A Collaborative and Dialogic
Approach:
working with communities
M.T.F. Rocio Chaveste Gutiérrez, Ph.D.
Basic Premises of a Postmodern
Collaborative Philosophy
• Postmodern refers to a
family of concepts. The most
important are:
–the notion of knowledge and
–language as relational and
generative.
Basic premises…
Knowledge
(what we know or think we might know)
• The development and transformation of
knowledge is a communal process.
• Knowledge and the knower are
interdependent.
• What we know or what we think we
might know is linguistically constructed.
• Knowledge is fluid.
Basic premises… Language
(spoken and unspoken).
• Language gains it meaning through its use.
• Language is the primary vehicle through which
we construct and make sense of our world.
• Language is fluid.
• What is created in language (knowledge) is
multi-authored among a community of persons
and relationships (in and through language); and
therefore, what is created is only one of multiple
perspectives, narratives and possibilities.
Basic premises…
• Reality (the meanings that we attribute to
the events, experiences and people in our
lives) is socially constructed and is infinite
in variety and expression.
• Language and knowledge are relational
and generative; and therefore, the kinds
of relationships we have, influence the
kinds of conversations we might have and
vice versa.
• These views of language and knowledge
invite uncertainly.
What are the Implications of a
Postmodern Collaborative
Approach to our work with
Communities ?
Postmodernism offers a broad
philosophical and pragmatic challenge
to the modernist culture and
traditions of “community work”.
Implications…
Postmodernism invites a philosophy
for conversation that includes a
particular conceptualization of human
beings and their behaviors that, in
turn, influences collaborative
relationships, a partnership endeavor.
Elements for working with
diverse communities
• Collaborative and dialogic practices
• Socioconstructionist and relational
approach
• The communal construction of social
justice
Collaborative and Dialogic
practices
Collaborative and dialogic practices
invite a philosophical stance: a way of
being in conversation and relationship
with the people we work with,
including a way of thinking about,
talking with, acting with and being
responsive to them.
Collaborative practices challenge the
technical and instrumental character of
psycho-social work; it challenges the notion
of an expert knower on how people ought
to live their lives; and it challenges the way
that we use what we think we might know;
and therefore, invites uncertainty.
• It values the inclusion of
multiple voices and the richness
of differences.
• Promotes less hierarchical and
more egalitarian relationships
and systems.
Socioconstructionist and
relational approach
• The communal construction of
knowledge
• The relational processes through
which knowledge is produced,
focusing on the meanings and
understandings that we give to
those constructions.
• Knowledge is historically, culturally
and linguistically situated.
On language
• What we use to understand and make meaning
about the events, experiences and people in our
lives, what we use to express our “thoughts”.
• Language gains its meaning through its use
• It is creative rather than a representation
(mirrors) of knowledge or reality.
• Understanding and meaning emerge and are
created and recreated in language. Refers to
spoken and silent: words, signs, symbols and
gestures.
• Language is fluid.
Self, self identity and self agency
• The self as developed in language and as
changing based on conversation and the
contexts in which conversation occurs.
• Thus, self as a social process, a shift from
the individual self to the relational self.
• Self identity and self agency are created
in language and conversation.
• Identities and narratives influence, permit
or limit, self description, experience,
expression and agency.
Social Justice:
traditional approach
• A society where all members have equitable
access to resources
• Righting the wrongs created by a systems of
inequality (structural inequalities).
• Analyzes the society in terms of dominant and
oppressed groups
• Valuing of fairness and equity in resources,
rights, and treatment for marginalized
individuals and groups of people who do not
share equal power in society
Social Justice:
social construction approach
Rather than understanding our social
realities as structurally fixed entities, we
explore the dynamic relational processes of
making such realities. Not to be dismissed
as only as a “thing” of the past, but to
understand it also as a process that we are
all currently engaged in shaping and being
shaped by it.
Collaborative/dialogic
approach to social justice
• Centers the practices on
communicative action
• Understand the historical process of
making (structural inequalities) from
the client’s perspectives
• Decenter structural inequalities by
locating expertise with clients
Collaborative/dialogic
approach to social justice
• Avoids the potential colonization of sensemaking when one adopts dominant viewpoints.
• Focus on being relationally responsive to the
kind of futures we are creating.
• Shifts our gaze to “power-with” our clients
without being blind to the power-over the client,
built into the “system” of mental health
practices.
Social justice and power:
a collaborative perspective
• Rather than take an either/or position, we
are advocating for a both/and position.
• Power is both constituted within the
social and constituting the social
• The discourses of power are themselves
historically produced and socially
organizer of our realities.
Social justice and power:
a collaborative perspective
• Power is not a decontextualized concept,
it is generated by us as a way to
understand and organize our lived
experiences.
• “Power is created in the moment bymoment interaction [we have] with
others. A power relationship is a
constructed relationship” (McNamee, 2010)
Social justice and power:
a collaborative perspective
• We not only acknowledge the
institutionalized practices of racism,
sexism, heteronormativity etc. but locate
these institutionalized practices in
communicative action within which
power relationship are constructed.
• These institutionalized practices
originated within a communal context
and are maintained in language and
communities of practice
Social justice and power:
a collaborative perspective
• Calling a group minority, at-risk, and/or
weaker, continues to maintain our focus
on these groups as less than, rather than
attending to how they are resisting
and/or actively shaping and shifting the
“power” discourse.
• Our language practices carry the potential
to further the very discourses we want to
unmake, by the way we continue to use
language.
To keep in mind as we work
with communities
•
• Validation: Have respect for, be
humble, listen to, and maintain
coherence with each person and
community story.
• Their story take center stage: Be
curious, ask questions that lead to
other questions, not answers.
• Communities as authors of their
own story: Create and safeguard
room for each community to
develop its own views and rewrite
its own stories.
• Stay in sync: Work within each
person and community rhythm,
pacing, and timing, not yours.
• Information: Each conversational
cluster together creates knowledge
that is unique and specific to their
community.
• Choices: Let each person and
community determine what is
important.
• Intervention: Avoid the temptation of
across the board diagnoses, goals, and
strategies for reaching goals. Consider the
uniqueness of each situation, the
multiplicity of possibilities for each
community, each context and each
moment.
• Familiar: Explore the known in a way that
allows for doors to be created where
there were walls.
• Public: Make your ideas and
prejudices visible; keep them open
to question and change.
• Try to understand: Don’t know,
assume, or fill in the blanks too
quickly.
• Trust and believe: Try to make
sense out of what appears non
sense.
THANK YOU
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