Wolf Wolfensberger Summer Institute on Moral Issues

Announcing a 7-day Workshop on
 

How to Function With Personal Moral Coherency

in a World That is Disfunctional,*

Including Its Human Services

Welcome!

           We are glad you are interested in the seven-day workshop on “How to Function With Personal Moral Coherency in a World That is Disfunctional.” This somewhat lengthy letter explains our expectations for workshop participants, and how to prepare for the workshop. We require that it be read before the workshop, so that participants will fully understand what the workshop entails before registering. You are asked to attest to having read it before your registration will be accepted. 

Our Expectations for Participants

          The workshop demands the full and complete attention of participants. Therefore, we ask participants not to bring any devices into the presentation room that might become irresistible distractors; not to use any devices for texting, messaging, etc. during presentations; and to turn cell phones and other devices OFF during all workshop sessions. 

          The workshop has a demanding schedule, and we expect participants to be on time. Each day starts promptly at 8 a.m., and there are evening sessions on the first six days. There are breaks for meals, and short breaks (typically 15 minutes) at approximately mid-morning and mid-afternoon. However, participants should feel free at any time to unobtrusively get up, and stand or pace or lie down at the sides or back of the room, if they need to stretch or prefer standing or lying down to sitting.

            Also, a workshop and everyone attending it suffer when people do not participate fully but come in and out. Thus, we ask and expect participants to be there for the entire workshop, including all evening sessions. If something unavoidable comes up that requires a temporary absence, such a participant should be very reticent in the subsequent discussions, in fairness to those who have been present for everything.

          The workshop is composed of a series of presentation modules that vary in length. At the end of each module, the floor is open for questions, discussion, and debate on the material covered so far. So as not to jump ahead to topics yet to be covered, questions are sometimes deferred until later in the workshop. Participants are asked to hold their questions or comments until these times, rather than raising them in the middle of a presentation, so as not to interrupt and fractionate the presentation of a cohesive idea or theme. We do encourage participants to ask at any time for clarification or to have a point repeated or restated in a different way, and to make notes of all the comments or questions they may want to offer, so as to remember these when the time comes for questions and discussion. 

            We ask participants who raise a question or make a comment to please state their name, affiliation, where they are from, and what they do (for example, “Jane Smith from Toronto, I work in a supported employment agency”), at least the first few times they speak. This helps everyone to get to know each other. We also ask contributors to the discussion to speak loud enough that all can hear; if necessary, stand up.  

Preparing Yourself for the Workshop

            It should be obvious from the above expectations that participants should attend with a serious learning set, and arrive well-rested.

           In addition to the demanding schedule, participants should be prepared for the demanding content of the workshop. Some presentation modules are lengthy, and all require close attention. Some are intellectually demanding; others are difficult because they challenge commonly-held beliefs. Over and over, the workshop invites participants to explicate and/or examine their worldviews, values, and assumptions. In fact, this workshop is apt to call into question and deeply challenge a great many beliefs, values, loyalties and allegiances, habitual ways of thinking and doing, service practices, etc. 

          Also, by the very nature of the issues it addresses--after all, the title is “How to Function With Personal Moral Coherency…”-- it is not “value-free” or value-neutral. High-order beliefs are continually referenced throughout the workshop, especially how they logically yield or imply certain decisions and actions. Throughout the workshop, and particularly in connection with several modules on truth, the presenters will mention positions held by various major belief systems and “wisdom traditions” in the past or present. And on several occasions, presenters will state some of what they believe, and explain how some subsequent analyses and recommendations derive from these beliefs. 

            We do not expect that participants will necessarily embrace wholesale all the views or positions presented in the workshop, but to our knowledge, those who have attended the event in its entirety have found considerable worth in the workshop as a whole and in a great deal of its content, even if they did not agree with it all. Almost everyone who has stuck with the workshop through the end has been glad they did so.

          Because the workshop as a whole, and some specific parts of it, invite or even necessitate that participants look at their own highest-order beliefs, examine the coherency of these, compare them to other belief systems, and strive to bring their lives and their beliefs into coherency, one way to think of this workshop is as a week of deep values examination or values-grappling or even soul-searching. Participants should come prepared to engage with these challenges. 

            Lastly, participants should prepare themselves to occasionally hear terms and phrasings that they do not like or have learned to think of as outdated or even improper. Language about societally devalued conditions and people who have those conditions (such as people with impairments, poor people, the elderly) is a much more complicated subject than most people realize; further, the terms that are considered acceptable vary from locale to locale, and even from day to day. So it is practically inevitable that someone will object to some word or phrasing. The workshop designers and presenters have given much thought and analysis to this issue, and more will be said about it during the workshop, especially in connection with becoming reconciled to “least worst-ness” about many vexing issues.