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Back to School Special: Teaching Love & Learning Freedom w/ Dr. Carla Shalaby
4 Plays9 months ago
Many of you are already working to get your classrooms ready and will be welcoming students for the first day in the next couple of weeks, if you haven’t already. It’s a magical and stressful time of year, so we wanted to release Dr Carla Shalaby’s 2024 Conference to Restore Humanity keynote as a “back to school” special podcast. Carla speaks so powerfully to her own practical experience of human-centered education and why we do what we do: moving away from control, surveillance, and punishment, towards a model based on collective care, inclusion, and restorative practice. We hope you find it a great way to center ways of thinking about classroom management that will help get the school year started off on the right foot and sustain community with students throughout the next several months. As Carla reminds us, "Being good at human being requires a ton of work and investment, and perhaps most of all, an intentional rejection of a culture of disposability, the idea that there's ever such a thing as a throwaway person." If you prefer video, that’s up on our YouTube channel as well, just search for Human Restoration Project.
Thanks for listening, and we hope you have an amazing school year! Let us know if you need anything.
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Transcript
Introduction to Human-Centered Education
00:00:12
Speaker
Hey, everyone.
00:00:13
Speaker
Many of you are already working to get your classrooms ready and will be welcoming students for the first day here in the next couple of weeks, if you haven't already.
00:00:21
Speaker
It's a magical and stressful time of year.
00:00:24
Speaker
So we wanted to release Dr. Carla Shalabi's 2024 Conference to Restore Humanity keynote as a back to school special podcast.
From Control to Care: Reimagining Education Practices
00:00:32
Speaker
Carla speaks so powerfully to her own practical experience of human-centered education and why we do what we do, moving away from control, surveillance, and punishment, and towards a model based on collective care, inclusion, and restorative practice.
00:00:47
Speaker
We hope you find it a great way to center ways of thinking about classroom management that'll help get the school year started off on the right foot and sustain community with students throughout the next several months.
00:00:57
Speaker
As Carla reminds us, being good at human being requires a ton of work and investment, and perhaps most of all, an intentional rejection of a culture of disposability, the idea that there's ever such a thing as a throwaway person.
00:01:12
Speaker
If you prefer video, that's up on our YouTube channel too.
00:01:15
Speaker
Just search for Human Restoration Project.
00:01:17
Speaker
Thanks as always for listening.
00:01:19
Speaker
We hope you have an amazing school year and let us know if you need anything.
Human Being as a Practice
00:01:30
Speaker
Hello, Human Restoration Project folks.
00:01:32
Speaker
I'm so just delighted really to be with you.
00:01:36
Speaker
I'm so grateful that you're here.
00:01:38
Speaker
I know this is a time when folks are just especially beleaguered and unwell and really needing and seeking spaces of restoration themselves.
00:01:54
Speaker
So I hope we might find some of that in one another today.
00:01:58
Speaker
I wanted to talk today about teaching love and learning freedom, what it means to practice human being.
00:02:06
Speaker
So I think of human being as a verb, something you do in action, and like all actions, something that requires lots of skill building and practice to be good at.
00:02:19
Speaker
So being good at human being requires a ton of work and investment, and perhaps most of all, an intentional rejection of a culture of disposability, the idea that there's ever such thing as a throwaway person.
00:02:36
Speaker
So in keeping with that, and in keeping with that as a core philosophy, guiding light North Star for me personally,
00:02:45
Speaker
Anytime I'm sharing space as we are today, I always start with a moment of silence as a way to allow people to be with whatever grief they may be carrying.
00:02:57
Speaker
And also because in times of mass death, mass murder, I think to fail to recognize the loss of life is
00:03:08
Speaker
is another way that we invest in a culture of disposability.
00:03:13
Speaker
And I'm really interested in divesting from a culture of disposability.
00:03:18
Speaker
And that means pause with intentionality,
00:03:23
Speaker
even when we have precious time together to be with the loss of human life.
00:03:32
Speaker
So please take a quiet moment of silence for yourself and for each other now.
00:03:48
Speaker
Thank you.
