This workshop will give experience of active, safe reflection within the diversity of attending SLPs and guests with lived experience of incarceration. Based on principles established by sociologist and author Parker Palmer for holding safe space, participants will experience safe and honouring exchange of story, personal and professional reflection at a deep level, and evocation of insights for work and life as a SLP advocating and activating in Australia for equity of opportunity and honourable, non-judgmental valuing of all citizens.
Participants will be introduced to communication touchstones for holding safe space for reflection, respect, and response that transculturally invite respectful human experiences of diversity. Participants will have an embodied experience of these touchstones in action, giving insights into the macro-variables of communication across diversity, further to the micro-variables in which they are well-versed. It will challenge assumed knowledge in ways that are vibrantly bespoke and healthily confrontational. It focuses on holding the tensions of reflection and respect, to then collaboratively progress response.
Activities include personal drawing and writing. These require no prior experience or skill and are conducted safely. Activities will take place in small groups, dyads, or triads, including a person with incarceration experience – then larger discussion groups. Activities are aimed at creating levelling experiences across participant backgrounds.
SLP participants will come away with new insights about the enabling value of silence in story exchange, and the embodiment of respect within unknown and uncertain interactions. These experiences will further inform their practice according to their ongoing respectful reflections.

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This workshop is entirely about reflection, respect, and response. It is grounded in the processes that safely enable them. It focuses on how to hold the tensions emerging within the process of reflection and the desire of respect - and to then collaboratively progress them to response.