RAD Experiential Learning Gatherings

Written 2009. Last Updated April, 2014.

‘RAD’ is a short term for a series of documents on Rapid Assessing of Local Wellness Psycho-Social Resources & Resilience Following Disasters.

This page is about processes enriching networks of healers towards:

o Identifying and evolving folk to engage in Rapid Assessing of Wellness, Resources and Resilience following disasters and possibly supporting follow-on wellness healing

o Evolving and supporting mutual-help healer networks within communities

Going to disasters and conflict contexts engaging in RAD Assessing may be, and typically is stressing and distressing. Processes, resources and learning experiences are available to enrich assessors’ experience, capacities, resilience and resources to carry out the role well.

IDENTIFYING PEOPLE TO ATTEND RAD EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING GATHERINGS

Experiential Learning

Aristotle said,

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.

For example, we learn how to swim by doing it. We learn to use a canoe by doing it. We may watch how others do it, though we don’t have to. We can just have a go on water with the canoe and find out by making mistakes. Within this learning by doing tradition, Laceweb support may help setting up learning experiences and learning contexts.

Experienced Laceweb people may support local folk learning to extend their life skills and wellness by experiencing differing forms of wellness, if locals want this. These forms of wellness may include (in no particular order) cultural, clan, personal, family, interpersonal, spiritual, emotional, psychological, physical, communal, inter-family, habitat, village, inter-village inter-religious, inter-clan, environmental, inter-faction, economic, and inter-cultural wellness.

As Laceweb enablers share experiences of wellness in local group contexts, locals typically begin adapting wellness ways to their local context. What constitutes wellness may vary among people of different cultures. Typically, locals recognise when they do not have wellness, and recognise what is for them wellness when they do experience it.

Laceweb enablers are available to go to places in their own or others’ cultures and help set up contexts for co-learning. Locals may learn how to be enablers and influence the spread of wellness in the lives of other locals.

As the local folk experience and adapt more wellness experiences to local culture, wellness tends to spread in the locals’ lives together.

Locals may begin passing these wellness ways on to other locals in everyday contexts and so wellness may spread through the culture among folk who have never met Laceweb enablers. Ways to explore wellness may begin to be passed on to others informally as people go about their lives together.

Experiencing Learning Environments

While together with Laceweb enablers sharing wellness ways, locals may, and typically do begin entering into what may be termed attunement. Figuratively, they begin to ‘play the same tune’ and ‘sing the same song’. One old Indigenous person upon hearing RAD way of engaging said:

You’re playing my song.

They share the same delightful engaging mood. They become fully immersed in being together in relational sharing and deep engagement. While immersed in attunement there is little consciousness of the passing of time. Immediately after returning to everyday conscious, time seems to have passed very quickly; an hour may seem like 15 minutes.

Natural Nurturers

People who are attracted to volunteering in Voluntary Community based psycho-social support may be ‘Natural Nurturers’. They are people who are naturally good at nurturing others. Typically, they are self-selected. For a sense of the term ‘natural nurturer, refer Regaining Balance through Mutual-help.

Natural Nurturers may hear about healing networking and are naturally attracted.

Natural nurturers tend to care for others as the go about their everyday lives; on the mountain trail, in the market, along the beach, or wherever they are. Others in need may know who the local natural nurturers are and seek them out when they are in need.

In evolving the psycho-social support networking, Natural Nurturers may be identified and be linked with other natural nurturers, with associated opportunities for evolving gatherings for sharing of experiential co-learning of healing ways.

Possible Experiential Learning Outcomes

1) The evolving of a group of participants who are capable and willing to use:

a) There own ways of providing psychosocial support to others

b) Use and adapt to context, healing ways they learn from other local natural nurturers

c) Psychosocial support processes evolved and used by other locals in the Region that have worked well in the past in supporting people in emergency contexts

d) Psychosocial networking processes for identifying, gaining rapport and linking with local (potential/actual) carer/supporters, and with them evolving psychosocial support that local support people enable

e) Psychosocial support processes and rapid assessment of local psychosocial resources and wellness and perhaps using and or adapting prepared resources to link follow-up psychosocial support appropriate to the context into unfolding local psychosocial support action

Sensing Folk Who May become Involved in Learning Experiences

Local Natural Nurturers tend to be self-selecting as to who involves themselves in RAD Learning Experiences and other associated wellness based experiential learning.

Others may gain a feel for the legitimacy of their intensions. For people with experience of duplicitous behaviour (deceitful, double-dealing, dishonest, treacherous, etc) in others, Freud’s observation is germane:

No mortal can keep a secret. If the lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

The natural nurturers who emerge may have some or all of the following experience:

1. Offering appropriate quick response short-term psychosocial care in emergency contexts with or without sequential or no-sequential follow-up by others

2. Offering appropriate sustained comprehensive psychosocial support in emergencies

3. Offering appropriate comprehensive and/or focused (e.g., at-risk children) psychosocial support in protracted emergencies

4. Being self-starters acting in self-organising kinds of ways supporting wellness as appropriate to the moment

5. Engaging in:

a. Identifying local psychosocial support people and their capacities

b. Engaging with them to gain understanding of the local psychosocial and cultural contexts, and

c. In participatory action jointly with these local support people, evolving culturally appropriate psychosocial support for local people, that local support people may conduct

6. Engaging in:

a. Liaison with organizing/donor partners, and briefing them on local context and local support action,

b. Identifying, liaison with, and mobilizing the necessary external support, including:

i. briefing them on local context and local support action,

ii. linking external support with local carers and evolving participatory action,

iii. training, supervision, supplies, etc. for external support

Note:

The above notes may be used in evolving protocols for Rapid Deployment Action

BACKGROUND LINKS:

Other RAD Links:

· Rapid Assessing of Local Wellness, Psycho-Social Resources & Resilience Following Disasters (RAD)

· Evolving RAD