Educational Group in Aggression and Uncertainty Situation: Whether the Learning Process is Still Existing
Our profession core knowledge of “person in environment” is our rational to adopt small group setting as a common setting in order teaching methods of social work intervention. Group work theories propose that the group is a microcosm of the environment in which it functions. Therefore, in order to understand the group-process and dynamic, especially groups involving social traumas, it is necessary to understand the social, cultural, and political context in which these groups operate.
Since September 2000 a dramatic change has occurred in Israel. Terror attacks and multitudes of casualties have become our daily unbearable routine. During the last two years 1000 civilian people were killed in terror attacks. These attacks have occurred all over the country, in different places such as restaurants, buses, coffee-shops. The casualties are Jewish, Arabs, newcomers, foreign workers; every person living in Israel is in the danger of being hurt. These events smashed the equilibrium between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs and the illusion of coexistence, the world assumptions and the reciprocity between the Israeli citizens, and lead to feelings of anger and suspicion.
During this period we continued to teach different educational groups, including groups with Jewish and Arab participants.
As aforesaid, our understanding led us to perceive the Israeli society as the ‘con’ in which the group ‘text’ took place and to assume that the outside conflict would reflect in the groups. But something different characterized our groups.
In our lecture we will try to deal with questions that arose, such as How the external processes influence the work group level and the education process? Whether during an existential threat the group can serve as a safe space in which the participants are able to learn, to explore and investigate themselves and society as well?
We will explicate these processes and the ways of coping and defending by some examples from three different educational groups including Jewish and Arabs' groups that we ran at the same time.