Collective Responsibility and Care in Education
00:03:50
Speaker
Okay, I wanna also begin with an offering for you.
00:03:54
Speaker
This is a poem that I return to often as, again, another guidepost for me.
00:04:00
Speaker
It's called Shoulders by Naomi Shehab Nye.
00:04:06
Speaker
A man crosses the street in rain, stepping gently, looking two times north and south, because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
00:04:16
Speaker
No car must splash him,
00:04:18
Speaker
No car drive too near to his shadow.
00:04:22
Speaker
This man carries the world's most sensitive cargo, but he's not marked.
00:04:27
Speaker
Nowhere does his jacket say fragile, handle with care.
00:04:32
Speaker
His ear fills up with breathing.
00:04:35
Speaker
He hears the hum of a boy's dream deep inside him.
00:04:40
Speaker
We're not going to be able to live in this world if we are not willing to do what he is doing with one another.
00:04:47
Speaker
The road will only be wide.
00:04:49
Speaker
The rain will never stop falling.
00:04:55
Speaker
I wanna jump right in so that we use our time together as well as possible.
00:05:00
Speaker
And I just can't wait to be with you all for questions and answers.
00:05:02
Speaker
So please, of course, collect your confusions, your concerns, the things you hate, the things you love.
00:05:10
Speaker
Just keep note of all of that, because I'm really excited to talk with you about these ideas.
00:05:14
Speaker
This format's a little rough.
00:05:16
Speaker
Of course, I prefer to be interacting with you and I'm excited to get to interact with you around these ideas.
00:05:21
Speaker
But these are the three that we're gonna consider together today, okay?
00:05:24
Speaker
The first is that safety and control are incompatible.
00:05:29
Speaker
Where there is control, there can never be safety.
00:05:31
Speaker
And that control prevents us from learning to practice our freedom responsibly.
00:05:36
Speaker
So that's the first idea that we're going to unpack together.
00:05:40
Speaker
The second is that punishment and accountability are incompatible.
00:05:44
Speaker
Okay, so where there is punishment, there can never be accountability.
00:05:49
Speaker
And that's a second idea that we will unpack together.
00:05:52
Speaker
And the third is that human being is a verb, and every day is an opportunity to practice it both in and outside of classrooms.
00:06:00
Speaker
So we can engage a curriculum and a practice and a pedagogy and a way of being, of care, as a challenge to the culture of throwaway people.
00:06:10
Speaker
Okay, so each of these three ideas we'll treat in turn and go into it a bit so that we can argue about it when we get to be on the live Q&A.
Freedom and Responsibility in Education
00:06:18
Speaker
I want to think about the difference between safety and control.
00:06:22
Speaker
I want to think about how we define safety.
00:06:24
Speaker
I think when I, I mean, sorry, how we define freedom.
00:06:27
Speaker
When I talk about freedom, people often misunderstand me to mean that freedom means getting to do whatever you want.
00:06:35
Speaker
And I want to be really clear that I am absolutely about the practice of freedom.
00:06:40
Speaker
And I absolutely do not define freedom as the ability to do whatever you want.
00:06:45
Speaker
Okay, I want to offer this definition of freedom for us to think about and toy with and play with together.
00:06:52
Speaker
Okay, I'm going to move over a little bit so that you can see the whole thing.
00:06:56
Speaker
Freedom means safely getting to be our whole human selves in community with other whole human selves without any threats or assaults to our well-being.
00:07:09
Speaker
That's part one.
00:07:11
Speaker
That is our right to freedom.
00:07:14
Speaker
Part two is our responsibility.
00:07:16
Speaker
Freedom means using our power to demand that each of us is taken care of, protected, treated with dignity and affirmed.
00:07:25
Speaker
Every time I am talking about, thinking about, teaching about freedom, I am teaching it and talking about it as both a right
00:07:33
Speaker
something that we have just by virtue of being human and a responsibility, something that we must ensure for others because no person has the right to freedom if we each don't mind our responsibility to freedom.
00:07:47
Speaker
By that I mean,
00:07:49
Speaker
You could never be a free person, safe, getting to be your whole human self, if I violate that right at every turn.
