Community Learning Development Resource 200 – 08
GROUND-RULES FOR A LEARNING ENGAGEMENT
SUMMARY
- Every engagement between people has the potential for participants to learn from the experience.
- When we want people, including ourselves, to learn from an experience, we try to make the experiences as encouraging and enabling as possible so that the learning successfully happens.
- For the best chance of this happening we need everyone’s comfort, expectations, feelings, comfort, confidence, hopes, desires, motivation, etc., to contribute positively to the experience.
- Shared and understood ground-rules might help us to inform and shape our style and behaviour for successful interactions within community learning and development work.
1. Looking at the worker-client learning engagement – some questions:
- Hopes – what is in the workers and the client’s minds regarding how they expect and would like each other to behave – what would help them to be in their comfort zones and confident to participate together in an experience?
- Do clients hope that the experience will be a good one for them, one that is encouraging, supportive and helpful, and not threatening or oppressive? These hopes shape their expectations. What might their ground-rules be for how they want the experience to be and the worker to behave?
- If the worker believes that working with the client in particular ways will be useful, is it helpful for the client to be aware of these – in order to be comfortable to participate?
- How important are the client’s feelings? Their feelings at first contact can be different to those at the end of an experience, how might you want the clients feelings to change?
- Some areas for ground-rules within community development work;
- How we present ourselves
- Our personal style and presence
- How we communicate and listen
- Hoping to feel comfortable and to enjoy the experience
- Feeling safe to participate and contribute
- How we can feel personally safe and comfortable
- Concern for confidentiality
- Developing mutual trust and respect
- Accepting, managing and responding to challenges
- How we can build future relationships and partnerships
- Building and maintaining equality and inclusion
- Creating satisfactions
- The environment
3. NOTES:
- Choice of the learning environment may be part of agreeing the ground-rules. The environment needs to be ‘fit-for-purpose’ and this may include that it needs to be where the learner is most comfortable, within their comfort zone. Non-confident learners are unlikely to voice their own preferences and needs – their ground-rules, and it could be up to the worker to be sensitive to unspoken fears and concerns.
- A good ground-rule for learning in the community might include ‘always start with a cup of tea’.
- One major advantage in agreeing ground-rules is not in what they are, but in the shared awareness-raising process, which identifies that the client (learner) has choices, which in itself can be an important piece of learning.
- Whilst ground-rules should be negotiated, agreed and shared, they need not be written down or displayed. Neither should the processes of sharing and putting ground-rules in place, be threatening or formal.
- People feel less threatened if they know what is expected of them and the worker can lead in agreeing ground-rules, which are learner-centred – putting the working/learning relationship within a shared comfort zone.
These ground-rules focus on building mutually beneficial relationships and ways of communicating and working between people. There are other factors often considered in teaching and learning situations such as:
- Interruptions and noise, e.g., background noise and mobile phones
- Use of language and jargon
- Availability and use of time and support
- Smoking, etc.
These may be important in gaining mutual respect and helpful relationships but the foundation that underpins and informs your shared ground-rules is always your value-set and a shared value set is an outcome to be desired.