The Experimenters Union Learning Community

• Alexander Technique curious, literate, or certified teachers; all certified/licensed embodiment educators and/or therapists including Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, Somatic Education or Therapy, or any other form of psychosomatic education.
• Teachers who are dedicated to developing humane, life affirming pedagogy and committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion no matter how messy or imperfect.
• Teachers who have an appetite for the joy of learning, an ability to be vulnerable and kind in a group environment, and a willingness to take risks and make mistakes as a part of the learning process.
• Teachers who want to succeed in their careers & businesses, build confidence and courage in their unique way of teaching, and who want to develop collaborative skills and build healthy professional relationships.

Meetings are led by a trained facilitator. They usually begin with 5 minutes of unstructured time to get quiet and arrive. The facilitator collects all teaching ideas or topics for experiment and divide the meeting time equitably.

Sometimes teaching experiments arise out of discussion, or sometimes members show up with a light sketch of an idea or a fully formed exercise.

As a member, you are always free to just be – to sit back and observe without being vocal, to teach without getting feedback, to participate without giving feedback. We are always experimenting with the freedom to choose!

We have found the benefits of sharing our feedback with each other to be:

• astounding
• entertaining
• useful
• extremely encouraging
• relieving
• confidence building

Our experience of teaching and learning just gets easier and easier as we practice using this format.

We have simple formats for teaching and for giving feedback to the teacher after the learning experience.

The facilitator makes sure that everyone understands and follows the format (see below) for the session. They choose who presents and who gives feedback, and make sure that these roles are circulated evenly throughout the group over time.

A teaching moment has 3 parts:

1. Beginning
2. Middle
3. End

The teacher, once they take the lead, must clearly mark the beginning and end of their teaching so that it is distinct from conversation or feedback.

Participants answer these questions about their experience of your teaching in no particular order. We find these elements are often naturally present in our language; but if they are not, we agree to try and articulate them as part of our commitment to the experimental process:

1. What did I sense (multi-sensory experience including self and environment)
2. What did I feel (emotional tone)
3. What did I think (cognitive associations, connections, and context) 

We begin with sensory experience to prevent dissociation from the physical self. In trauma-informed psychology texts, “bottom-up processing” is linked to action systems that activate at the sensory-motor level more quickly than cognitive decision making or emotional processing can occur.

These action systems, such as safety, social connection, exploration, and play, must be in place for learning to occur. For a basic definition of “bottom up processing” go here. For a basic definition of “top down processing” go here.

We also find starting from sensory experience is helpful in noticing an increase or decrease in ease, or changes in our physical state. Since the efficacy of the Alexander work (meaning, does your overall coordination get better or worse) is measured at least in part on a physical level, it seems to be a key aspect of where our work is located.

If we start with the cognitive content, sensory experience fades and changes very quickly and we get disconnected from it. However, if that’s where you need to start, it’s fine. Eventually you develop the skills to move between these three aspects of experience more easily.

Including emotional tone or experience is also profoundly integrating for us in our work exchanges. We notice that just taking the time to be aware of our emotional state changes our physical state in a positive way, whether we can articulate the emotional state clearly or not.

That’s why we use the noun “tone” to relieve the pressure of having to describe or articulate emotion in detail. The goal in sharing emotional tone is not to process or analyze it, but just to include it in our conscious awareness.

We find that consciously moving through all three layers of experience, in whatever order, is very rich and integrative for us. It increases learning retention. It changes how we experience “thought” and how we express those thoughts and associations through language.

We acknowledge an asymmetry between the roles of teacher and student, but in our meetings neither role is assigned more value than the other. Every participant in the learning environment contributes a needed perspective for its success.

1) RESPECT OTHERS, THEIR OPINIONS, AND EXPERIENCES

We welcome diverse opinions and viewpoints to in The Union and welcome. Should the opinion of another member spark strong feelings or anger, please take time to calm yourself before responding in public. Remember, just because you disagree with what someone has to say doesn’t mean they don’t get to say it. Of course, it also doesn’t mean you have to agree either. If you chose to express your disagreement, do it kindly.

2) THIS IS A GURU-FREE ZONE

There is no one pedagogy or way of teaching considered superior to others in the Union. We are not selling or promoting any particular way of teaching, products, or workshops. While you are free to invite others to join your personal mailing lists for events, please do not market them during meetings or on the private FB group. These spaces are for the exchange of ideas and work, not marketing.

3) WHAT YOU HEAR AND SEE IN UNION MEETINGS IS NOT TO BE SHARED OUTSIDE OF MEETINGS

We need to be assured that experiences will not be shared outside the context of the meeting to feel safe being honest and authentic. These experiences are offered in the moment as a gift and to benefit the learning environment. Union members respect the authorship of work that is shared in meetings. We are free to share only our own work outside meetings unless agreement is openly and clearly made between members to collaborate or share one another’s work. Only other members of the Union will have access to the recorded archive of meetings.

