Last January the TILDE Training took place in Switzerland, with the institution Ecole de l’Accueil in Lausanne.
Emilie and Brigitte, two french teachers from this institution, opened the doors of their class to join the students for 4 days into the TILDE workshop. The 24 students are young people between 16 and 21 years old, who migrated to Switzerland for different reasons.
We started by knowing better each other, as there were two different classes that did not interact much before. We also established group agreements in order to create a safer and trustful space for all to share, or not.
We continued understanding some basic principles or ideas of Process Work and Deep Democracy, and understanding how power dynamics affect our relationships with ourselves, others and the whole system or community we live in.
We talked about different kinds of power, and how we can better use the power when we have it, how can we be better leaders. Moreover, we had experiential dynamics about leading others, or letting others lead, and share the different experiences.
We spoke about tensions and conflicts, the different phases of conflict, and how useful could be that we all learn more and more tools to face tensions and conflicts and learn from them .
The third day of the training, we had the great experience of doing an Open Forum on: How do we feel about migratory processes? It was a very powerful space to listen to each other, and to feel what others were feeling, to empathize with people we do not know so much, to understand that many other people feel the same as I do, and at the same time, that the voices that I feel very far, have also something I can connect with. This space helped us to come close to each other, and to talk about emotions and feelings, something that we are not very used to talk about, but that we found so important.
There were many creative activities during the workshop, including moving our body, paying some games together, expressing learnings in artistic and creative ways, sharing the learnings with smaller groups, brainstorming together on how to apply these learnings in our daily life.
As we were doing this workshop with the French teachers, the students did their best all the time to communicate in French about these challenging topics of power dynamics, leadership, emotions and personal experiences … It was a great surprise how well they communicated in this new language! But they could also express in their own language, or in another they felt more comfortable, if needed.
As well, we implemented different artistic proposals to promote other ways of communication, and it was beautiful to see all the creative results they shared: from poems to drawing, comics or posters. This was key in facilitating the sharing between them, connecting with something deeper and expresing it in their prefered form, and rooting the learnings.
It was a great experience to share these days and learnings with all of you! Thank you so much to all of you for participating in the TILDE training in Switzerland!
Jordi and Lucila