When Conversation Is Not Enough: How Art Can Make Group Dynamics Discussable FA

Reading Note · Rosemary C. Reilly, “Improving Cohort Functioning”

Groups often assume that a difficult relationship can be repaired if people simply talk more openly. Yet fear of judgment, unequal influence, avoidance, and dependence may contribute both to the difficulty and to the conversation meant to resolve it. People may know that something is wrong without having language that feels safe or precise enough to name it.

Rosemary Reilly’s arts-based action research offers a different point of entry. In her study, art did not decorate a meeting or provide a pleasant break from serious work. It helped groups place an experience in front of themselves before asking members to explain or defend it.

Source and scope

This is my reading and interpretation of Reilly’s published study. It is not a report of collaboration with her, a reproduction of her article, or a new field study of my own. This English edition is my translation of the original Persian note. When I move from describing the study to considering its practical implications, I label that move explicitly.

Table of contents
  1. What Reilly studied
  2. Why ordinary conversation can get stuck
  3. From blaming a person to seeing a pattern
  4. What the source supports—and what it does not
  5. My interpretation for group practice
  6. The question I carry forward
  7. Primary source

What Reilly studied

Reilly worked over five years with 73 graduate students in four higher-education cohorts (Reilly, 2022, p. 73). A cohort can provide continuity, trust, and shared learning, but keeping people together does not automatically produce a healthy group. Stable groups can also develop constraining roles, unresolved conflict, competition, marginalization, or an appearance of harmony that makes disagreement harder to express.

The study treated these difficulties as patterns of a group system rather than as defects located in one individual. A person may repeatedly remain silent, another may carry unusual influence, and several may avoid disagreement. The useful question is not only, “What is wrong with this person?” It is also, “What interaction keeps recreating this position, and how does the group participate in it?”

Students used forms such as poetry, collage, mask-making, puppetry, and clowning to express aspects of their experience in the cohort (pp. 73–74). The purpose was not artistic mastery. The works made fears, power relations, contradictions, and subjects that had been difficult to discuss available for collective attention.

Afterward, the works were displayed and discussed through a collective sense-making process (pp. 74–75). Art therefore served two related functions in the project: it helped collect accounts of the group’s lived experience, and it became part of an intervention through which the group could examine that experience.

Why ordinary conversation can get stuck

Direct conversation asks people to speak inside the relationship that is already causing difficulty. If members fear rejection, depend heavily on an instructor’s evaluation, or believe disagreement will damage the group, a request to “be honest” may reproduce the same pattern. The most confident voices may continue to dominate, while other members edit themselves more carefully.

An artwork can create a third object between “me” and “you.” A mask, collage, poem, or short performance carries the experience without requiring one person to begin with an accusation. Members can ask what the work reveals about the group rather than immediately deciding who is guilty.

This distance does not make the subject unreal. It can make a difficult subject discussable. Members are neither fully overwhelmed by the experience nor restricted to a detached, abstract account of it. Reilly connects this possibility with aesthetic distance: a position between being overwhelmed by emotion and retreating into overly rational objectivity (p. 73).

From blaming a person to seeing a pattern

The value of the work was not that conflict disappeared. Reilly does not present the arts-based activities as a cure. Their more defensible contribution was helping participants recognize and discuss recurring patterns: avoiding disagreement, fearing judgment, depending on formal authority, hiding experience, or maintaining an unrealistic image of the cohort.

Once a pattern was visible, members could also notice their participation in sustaining it. That shift matters. Blame locates the problem in another person and often invites defence. A systemic account asks how different actions, silences, expectations, and power relations hold the pattern in place.

Art appeared to support three movements:

  1. something difficult to name became available to see;
  2. members could approach it with less immediate accusation and defence;
  3. the group could consider its own agency in recreating or changing the pattern.

These movements are more modest than “art transforms groups,” but they are practically important. A group cannot work responsibly with a pattern it is required to pretend does not exist.

What the source supports—and what it does not

Reilly’s article is an action-research study in a particular higher-education setting. It provides a detailed account of how arts-based methods were used across four cohorts and how participants and the researcher understood the process. It supports the claim that artistic forms can be used to surface and discuss aspects of group experience that ordinary conversation has left hidden.

It does not establish that:

  • every group will become safer or more effective after an arts-based activity;
  • art is superior to every other form of facilitation;
  • a particular activity caused a durable change in relationships;
  • participants’ accounts are independent of the researcher, instructor, or cohort context;
  • or a facilitator can interpret an artwork as a diagnosis of the person who made it.

The study’s value lies in the process it makes visible, not in a universal prescription.

My interpretation for group practice

My own work with groups makes Reilly’s distinction useful because teams often move to solutions before they have made the problem discussable. They write communication rules, redefine roles, or ask for transparency while the underlying fear, rivalry, or dependence remains untouched.

An arts-based prompt may offer another route. A group could create a shared image of its present condition, make two masks for its public image and private experience, or represent a recurring interaction through metaphor or a short scene. The exercise should then lead to careful collective inquiry:

  • What do we notice in the work?
  • Which pattern feels familiar?
  • Whose experience is missing?
  • How might each of us help sustain this pattern?
  • What small change could we test together?

These are implications I draw from the study, not a protocol validated by it. Their ethical conditions matter as much as their creativity. Participation should be voluntary. Members should be able to choose what they disclose. The facilitator should not infer personality, trauma, or motive from an artwork. The group needs clear boundaries for confidentiality, and the activity should not be tied to punishment or performance evaluation.

Art can create visibility, but visibility without agency and safety can become exposure.

The question I carry forward

The most useful question this reading leaves me with is not whether art is “good for teams.” It is more precise:

When a group cannot yet speak directly about a recurring pattern, what form can make the shared experience visible without assigning a culprit or forcing disclosure?

Reilly’s study suggests that art can sometimes become that form. Its contribution is not magic, entertainment, or neuroscientific proof. It is a different way of knowing what is happening between people—and a possible beginning for a more honest conversation.

Primary source