This is a personal reflection on moving through a five-day “Residency crafting pedagogies of togetherness”, grounded in the embodied methodology developed by Arawana Hayashi, Ricardo Dutra, and the Social Presencing Theater faculty. I am grateful to the hosts and organisers. These reflections were possible through the accompaniment of esteemed humans—researchers, professors, NGO representatives, faculty, and educators—whose presence shaped the inquiry. I write holding one eye on collective reflection as I experienced it, and one eye on bridging these practices into everyday classroom realities when integrating sustainable development goals.
“Collective Courage” is one of the smallest initiatives emerging from this Residency, and I look forward to being part of its unfolding.
“Interesting dynamics of mutuality not restricted to a certain field-specific language, we learn from each other by teaching what we know, we engage in mutual appropriation.
Solo practices are insufficient!! To meet the challenges and the new complexities.
Vera John Steiner
Seed 1: Welcoming into a space where togetherness holds.
Welcoming-ground pedagogies practice. Participants enter with a discrete greeting and a fine-tuned quietude to establish collective calm. Talking is intentionally minimal and agenda-free to foreground meta-process cues (e.g., aesthetic cards and artistic imaginary). Seating is arranged in a circle to form a “village” configuration, followed by a structured pause with three prompts—(a) Why are you here? (b) Why social arts for education? (c) What brings you energy?—to draw on purpose, orientation, and vitality. The setting is framed as humane networking rather than instrumental coordination, guided by “rules” emphasizing agency, benevolence, and friend-level listening toward co-creation. In response to the known drain of early-stage brainstorming, the protocol defers ideation and opens larger reflective spaces. This first step operationalizes the Pedagogies Together prototype and positions intention as an aesthetic, pattern-free locus for convening.
Every time you leave home
Into a world you were never in
New strangers on other paths await
New places that have never seen you
Will startle a little at your entry
Opening conversation
You want to take in
Blessings John O’Donohue
Seed 2: Cultivating a collective field in which we notice how we listen to each other, creativity flows between levels of listening.
“I see you seeing me.” Ubuntu felt like simple embodied practices: “come as you are”, we start from where each is, feel with others, create together the emerging agenda. We activate the listening field through a three-part arc—(1) warm-up with silent duets that test listening levels and surface habits; (2) main polarity exploration where partners hold opposing positions, track when and how the polarity switches, and speak from the heart in gestures that invite collective feedback and a new shared gesture; (3) an exit ticket noting where energy rose, tracking where perspective shifted, what was discovered, and when resistance softened in service of something larger, a small entry moment for collective intelligence.
We could say that practically all the problems of the human race are due to the fact that thought is not proprioceptive
David Bohm
Seed 3: When an opportunity arises, from practicing in two, expand the circle.
A three-step embodied ergonomics protocol for enlarging dyadic practice into a four-person cell, adapted from dance-based methods, to investigate pedagogies of togetherness in a classroom or in the work of teachers.
Everyday Gestures Calibration
Set-up: Four-person group, brief check-in to surface micro-habits and awareness (small “stucks,” ordinary stories, felt textures). Simple relaxes, and when relaxed, we can actually shift perspectives to unexpected new data. Aim: Establish a common sensorium and reduce performance drive; anchor attention in lived movement rather than narrative explanation.
Prompts are short: What did you notice about your own micro-gestures? Where did sense-feeling emerge versus physical effort?
Empathic Witnessing
One person offers a short movement sequence (a lived story rendered as gesture). The other three repeat the sequence as “witnessing,” adding empathic attunements (e.g., seeing the child, the kitchen arrangement), while avoiding leader-centric performativity.
Principle: Contemporary witnessing—multiple perspectives to the same event; holds the collective’s capacity to sense healing without collapsing into unison or mere mirroring.
Risks to monitor: Drift into directed leadership, overemphasis on physicality.
Data prompts: Where did empathy appear in movement (heart speaking in gestures)? How many distinct perspectives surfaced? Did resistance soften when serving something larger?
Difference is a source for generative variation.
Person 2 offers a new sequence; others enact “difference” along simple parameters—direction, facing, speed, object/story substitution (e.g., feeding a cat vs. feeding a dog; sitting on a bus vs. on the floor).
Principle: Synchronicity ≠ , unison, and ≠ mirroring; difference can cohere through emergence.
The practice aims for artful communication and freedom while preserving relatedness.
Data prompts: Where did beauty, ease, or freedom arise? Did belonging become palpable? When did polarity switch, and how did creativity in conflict appear?
Seed 4 Context for artful communication.
Iterative prototyping with multiple small cycles of practice, limiting reflections to 1–2 minutes to maintain energy and granularity.
Embodiment range. Acknowledge variability in movement training; consider a 20-minute solo warm-up (awareness of self before connecting) to expand participants’ range of perception and data that informs them. Track polarity shifts, empathic markers, synchronicity moments, and sense-feeling vs. performance. Use brief exit tickets, video micro-slices, and field notes.
Gestures are the language of the heart, practices open a window of opportunity by suspending one logic to allow another; system-level emergence is expected—if goodwill does not appear, interrogate systemic conditions rather than the practice alone.
Observed effects (from pilot iterations) in words as experienced:
Ease and beauty; artful communication; freedom.
Emergent belonging (beyond social niceties); creativity as space-making for new thinking.
Clarification that synchronicity is emerging alignment, not choreographed unison.
Seed 5 Sensing into a land, some places hold local ecologies in transition.
The hospital is ill, and that is what I would think as of the wisdom of the cracks.
Bayo Akomolafe, quoting Jean Oury
In crafting together, we learn to “find a place that holds the people we gathered”, to notice which contexts could hold our emerging action and where the global village might rest with local ecologies. Practices surface center–margin–periphery dynamics—sometimes playful and intimate, sometimes provoking reluctance—which we treated as data rather than deviation. Togetherness pedagogy allows one and collectives to orient by interest, using malleable forms that could support interior processes and, just as importantly, stepping back when a form does not serve. This stance—collective witnessing helped us sense into places that hold, translate belonging into the smallest possible actions, and keep humility and goodwill at the core of our togetherness pedagogy.
Sometimes it is time to move on, right? So, if you’re kind of writing a dead horse, you need to get off that horse.
Otto Scharmer
Reference:
Akomolafe, B. (2040). The mysterious motion of spirituality [Conference dialogue hosted by T. Hübl]. Collective Healing Conference 2024.
Bohm, D. (1996). On dialogue (L. Nichol, Ed.). Routledge.
Hayashi, A. (2021). Social presencing theater: The art of making a true move. PI Press.
Hayashi, A., & Gonçalves, R. D. (2020). A pattern language for social field shifts: Cultivating embodied and perceptual capacities of social groups through aesthetics and social field archetypes. Journal of Awareness Based Systems Change, 1(1), 35–57. https://doi.org/10.47061/jabsc.v1i1.478
John‑Steiner, V. (2000). Creative collaboration. Oxford University Press.
Oddience 2030. (n.d.). Oddience 2030 Erasmus+ project. https://www.oddience2030.com
SPT in Education [Video]. (n.d.). Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/299237120
