Let me introduce you to Red Thread Stories. We are a consultancy which uses collaborative learning, drawing on the experiences of the participants as they share their stories. We humans have always told stories to explain our selves to ourselves We put great store on the power of personal stories. They usually have archetypal elements; and we, the listeners see in the other’s story, something pertinent to ourselves and an elaboration of the greater cultural and political world in which we live. The teller is heard and usually learns something more about themselves, others and their cultural milieu. To achieve this we use a process which draws from a number of sources, including physical theatre, improvisation, Playback theatre and psychodrama where the emphasis is on promoting the physical, emotional and conscious engagement of each participant.
Studies have shown the effectiveness of cooperative learning. Groups of people where differences in opinions are shared and discussed can work together to reach agreed decisions which embrace aspects of each other’s views. There are some psychologists who argue that early in our human evolution we learnt to debate or discuss issues with each other and together we reach better decisions than we do on our own. Alone we rarely confront our most deeply held biases and end up with a polarised perspective, which “even enable us to violate our own moral intuitions” (1) .In a group we have to explain ourselves more carefully and take into account the opinions of others. A similar process can be seen where individuals of like biases group together and maintain strongly polarised positions. Similarly we argue, when we gather in a group and hear stories of people we have not meet before and whose lives may be very different from ours, we are presented with an opportunity to see similarities and differences between ourselves and the tellers and to begin an exploration, a new dialogue with our self, with another person and another way of being in the world.
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