00:08:00
Speaker
So your freedom depends on my actions.
00:08:03
Speaker
So freedom is my responsibility if it is to be your right.
00:08:07
Speaker
So when I talk, especially to young people, but really to anybody about what freedom means, I try to frame it as much as possible as a responsibility, something that we owe one another.
00:08:19
Speaker
When I think about defining it for young children, this is the definition of freedom that I use.
00:08:25
Speaker
Freedom means we keep us safe.
00:08:29
Speaker
We protect everyone's bodies and feelings, and we protect our planet.
00:08:34
Speaker
I'm gonna give you a quiet moment to think about this definition of freedom and how I'm framing it as a responsibility.
00:08:45
Speaker
Freedom means we keep us safe.
00:08:49
Speaker
That's a phrase that I borrow from abolitionists movements that insist that it is not police who keep us safe.
00:08:58
Speaker
We keep us safe.
00:09:02
Speaker
When I'm talking with teens, I level up a bit here.
00:09:06
Speaker
Freedom means we keep us safe.
00:09:09
Speaker
We move and act in ways that reduce harm and that protect the well-being of all people and of our planet.
00:09:19
Speaker
Again, it's a responsibility.
00:09:21
Speaker
There is a focus here on the reduction of harm.
00:09:25
Speaker
These are abolitionist principles that are built into a working everyday school-friendly definition of freedom as a responsibility to protect each other's bodies, feelings, and our planet.
00:09:39
Speaker
Because while we are talking, of course, about human being, there is no human being without the sustainability and the life of all land and waters and living and non-living creatures.
00:09:50
Speaker
And these are not less important than human beings.
00:09:53
Speaker
Okay.
00:09:53
Speaker
So we really try to keep a focus on that as well.
00:09:57
Speaker
This poster is up everywhere around our building.
00:10:00
Speaker
It is our core anchor poster for safety.
00:10:06
Speaker
We keep us safe.
00:10:07
Speaker
We protect everyone's bodies and feelings and we protect the planet.
00:10:10
Speaker
This responsibility shapes everything that we do.
00:10:13
Speaker
It is our working definition of the relationship between safety and freedom and our behaviors.
00:10:22
Speaker
I wanna contrast that surveillance poster with the giant security camera with this kind of messaging instead.
00:10:32
Speaker
I don't watch my neighbors, I see them.
00:10:36
Speaker
We make our community safer together.
00:10:40
Speaker
These are ways to define and to think about safety that are outside of logics of control, of surveillance, of policing, of tighter restrictions of freedom.
Redefining Safety in Educational Spaces
00:10:53
Speaker
Okay.
00:10:55
Speaker
As a challenge to this poster around our school, I want to show you one campaign that we offered our high school students, our young people.
00:11:04
Speaker
We put up our own poster next to the district provided poster.
00:11:08
Speaker
What does safety mean to you?
00:11:09
Speaker
It features a block print by one of our young people and we invited our students to define safety in and on their own terms and then we took
00:11:19
Speaker
some of what they provided back.
00:11:21
Speaker
And we created this campaign of safety around how they define safety.
00:11:26
Speaker
Okay.
00:11:26
Speaker
So we use Jay-Z's lyric, nobody wins when the family feuds, we protect each other.
00:11:31
Speaker
We keep us safe.
00:11:33
Speaker
And we use some of their offerings from that QR code.
00:11:36
Speaker
They were talking about care, about joy, about community as the things that make them feel safe, that signal to them.
00:11:44
Speaker
a sense of safety and community belonging, a sense of seeing each other instead of watching each other.
00:11:50
Speaker
And so we created these posters, which are all around our school building, trying to redefine safety, trying to challenge surveillance as a synonym for safety.
00:12:00
Speaker
It is not.
00:12:01
Speaker
Policing and surveillance are not synonyms for safety.
00:12:05
Speaker
And I really want to try to build the argument that control and safety are incompatible.
00:12:10
Speaker
I'm going to keep building on that idea before we move on.
