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Asking Ethical Questions
A TLA Ethic as Conscious, Connected, and Creative Action
By James Sparrell, Ph.D.
There
has been a pile of dirt in my driveway for about a year and a half. No,
it's bigger than you're picturing - probably the size of a truck
without wheels and covered by a huge luminescent blue tarp. It wouldn't
pass as an art project and was probably more of a monument to good
intentions in the garden. But through two complete gardening seasons I
had not had time to distribute it in all the good places I wanted new
rich loam.
I suppose somewhere inside it was my protest against the inflated
housing market in town, which would preclude my moving here, if I tried
to today. I used to live next to people who fished for a living; people
who had only been out of the state once (and the Maine border is only a
five-minute walk away); and people who worked their whole lives at the
nearby Naval Shipyard. Now I live next to a physician, a retired
physicist, and well-to-do business officers and owners. My cold frame,
for starting vegetables in spring was once a springboard for all sorts
of gardening conversation with the neighbors and mail carrier. Now it
is a sort of blight of embarrassment in the yard.
Yet I must say that not one person has complained about the big blue
pile of dirt in the driveway. The physician, who recently moved in, did
stop by and chat about the critical importance of "keeping property
values up," but I could easily ignore that. What got me stuck on my
relationship to that big blue pile was contemplating writing an essay
on ethical practice. I began to think about what it means to be a good
neighbor, and the physicist who is trying to sell his home and needs to
move to a retirement community, whose windows look right on that pile
of dirt. I no longer felt comfortable in making my gardening and
deflationary statement in his face. So on the second day of fall I
spent a day pushing a wheelbarrow and dodging wasps and the pile is
gone. The tarps are folded and stored in the shed.
What struck me is that I began to see the dirt pile in a way I
hadn't seen it before. If I believed in affordable housing in my
community, my big blue pile was not serving for much more than a
rationalization for being too busy to do the work, and there were
infinitely better ways that I could work toward a more socially
equitable community, better ways to make a political statement. In the
process of this shift in my relationship to the dirt, there was a
change in my consciousness of it, a challenging of my own assumptions
and beliefs, and a possibility of new and creative ways of
participating in community. It is often the way in which we pose the
questions that limits our thinking and reasoning about what are ethical
answers, and keeps our social reasoning vacillating between the false
dichotomies of parallel ruts in a well-worn road.
It is my opinion that we are animals first, and animals with big
brains second, and that much of the time our big brains are spent in
rationalizing what our more animal aspects have guided us to do. The
spirit of ethical thinking is to use those big brains like a flashlight
in the dark, directing our actions, directing our thought in conscious
ways as to how we want to relate to others and to the natural world.
It is not possible to ask questions that we have not been able to
form. As professions develop ethical codes, they function to suggest
common questions that practitioners ought to be thinking about; to
raise consciousness regarding the consequences of practicing in a
particular way. Codes are constantly in a state of flux and evolution,
which is an exciting thing. Unfortunately as ethical thinking moves
into ethical codes there is sometimes a tendency to discard the
reasoning aspect and focus on a sort of legalistic adherence to the
code.
In the world of Western psychology ethics have had a good
hundred-year history of debate and development and at times are
bewilderingly complex. For example, the APA (American Psychological
Association) guidelines at this time may deem it acceptable for a
psychologist to assist in the development of strategies to aid US
forces in psychological torture of "detainees," while it might be
considered unethical, as a violation of confidentiality, for a
clinician to greet a client in a grocery store (Mayer 60-71). I don't
say this to imply that ethical guidelines are without merit or so
confusing that they are not worth attending to, but to suggest that
they deal with complicated life situations, reflect social, political,
and religious beliefs and values, and are constantly in a state of flux
and development.
For the world of TLA, a relatively new area of study and practice,
the ethical questions and development of ethical guidelines are in
their early stages. And there is much to glean from the work of other
disciplines and practices including education, journalism, social
activism, expressive arts, and psychology, as well as other disciplines
and practices. A preliminary code of ethics for TLA has been developed
by Mirriam-Goldberg and is presented in Table 1.
Several major ethical themes can be seen to emerge from these
principles. A number of items focus on the general theme of competence,
either by developing or improving areas of expertise or creative
practice (writing, artistic practice, research), or practicing within
areas of competence, doing what you know, and also seeking to provide
evidence that TLA practices are effective in meeting their purported
goals and objectives. In this sense, there is also comfort with the
idea of not-knowing, and not having all the answers, but being open to
learn and listen from clients or participants. Competence also implies
a knowledge of how and when to refer an individual for other forms of
education, medical care, psychotherapy or other potentially necessary
or beneficial services. This touches on a related theme of doing no
harm which acknowledges both the powerful benefits and the limits of a
TLA practice in providing help and fostering social or personal change,
again necessitating the likelihood of referring participants to other
kinds of community care when needed. Doing no harm also involves
non-exploitation of individuals, nondiscrimination, and providing a
context that seeks to ensure that participants will be respected and
able to work in a climate of safety and trust.
