Lowering the waterline

Higher education classrooms are increasingly shaped by polarization, conflict, sociopolitical tension, and heightened emotional intensity. Educators are navigating divergent student realities, complex power dynamics, and growing pressure to sustain learning environments grounded in care, inclusion, and intellectual rigor. What is said in the room is often only part of the story. Beneath the surface, unspoken roles, emotions, resistance, and group dynamics shape how dialogue unfolds.

Lewis Deep Democracy (LDD), developed in community and organizational conflict contexts, offers a structured yet flexible approach to engaging difference as a source of collective insight rather than fracture. Drawing on process work methodology and theories of group dynamics, LDD helps educators “lower the waterline” — bringing forward the voices, tensions, and energies that are shaping the classroom field. 

This interactive workshop introduces key concepts from Lewis Deep Democracy, including the “waterline” metaphor of collective conscious and unconscious dynamics, attention to minority voices, and structured methods for working with polarization. Participants will receive a first introduction to practical LDD sociometric tools such as the Conversation-on-our-Feet and the Polarity Exercise, experiencing how structured movement and embodied dialogue can slow down reactive exchanges and surface underlying tensions. 

The session is both conceptual and experiential. Participants will engage with foundational theory and participate in large-group facilitation processes. Together, we will explore how classrooms can become spaces where disagreement is engaged constructively, where resistance is understood as meaningful information, and where collective care is enacted through dialogue practices. 

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to: 

• Begin to understand core principles of Lewis Deep Democracy, including the waterline metaphor (collective conscious/unconscious dynamics) and attention to minority or marginalized roles in group dialogue. 
• Recognize resistance dynamics in classroom settings, including subtle and overt expressions (e.g., silence, sarcasm, disengagement, disruption), and interpret these as meaningful group signals rather than individual deficits. 
• Experience two sociometric tools that slow down to explore tensions that may be contributing to stuckness or polarization and support more inclusive and equitable classroom dialogue by surfacing divergence before moving toward convergence. 
• Start reflecting together on how community-based facilitation frameworks might require adaptation to align with the ethical responsibilities, institutional constraints, and relational realities of public postsecondary teaching. 

Participants will leave with practical, adaptable tools for navigating conflict, tension, and difference in ways that deepen learning, protect relationship, and strengthen classroom community — while contributing to a broader conversation about collective care in higher education.

Audience: Faculty, staff, teaching assistants, and external participants