00:12:14
Speaker
I want to show you a translation of what it looked like at our elementary building.
00:12:18
Speaker
Our school serves kindergarten through grade 12.
00:12:20
Speaker
So two buildings, but we serve all grade levels.
00:12:24
Speaker
These are some of our playground signs that will go up this year.
00:12:28
Speaker
We're, of course, seeing a lot of behaviors on the playground.
00:12:31
Speaker
Any of you that work in elementary school see a ton of behaviors on the playground.
00:12:36
Speaker
So we are trying to keep on theme with the We Keep Us Safe program.
00:12:40
Speaker
We're trying to address some of the common behaviors that we're seeing on the playground, throwing rocks, not sharing the swings, harming and hurting the environment, the trees, the bees, the land, the waters that are there, you know, sliding down the slide when there's still a ton of people just sitting there at the bottom.
00:12:58
Speaker
Right.
00:12:58
Speaker
We're trying to address these behaviors.
00:13:00
Speaker
And we didn't want a list of rules.
00:13:02
Speaker
So instead, we are just talking about our responsibilities and what it looks like in practice to keep us safe.
00:13:10
Speaker
It looks like giving other people turns, protecting what lives here, rocks staying on the ground, checking below before sliding, right?
00:13:19
Speaker
These are still ways to shift behaviors, which is what we want to do.
00:13:24
Speaker
But we want to shift behaviors through this lens of keeping each other safe.
00:13:29
Speaker
All of this is under the umbrella of practicing freedom.
00:13:33
Speaker
You have the freedom to throw a rock at another person.
00:13:39
Speaker
You have the freedom to hog the swing.
00:13:43
Speaker
You have the freedom to kill and stomp the flowers and the trees that are on our playground.
00:13:50
Speaker
Those are freedoms that you have.
00:13:53
Speaker
What we want young people, all people to learn to do, adults are terrible at this as well.
00:14:00
Speaker
We want them to learn that though they have those freedoms, they want to use their freedom responsibly.
00:14:06
Speaker
So you do have a choice whether or not to throw the rocks, to hog the swings.
00:14:11
Speaker
And we want you to start to think about what it means to be accountable to other human beings as you think about how you want to use your freedom.
00:14:19
Speaker
So any kind of messaging that we can do at all grades and at all levels to center behaviors around impact to other human and non-living things.
00:14:31
Speaker
Sorry, I'm outside talking to you and speaking of other living things, there is a very scary one right near my foot.
00:14:38
Speaker
So excuse my distraction, but we want to really think about the impact of our behavior on other things and people.
00:14:48
Speaker
Okay, not the impact on ourselves.
00:14:51
Speaker
And I'm going to talk more about this when we get to punishment.
00:14:53
Speaker
All right, I want to think about the culture of disposability and how it shows up in schools, right?
Rethinking Classroom Management
00:14:58
Speaker
And so this is ultimately a project that is trying to intervene on policing in prisons, but I really want to show you how we can do that just as everyday educators, okay?
00:15:08
Speaker
And it's really about interrupting logics of disposability.
00:15:12
Speaker
So I want to think about what we do in schools typically around classroom management.
00:15:16
Speaker
We determine and post classroom rules and norms, whether we do that together in community with kids or on our own,
00:15:22
Speaker
doesn't really matter for my purposes right now.
00:15:24
Speaker
The bottom line is we determine them somehow and we post them.
00:15:28
Speaker
And then we use very complex systems of reward and punishment to enforce those rules.
00:15:32
Speaker
We flag children who consistently violate them.
00:15:36
Speaker
And we intervene on those children either by punishing them or pathologizing them, right?
00:15:40
Speaker
We look for what is wrong with this child that they will not follow the rules of the classroom.
00:15:45
Speaker
Ultimately, we will end up having to exclude those children who cannot or will not adhere to the rules that we have set up.
00:15:54
Speaker
Right.
00:15:54
Speaker
This is typically our classroom management logic.
00:15:56
Speaker
This is, as a matter of fact, what we teach new teachers, typically in traditional teacher training programs.
00:16:03
Speaker
This is the logic of classroom management.