4) BE RESPECTFUL EVEN IN PRIVATE

Social media channels may include private messaging capabilities that form an invisible part of our community and are an invaluable place to share thoughts and questions that you don’t wish to make part of public conversations. Please remember that all these guidelines are fully in force within the private messaging space and on social media in general, as well as in the conversations themselves.

5) REPORT ABUSIVE BEHAVIOR

If you are at the receiving end of an abusive private message – abusive, that is, either in its attitude or in its language, please contact Clare Maxwell. As difficult as it may be, try either to save the offensive PM, or at least to copy it and forward it to Clare before you erase it. If I am to help, it is important for me to see precisely what it is that caused offense, so that I can speak with the sender in specific terms.

6) DEFINITIONS OF ABUSE

We do not have a specific definition of abuse, as there has never been any. If one becomes necessary, we will notify the community at that time. Use your common sense.

We thank you for the time you’ve taken to enhance your understanding of the quality of culture we are trying to develop here in our community.

The three D’s of collaboration are:

1. Diversity
2. Disagreement
3. Dialogue

Perceptual bias often happens in small communities like ours. We have close professional relationships and it’s easier for people to pretend to agree when they really don’t.

We propose two solutions:

1. Ground dialogue in work exchange and actual experience.
2. Have an established format for giving and receiving feedback that is understood by all to be subjective and not all-powerful or “correct.”

Collaboration, to be successful, means claiming and articulating your unique viewpoint while simultaneously knowing that it might be totally wrong, or that there might be a different way to arrive at the same result.

That’s a big emotional, biological, and cognitive stretch. We, as a community of embodiment educators, have found we need regular practice.

We believe that practicing the art of collaboration will increase our chances of thriving as a profession and getting our incredible work to those who need it.

1. To develop a non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer community supporting exchange among embodiment professionals online worldwide
2. To encourage the development of individual teaching styles and methods
3. To cross-fertilize and verify bodies of practice and knowledge across embodiment disciplines

The Union grew out of Clare Maxwell’s interests and research and was supported by generous funds from the Appalachian Springs Foundation. Clare started collaborating with Eleni Vosniadou in the summer of 2018, and together they developed a special format for Alexander Technique work exchange that could be practiced online as well as in person.

We feel that the discovery of one’s authentic, personal teaching style and voice is a neglected stage of development in our profession. We are passionate about creating humane, embodied methods of pedagogy that do not traumatize and oppress the learner or the teacher in the process of learning.

Institutional forces can stifle individual discovery and research regarding pedagogical methods, which often serve the needs of the academy or the economy, rather than the needs of the learner. An independent, peer-to-peer organization like The Experimenters Union can provide a safe container for teachers to discover their unique teaching “voice” without being measured against a master teacher’s methods. There are no institutional needs held above those of the teacher and learner in the Union.

The Union work exchange format amplifies your teaching and reflects it back to you, empowering you to make well informed decisions about how you teach. Our exchanges also help us to continually experience and reflect on the most important role of learner, whose passion and curiosity is the ultimate driver of true education.

We naturally draw connections between your unique way of teaching and the concepts embodied in your particular teaching modality, so that we can better understand those concepts, and the truth about how humans function. No one method of embodiment has all the answers. We think your singular voice is important in this endeavor, and hope that you will be pleasantly surprised by the joy experienced in finally getting to just be yourself in the learning and teaching environment.

Many teachers express a deep lack of confidence in their skills, and even despair that they will ever be really “good” at it, especially compared to the master teachers that they trained with. Teachers of all kinds suffer from the same problem. Teaching itself is profoundly non-formulaic, improvisational, and incredibly difficult to do well.

It takes true courage!

A teacher training course or program can only cover so much territory, and even after three or more years of training many teachers feel that they are just getting started in actually understanding how to teach. Once we start teaching on our own, it starts to get real.

We may try to emulate our trainers, but find that when we are on our own, we have to find a way that works for us personally. Sometimes it’s incredibly different than how we trained. It’s easy to get isolated during this phase of our career. Lack of confidence grows in isolation, and it’s difficult to know if we are veering off course as we start following our natural teaching instincts out in the world.

Then...

Existing post-graduate offerings abound! However, they are either for improving teaching skills within an already existing pedagogy, business skill development, or learning a niche-specific skill set that has been developed by someone who has already found their teaching voice. And you can spend as many years on even one of these things as you did for your initial training.

What about your voice?

A very important piece of needed support is missing, and that’s where The Union comes in.

• What if the nature of the Alexander Technique, or any embodiment pedagogy, is experimental, continually generating new pedagogies? 
• What if those pedagogies don’t conflict but could instead illuminate one another, revealing a larger and more accurate view of human functioning? 
• What if new methods of teaching were much needed for different purposes and by different kinds of people who learn in different ways?
• What if finding an authentic "teaching voice" was a stage of development that could be more easily and effectively done in community instead of the isolation that often occurs once we leave training?
• What if we didn’t have to teach for 40 years before getting “good” at it?