Thursday, March 14, 1968
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
7
Human relations course is unique; class members study one another
By Cynthia Smith Kansan Staff Reporter
The subject being taught is you and your fellow students.
You have a textbook, but it's only used as a guideline.
The instructor walks in and takes his place, but he doesn't begin to lecture. He just sits there and waits for someone to say something.
The class is human relations 141, a unique class in that it is completely unstructured and the instructors of the various sections are treated more as members of the class than as teachers. They are from varied backgrounds and include a psychiatrist, two ministers, a clinical psychologist and a behavioral scientist in business administration.
Grades are not given on the basis of what is done in class. But the students write an analysis of what went on in class one day that week, and are graded on it.
The various sections have a yearly enrollment of about 560 students.
The class will discuss anything as long as it relates to the group, according to Tim Theis, instructor of human relations.
Each member of the class also meets with one other member during the week to get to know him better.
One of the objectives of the course, according to Theis, is to help the student view his personality as others view it, and to help him gain a greater awareness of himself and others.
In a recent exercise, group
members explored emotions and reactions concerned with loss of sight. The exercise showed examples of how it feels to be dependent on other members of the group for "eyes," and the idea of physical proximity in relation to dependency and trust. Other exercises deal with the open expression of emotions such as anger, frustration, fear and happiness.
human relations, Theis said, and is based on a concept invented by accident at a conference for Intergroup Relations members in 1946.
The laboratory approach to human relations is only a part of
While discussing informally their observations of the other people at the conference, they saw what value such a concept could have in a formal situation. The training group, or T-grouping, concept was born.
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