Looking Closely at a Sample Session

As in all of the sessions, the participants in Session 2 were asked to think about how they would use this space to combine processes of social entrepreneurship, conflict engagement, and the arts in ways that would connect the college with the community and contribute to regional development. However, this session was unique

Table 13.1 The nine participants in Session 2 of the action experiment at Max Stern Yezreel Valley College in Israel

Table 13.2 Session 2 of the action experiment at Max Stern Yezreel Valley College in Israel

because it centered on meeting an immediate need on campus for a defined target group. A class of approximately 60 nursing students, half of them Jewish and half Palestinian Arab had requested support in engaging in a real conflict they were experiencing in class. The head of the nursing program had asked Victor and a member of the nursing faculty who taught anthropology to these students whether they could help the group address the issues (see also Arieli, Friedman, & Knayzev, 2012). The two faculty members agreed to take on the challenge and decided to use a session in the studio to design it. Victor offered three students from his social entrepreneurship course the opportunity to work on the project with him as their practical assignment for the course, and he asked one of the teaching assistants in the social entrepreneurship course to help as well. The artist chosen for this session came on the recommendation of one of the students from the social entrepreneurship course. Table 13.1 provides an overview of the nine participants in Session 2.

Session 2 lasted 100 min, during which time the participants formed seven configurations in the studio space (see Table 13.2). The session was entirely in Hebrew because the students, the teaching assistant, and the artist were not comfortable using English. Researcher 2, therefore, did not speak in the session; she listened and observed but could not understand exactly what was said.

Fig. 13.2 Orientation configuration, Session 2 of the action experiment in the Studio for Social Creativity (Photograph by the authors)

The first configuration, Orientation, formed as soon as the participants entered the studio. As visible in Fig. 13.2, the participants bunched closely at the entrance to the studio (the door is invisible just to the left). Three of the participants leaned against a table, one sat on a table, and three stood (the teaching assistant had not yet arrived). At least three of the participants looked outwards into the studio space, getting a sense of the room itself. A few minutes into this configuration the video showed that the participants turned toward each other, talking, listening, gesturing, and looking at a document.^[1]

In the Orientation configuration, the participants were acquiring a sense of both the space and their task in the session. Researcher 1 and the artist did most of the talking. To the extent that the participants explored the space, it was only with their eyes. The students, in particular, appeared pensive and uncomfortable with the size of the space and the uncertainty of the task itself.

The shift to a new configuration occurred a quarter of an hour into the session, shortly after the lecturer arrived. She briefly observed the situation, then found chairs, which student 3 helped her arrange in a semicircle in front of the table at which the participants were huddling. The positioning of the chairs caused a change in the positioning of the participants. Those who had been standing in front of the table sat down, facing the others, who were sitting or leaning on the table (see Fig. 13.3).

Fig. 13.3 Meeting-mode configuration, Session 2 of the action experiment in the Studio for Social Creativity (Photograph by the authors)

The new physical arrangement signaled to the participants that they were in a meeting, hence our choice of the name Meeting Mode for this configuration. The participants looked more comfortable with the situation, into which they could bring the known rules of behavior for meetings. More of the participants spoke during this configuration than during the Orientation.

Although there was a change in the organization and physical positioning of the participants in the Meeting Mode, there was almost no change in the group’s location in the room. Figure 13.3 shows that the members of the group remained closely clustered next to the door through which they had entered the studio. Researcher 2 attempted to direct attention to the availability of larger space and the art materials by walking to front-center of the room, where the art materials were located on a low platform. She began finger-painting on a large piece of flipchart paper, capturing words she picked up from the conversation. However, the other participants did not appear to pay any attention to this attempt at modeling. The ineffectiveness of this attempt may be related to the language barrier that led researcher 2 to hover around the group but never actually join in the planning process throughout the session.

The next configuration, which we termed Expansion, began after 19 min (see Fig. 13.4). Researcher 1 stood up and walked toward the middle of the room, followed quickly by the teaching assistant. The other participants began to move slowly across the room toward the art materials, with the lecturer joining them after a conversation with students 1 and 2.

Researcher 2 stopped finger-painting and picked up her sheet of flipchart paper from the pile on the platform so that others could take paper. The artist bent down

Fig. 13.4 Expansion configuration, Session 2 of the action experiment in the Studio for Social Creativity (Photograph by the authors)

and began picking up sheets of flipchart paper, spreading them on the floor in the middle of the room. Some of the participants began to look at, pick up, inspect, and handle the materials. The artist sat down on the floor, followed by researcher 1, the lecturer, and then the students and the teaching assistant. Researcher 2 carried colors, paints, clay, and other materials from the platform to various points near the group.