The principal of respecting individual autonomy is evoked in the
process of obtaining informed consent for activities, obtaining
permission for the use of client materials in other contexts or for
participation in research activities. Individuals are viewed as being
competent to make wise judgments regarding what they choose to do or
not do, but need truthful, accurate information on which to base their
decisions.
An underlying value implicit in the ethical code for TLA is that TLA
is reflected in a practice of connection and community. In this regard,
practitioners of TLA seek to remain related to a wider community of
those engaged in TLA work to hone their skills, provide support,
critique process, evaluate methodology, share techniques and ideas, and
to provide consultation on ethical dilemmas that will arise. Community
engagement is also evident in the TLA practitioner seeking to know
other kinds of therapists, educators, spiritual advisors, artists,
writers, activists, and professionals in their geographical area so
that referrals can be made in an informed, supportive way, not just
from a phonebook. TLA practice works to resist community fragmentation.
Implicit in these guidelines are also the principles of beneficence
and justice. The spirit of this work is tied closely to principles of
progressive, democratic education which seek to acknowledge injustice
and work toward positive social change. In that sense the work is not
neutral with respect to social values. And TLA ethics are not just
about not doing "bad" things, but to be affirmatively and actively
engaged in work that challenges violence, injustice, ignorance,
exploitation, oppression, and other societal ills.
Consciousness and self-knowledge are essential to the implementation
of ethical principles in actual practice. It is vital that
practitioners be able to identify themselves within the TLA work, in
terms of their own potential capacity to hurt or harm, even
unintentionally, and also to identify themselves with respect to their
power in the TLA work, and potentially harmful consequences of that.
Power dynamics cannot be eliminated even if attempts are made to
minimize them. Bird does a wonderful job of discussing the political
dynamic present in narrative therapy, which like TLA, seeks to
acknowledge and challenge dominant cultural paradigms. She describes
the importance of exposing and negotiating elements of power within the
work, and acknowledging that the practitioner almost by definition
comes from a position of the insider or one reflecting power in the
relationship, e.g. teacher-student. It is vital to recognize that any
attempts to address this inherently have costs and benefits. For
example, some people use self-disclosure as a strategy for minimizing
power over another person and to reflect a commonality. I recall in my
own psychotherapy, my wonderfully supportive, infinitely patient and
wise therapist telling me about traveling to her son's graduation from
Stanford with a Ph.D. in literature, just as I was finally completing
my Ph.D. and deciding that I would not attend, knowing also that none
of my family would be able to attend either. My experience involved
both an enjoyable sense of her pride and a shift toward equalization of
power, as well as one of irritation and abandonment. Self-disclosure is
a useful but complex tool, not unlike a shotgun.
Ultimately, ethical practice in a TLA context will likely result in
coming into relationship with the community and the local world in new
and unexpected ways. Rather than simply imparting (or bestowing)
knowledge, TLA practice seeks to pursue understanding and discovery so
that both the TLA practitioner and the relevant community will
experience change and construct new understanding. The flashlight
shines on the blue tarp and the pile of the dirt that lies underneath,
and calls for a different vision, a creative understanding of
relationship that may involve some difficult work, a shift in
perspective or even heavy lifting.
It has been some months but I did notice that the physicist's condo
sold within days of my having moved the dirt pile. The doctor doesn't
come by or speak anymore, and I noticed that the city counseling is
considering several proposals to provide more affordable housing in
town. Consciousness comes with a price; ethical questions resist
complacency and acknowledge the complexity of life and the emptiness of
simple answers. In the words of Greg Brown,
"Life is a thump-ripe melon,
so sweet and such a mess."
Works Cited
Bird, J. To Do No Harm: Keynote Address. Pan-Pacific Family Therapy Conference. Melbourne, Australia. 6 Nov. 2006.
Brown, Greg. "Rexroth's Daughter" Covenant. Red House Records, 2000.
Mayer, Jane. "The Experiment."The New Yorker 11 July, and 18 July 2005: 60
Mirriam-Goldberg, Caryn. Transformative Language Arts Handbook: Social and Personal Transformation Through the Spoken and Written Word. Goddard College: Plainfield, Vermont, 2006.
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