Addressing Context Through Episode Work
The level of context that we place as the highest order has the most influence over how we understand, make meaning, and then act into our communication and interactions with others.
We advocate that if we place relationship as the highest order of context, it will more constructively influence how we interface with others. If we hold our own interests and needs as the highest order, we will not pay the appropriate amount of attention to the interests and needs of others, and this will lead to a more competitive stance and deteriorate our relationship.Within relationship is concern for self and other, so our needs and the needs of our communication partner will both be considered. Of course, to frame our communication with relationship as the overarching context, we need to realize the value of the relationship, both short and long term. This requires energy and determination to pursue because it can be challenging considering our worldview differences and degrees of emotional investment. The short- and long-term perspectives can be explored well through the use of the paradox of response in which time factors are considered.
To move toward this contextualization of relationship as the highest order of context, we want to do “episode work” to create certain episodes that will allow this shift in context to happen (Pearce, 2007). There are many ways to foster these episodes, and two broad categories of activities can be either planned or emergent (Pearce, 2007). In planned episode work, we are consciously intentional on how we will generate communication and how we will respond to others, so that we elicit what will lead to constructive relationship building. We recognize that we have choice, and we identify in advance the choices that will create the episode we desire to make better social worlds. This can be done in preparation through reflection- on-action and while it is occurring through reflection-in-action. In emergent episode work, we are focused on both the content, as in planned episode work, and on the process as well, looking for opportunities to constructively act into relationship as the highest order context. This is putting reflection-inaction into practice as we view the episode from a metaperspective.
One useful way of being able to engage in this effort is by better understanding who we are and what we bring to our interactions with others. Transformative learning can support this effort through the exploration of identifying our worldview, values, assumptions, and ways of seeing the world that may be implicitly influencing our choices, characteristic of paradox of knowing.