We called this configuration Expansion because the participants pushed back the boundaries of the space they had created for themselves. Before sitting down, the artist had taken off her shoes, and the others followed suit, signaling a shift to less formal rules of behavior in the group’s new space. The video recording of Session 2 shows the participants talking in a more relaxed way than in the previous two configurations and occasionally laughing. The lecturer began writing with a marker on the paper, researcher 1 played with finger-paints, and the teaching assistant also began to draw. The Expansion configuration involved exploration and the opening up of new possibilities for the use of the physical space, the materials, behaviors, and ways participants related to each other. Laughter broke out when researcher 1 withdrew an offer he had made on a piece of paper for the group to focus on. Observing the video material, we think that this moment marks another shift in the rules of behavior because the agenda-setting power of the most senior participant and convener of the session in the studio was visibly called into question. The lecturer then began to lead a discussion, looking at the other participants and inviting them to express themselves. It lasted for 25 min, the lengthiest of all the configurations in Session 2.

Fig. 13.5 Creation configuration, Session 2 of the action experiment in the Studio for Social Creativity (Photograph by the authors)

There was a sudden transition to a new configuration in which the participants began drawing or painting on two shared sheets of paper. Everyone was leaning forward, and there was an appearance of great intensity. We term this configuration Creation (see Fig. 13.5) because a relatively cohesive group took shape and created a collective work.^[2] During this Configuration the group appeared to be comfortable behaving as artists, each individual concentrating on aesthetic expression.

After 10 min of the intense Creation configuration, the participants of Session 2 stopped drawing on the paper and leaned back, looked at what they had done, and began talking again. We called this the Reflection configuration (see Fig. 13.6). The rules of the game were no longer the same as in the previous configurations that had been dominated by talking: The participants pointed to elements on the paper, asked questions, and invited others to speak. No one speaker dominated, and the material that lay in the middle of the room played a significant role. The participants remained in the same physical location and arrangement, and there was no movement through the space of the studio. However, by leaning back to consider the physical expression of their shared thinking, they appear to have expanded the space they inhabited together at that moment.

The Reflection configuration lasted 8 min, at which point all of the participants stood up, took the picture they had created, hung it on the front wall of the studio, and stepped back to look at it. We termed this configuration Exhibition (see Fig. 13.7) because it was as though the participants had transformed part of the

Fig. 13.6 Reflection configuration, Session 2 of the action experiment in the Studio for Social Creativity (Photograph by the authors)

Fig. 13.7 Exhibition configuration, Session 2 of the action experiment in the Studio for Social Creativity (Photograph by the authors)

Fig. 13.8 Rehearsal configuration, Session 2 of the action experiment in the Studio for Social Creativity (Photograph by the authors)

studio into an exhibition space, displaying their work as artists usually do. In this configuration the participants not only moved to a different part of the studio and used wall space for the first time, they behaved differently from all previous constellations by arranging themselves as though they were in a gallery, standing opposite a picture, observing it, and commenting to cospectators.

Figure 13.7 also documents how the participants traversed and utilized various parts of the studio space at different times. Traces of earlier configurations remain: the chairs from the Meeting Mode in the foreground, near the entrance to the studio; and the papers on the floor in the front-center of the room.

The Exhibition configuration in Session 2 lasted for only 3 min, at which point the participants re-formed into a kind of a loose circle with the picture to their backs and began talking and moving around, using a much larger part of the room. We termed this new arrangement the Rehearsal configuration (Fig. 13.8) because the video recording shows the participants physically acting something out to each other and commenting after each performance.

The audio file documents that the participants were talking about and trying out how to apply what they had learned from this process to the following week’s planned session with the 60 nursing students. The Rehearsal implied expanding the space of the participants in several ways: They moved around a larger portion of the studio while acting out their presentations, they extended their space into the future, and they related to the entire studio space as they envisioned the way 60 nursing students could use it in the upcoming intervention.

Rehearsal was the final configuration we observed in this session. It lasted for 20 min—until the time for Session 2 ran out—at which point the group broke up, some participants rushed away, and others began cleaning up while talking.

• [1] In preparation for the intervention, the students in the nursing course had been asked to respondto a questionnaire asking them to define the kind of atmosphere they would like to create in theirclass, why this kind of atmosphere was important to them, and what concrete steps should be takento create it. Researchers 1 and 3, together with the students from the course on social entrepreneurship, had analyzed the responses prior to Session 2 so as to provide a resource to the planning team.
• [2] The audio material reveals that at this point the group had just decided to experiment togetherwith how they would actually envisage the intervention with the class of 60 students.