"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
Margaret Mead
Tricia Webster has a genuine passion for community building and has taken on the role of further articulating the 'nuts and bolts' of TLCs in the following pages. I invite you to drink in all the possibilities with her:
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How to Use this Material
Creating and Sustaining your TLC
TLC Monthly Programs:
#1: Fundamental
Inner Capacities
#2: Bridging Exercises
#3: Vision to Action
Help and Resources
What is a Teaching/Learning Community? (TLC)
A TLC is any group that comes together for the purpose of shared learning and teaching. Typically, leadership is shared or informal, as everyone takes a role in both the teaching and the learning...
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Why a Teaching/Learning Community?
First of all, the very urgency of our times seems to demand the growth of such communities. Even as we attend Mystery School and/or Social Artistry as students, it is vital that we teach and expand the learning, creating those small groups that, in Margaret Mead's words, can change the world!...
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A Message from Jean Houston
I WANT TO TAKE YOU back to November, 1978.
I was sitting at the hospital bedside of Margaret Mead. Two weeks later she would die. She had been dozing as I had been reading to her. Suddenly she opened her eyes and looked across the room. She pushed herself up to a sitting position and said to the wall, "Get out of here. I'm not ready for you. Go away!"
"Margaret, there is no one there," I told her.
"You can't see them, but they are there all right!"
"Who, Margaret? Who is there?"
"Dead people. My mother, my father, and Ruth. They say they are here to take me with them. Please leave! Go away!"
"Ruth" referred to the anthropologist Ruth Benedict who had been Margaret's most intimate friend and colleague.
They must have vanished, for Margaret lay back down and turned her attention to me. "Listen, I've got something very important to say to you. Forget everything I've been teaching you about working with governments and bureaucracies!"
"Now you tell me this?" I sputtered, looking down on my terminally ill friend.
Margaret seemed to find this funny. "Yes," she said. "I've been lying here being an anthropologist on my own dying--fascinating experience, by the way; there is no hierarchy to it--and I've had an important insight about the future. The world is going to change so fast that people and governments will not be prepared to be stewards of this change. What will save them is teaching-learning communities. They could come together in churches or businesses or even in families. They could meet weekly and do your kinds of exercises, especially ones that develop their capacities. There must be humor, laughter, music, games, and good food as well. That will keep the participants coming back. Then, when they feel ready, they will choose projects to work on to help their communities. The only way to have a possible society, Jean, is to develop the possible human at the same time. So, when it seems right, you go out there and make this happen."
"Yes, Margaret. I'll do that."
And in my own way, as many of you know, I subsequently have tried to do that. Wherever we teach or work throughout the world we have tried to create teaching-learning communities that would work among themselves to discover the possible human who then could go out into their world and help create the possible society. And, of course, the most elaborate of these are the Mystery School and Social Artistry communities wherein we attempt to explore and encourage a variety and depth of human potentials so that many of you become social artists in your own particular form or have your social artistry enhanced--for, if you are realizing the capacities that are innately yours, it generally follows that you must express them in the betterment of the world.
Won't you join me then, in creating such teaching-learning communities? The invitation that Margaret Mead extended to me, I now extend to you: "The only way to have a possible society... is to develop the possible human at the same time. So when it seems right, you go out there and make this happen."
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