At the time of registering for the conference, you may indicate your interest in being a facilitator on the Conference Registration Form
Process Groups are an integral part of our Conference and are a unique Gestalt approach to conferencing. Groups of twelve participants meet each day to discuss and examine the conference experience. These groups support the potential of the conference to become a meaningful, here-and-now Gestalt experience.
We need people both experienced and less so to facilitate the groups. You need to be able to come to orientation on the Wednesday afternoon of the Conference and to facilitator check in and support meetings during the conference.
Process Groups are a Gestalt group experiment involving contact. They embody the organizing principles of Gestalt Therapy and apply its theory and practice in conferencing.
Each group meets throughout the conference and is guided by a facilitator who supports and participates . In this way there is an opportunity in the busy conference to meet supported by the intimacy of a small group to share, reflect on and critically examine workshops, plenary presentations, and professional and personal experiences, to explore questions, emerging experience, thoughts, feelings and the meaning of the conference.
Process groups are not group therapy, or a leader-led topic group. All members engage as co-equal participants and facilitation is seen as a function, not a position. Leadership resides in everyone as members contribute reactions, concerns, knowledge, personal experience, mutual support and ideas. The facilitators encourage, stimulate and support participants to attend to their experience.
Process groups bring the large conference into a manageable human proportion and illuminate the diverse experience of conference participants. They support networking, dissemination of conference information, examining expectations, social interaction, and intellectual cross fertilization and bring to the conference’s emerging gestalt the vitality of social and political background. Feedback from facilitators to the conference organizers of themes and experiences (respecting confidentiality) makes it possible for the entire conference to be shaped by our emerging personal/collective experience.
At the end, process groups will be invited to create a poster that gives an artistic ‘capture’ of the experience people in these groups have had.