00:16:05
Speaker
You be clear.
00:16:06
Speaker
about your expectations for behavior.
00:16:09
Speaker
You flag people who refuse to meet those expectations.
00:16:13
Speaker
And we, you know, begin a series of interventions on that individual person.
00:16:19
Speaker
I want to think about what we do out in the world.
00:16:22
Speaker
Okay, we determine loss.
00:16:26
Speaker
And then we use police to enforce those laws.
00:16:29
Speaker
We search for and we capture the individuals who violate those laws.
00:16:33
Speaker
We intervene on these individuals through fines, arrests, or other forms of punishment.
00:16:37
Speaker
And ultimately, we exclude, through incarceration, individuals who cannot or will not adhere to those laws.
00:16:46
Speaker
because our schools right now are made in the images of the society that surrounds it.
00:16:50
Speaker
And what I wanna invite us to do is to think about the world we want and create the kinds of classrooms and schools that might prepare people for that world instead of this world that we have now.
00:17:00
Speaker
It's another image by Molly Costello.
00:17:04
Speaker
We really wanna uproot tendencies toward policing others that exist inside you.
00:17:11
Speaker
And I will say with love,
00:17:13
Speaker
with all love and all grace that educators really do often do the work of police officers.
00:17:23
Speaker
They do the work of policing, of controlling, of surveilling, of investigating, of doling out consequences, fines, punishments.
00:17:34
Speaker
And when you find yourself doing that, I just want to challenge us into understanding that we did not sign up to be police officers.
00:17:44
Speaker
We signed up to be educators.
00:17:45
Speaker
And there is a key difference in the way that we want to approach undesirable behaviors and the culture of the classroom and the school through a lens of teaching and learning rather than through a lens of policing and controlling and surveillance and criminalizing.
00:18:05
Speaker
So let's think about the difference here.
00:18:07
Speaker
I wanna look at this kind of ubiquitously used poster.
00:18:10
Speaker
Just focus all the way on the, to me, it's the left.
00:18:13
Speaker
It's the lineup and hallway routine.
00:18:15
Speaker
Be quiet, listen, look ahead, hands at your side, stay in line, walking feet.
00:18:19
Speaker
This is just a ubiquitous poster that we see in early childhood spaces.
00:18:24
Speaker
They very, very clearly outline the behaviors that we expect as we're lining up and walking in the hallway, right?
00:18:31
Speaker
And we practice these, we go over them.
00:18:34
Speaker
I want to bring back, though, this definition of freedom.
00:18:38
Speaker
Freedom means we keep us safe.
00:18:40
Speaker
We protect everyone's bodies and feelings.
00:18:43
Speaker
Now, I want to kind of apply this definition of freedom to this poster to start to understand a different kind of poster that we might use that would reframe away from control and toward safety, harm, and impact to other human beings.
00:19:04
Speaker
They are both aimed at the same set of behaviors, which is to walk safely, thoughtfully, and considerately from point A to point B when we are in shared public space, like the hallways.
00:19:16
Speaker
Okay.
00:19:17
Speaker
But instead of using language and means of control of bodies, we're trying to teach children to be mindful of the ways that their movements and their bodies might impact the people around them.
00:19:32
Speaker
Okay.
00:19:34
Speaker
Signage is one small key and important way to shift our values away from control and toward the responsible practice of our freedoms.
00:19:45
Speaker
Here's another example from our high school.
00:19:47
Speaker
Originally, there was this giant sign in the library.
00:19:50
Speaker
It said no food in the library or gym because as you can imagine, there's a ton of food in the library and the gym and then a lot of trash.
00:19:58
Speaker
Okay.
00:20:00
Speaker
Seeing that sign, I went through and I added this bottom part, right?
00:20:03
Speaker
Please help love and care for this special place.
00:20:09
Speaker
As a difference, again, a shift in tone, in values, in the reasoning behind our requests for a different set of behaviors.
00:20:21
Speaker
Okay.
00:20:24
Speaker
at our elementary school, seeing what happened with our library at the high school.
00:20:29
Speaker
When I built out our library at the elementary school, this is the poster that I created.
