gardens / The future of our university by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0