00:20:33
Speaker
Please forgive, of course, I wanted to keep these youngies anonymous here, but the library that we deserve, it stays loved, organized, peaceful, clean, safe, beautiful.
00:20:47
Speaker
It's different than a list of rules.
00:20:49
Speaker
It requires discussion.
00:20:52
Speaker
It requires practice.
00:20:53
Speaker
It requires some debate.
00:20:56
Speaker
What does it mean for our library to stay safe?
00:21:02
Speaker
What does it mean?
00:21:04
Speaker
That's a discussion.
00:21:05
Speaker
It's a series of lessons.
00:21:08
Speaker
It's an engagement of teaching and learning.
00:21:10
Speaker
Okay.
00:21:11
Speaker
It's not just a set of rules that tell us exactly how to use our bodies.
00:21:15
Speaker
It's instead an invitation to imagine together what it means for our library to be loved and to think about what that means for our individual actions within that space.
00:21:26
Speaker
Okay.
00:21:28
Speaker
Give you a couple more examples here.
00:21:31
Speaker
One is from our first floor library and the other is from our cafeteria, right?
00:21:35
Speaker
So at our cafeteria, we're trying to shift behaviors and we want to show people, you know, especially because they're young, just exactly what it means to care in the cafeteria.
00:21:45
Speaker
And so here are some ways that it might sound.
00:21:47
Speaker
Can you make space for me?
00:21:50
Speaker
Need my help cleaning that mess?
00:21:53
Speaker
Can you move more gently, please?
00:21:55
Speaker
Do you have enough to eat and drink?
00:21:57
Speaker
Can I take out your trash?
00:21:59
Speaker
Did you forget to say thank you?
00:22:01
Speaker
They're invitations.
00:22:03
Speaker
They're prompts.
00:22:04
Speaker
They're sentence starters.
00:22:05
Speaker
They're scaffolds.
00:22:07
Speaker
for young people in thinking about how we encourage each other to use our freedom responsibly.
00:22:12
Speaker
Okay, so we're actually trying to skill build the way that you would with any content area in a school building.
00:22:19
Speaker
Okay, there's a set of things we're trying to teach and we want to teach it through a ton of support, scaffolding, concrete examples and practice.
00:22:29
Speaker
Right.
00:22:29
Speaker
Same with our first floor library.
00:22:31
Speaker
We want to bring calm energy, move around slowly.
00:22:34
Speaker
Right.
00:22:34
Speaker
Again, we're trying to think about how do I word rules as invitations to care?
00:22:43
Speaker
Just trying to be as concrete as possible so that you can see how doable and makeable these shifts are.
00:22:49
Speaker
They're really easy little shifts, but they are interventions on control.
00:22:55
Speaker
They're interventions on policing.
00:22:57
Speaker
They're interventions on surveillance.
00:22:59
Speaker
They're interventions on punishment.
00:23:02
Speaker
So these tiny everyday shifts are trying to challenge culture of punishment, criminalization, and disposability.
00:23:12
Speaker
It's about restoring human beings.
00:23:15
Speaker
I just really wanna challenge us to recognize that we often use safety as a justification for control.
00:23:25
Speaker
OK.
00:23:26
Speaker
And so we'll say, well, I have to exclude.
00:23:30
Speaker
I have to enforce these rules.
00:23:31
Speaker
I have to do X, Y and Z oppressive controlling, surveilling behavior because that's the only way to keep us safe.
00:23:38
Speaker
No, it's not the only way to keep us safe.
00:23:40
Speaker
OK, safety does not result from control because control steals our opportunity to practice freedom.
00:23:47
Speaker
So I invite you to engage a very controversial kind of thought, which is
00:23:52
Speaker
classrooms that have the best traditional form of classroom management, where the rules are extremely clear and the enforcement of those rules is extremely consistent.
00:24:04
Speaker
Those classrooms most steal the opportunity of young people to learn the skills required by freedom because they don't need to practice them.
00:24:15
Speaker
The way the environment will run is already decided for them and the control of bodies
00:24:22
Speaker
is the definition of safety.
00:24:23
Speaker
So those children never have the experience or the opportunity to practice what happens when there are no rules in place and they have to move with care and thoughtfulness and consideration for other human beings.
True Accountability vs. Punishment
00:24:39
Speaker
Safety results from every member of a community having their needs met.
00:24:43
Speaker
If your needs are met, you don't have to use, you know, extra legal means to secure your needs.
00:24:51
Speaker
It results from belonging so that care and inclusion are the work of safety.
00:24:55
Speaker
All right.
00:24:56
Speaker
We often think of exclusion as required by safety.
00:24:59
Speaker
I have to kick this person out because they are unsafe.
00:25:02
Speaker
In fact, if that person had the most genuine kind of radical sense of belonging and responsibility toward the other people in that community, they would be less likely to cause harm.
00:25:14
Speaker
And so care and inclusion and belonging are the very hard work, the pro-social work of safety.
00:25:20
Speaker
And safety results from building the skills required by Freedom Care.
00:25:25
Speaker
We can fight about that when we're on the live Q&A.
00:25:28
Speaker
But I'm going to say that you're either practicing safety or control.
00:25:31
Speaker
They don't go together.
00:25:32
Speaker
They're incompatible.
00:25:33
Speaker
Okay.
00:25:34
Speaker
It's nice to not have you live to argue with me right now.
00:25:36
Speaker
We'll argue later.
00:25:37
Speaker
Okay.
00:25:39
Speaker
Second, right?
00:25:40
Speaker
And we're getting actually toward the end.
00:25:42
Speaker
This will be a much shorter section because the first really leads us into the second.
00:25:46
Speaker
Punishment and accountability are not synonyms.
00:25:48
Speaker
Okay.
00:25:49
Speaker
I want to think about the phrase holding someone accountable.
00:25:53
Speaker
Okay.
00:25:55
Speaker
Sometimes we feel like we have to dole out consequences and punishments because it's the only way to hold someone accountable for their actions.
00:26:01
Speaker
I wanna challenge us to understand that there is never ever a way to hold another person accountable.
00:26:05
Speaker
It's actually impossible for me to hold you accountable or for you to hold me accountable.
00:26:10
Speaker
I'm gonna build that argument in the next few slides, right?
00:26:14
Speaker
We can only hold ourselves accountable.
00:26:16
Speaker
And I wanna offer a definition and a vision of accountability, some clarity around that because then it will be very, very obvious why I can't make you be accountable, all right?
00:26:25
Speaker
I want to think about rupture and repair.
00:26:26
Speaker
So I'm specifically focused on the side of this poster that says repair is more than I'm sorry.
00:26:33
Speaker
It's also naming it happens, owning our role, naming the impact and listening to the version that another person is offering us, wondering how the conflict was co-created and planning a way forward, making repair.
00:26:49
Speaker
All right.
00:26:50
Speaker
Those are like the five basic steps of accountability.
00:26:53
Speaker
Naming what happened, owning your role, naming the impact, wondering how it was co-created, planning a way forward.
00:26:59
Speaker
If that's what repair and accountability mean, how could I make you do any of it?
00:27:04
Speaker
How can I even make you name what happens?
00:27:07
Speaker
I can't force you to do that.
00:27:09
Speaker
So I can't even force you to meet the first standard of accountability.
00:27:14
Speaker
You have to be willing and able to do that yourself, committed to doing it.
00:27:18
Speaker
I can't force that.
00:27:19
Speaker
No punishment or consequence is going to force you into naming what happened, owning your role, naming the impact, listening to someone's version, planning a way forward.
00:27:27
Speaker
Okay.
00:27:28
Speaker
That's a set of skills and capacities that
00:27:31
Speaker
that need and deserve to be built over time and cannot be forced on anybody.
00:27:36
Speaker
I'm not going to go through all of this, but I want you to understand here, and I can bring this up again when we have our live Q&A if it's going to be helpful, but I want us to think about the ways in which defaulting to rules and punishment actually undercut accountability, okay?
00:27:54
Speaker
Okay.
00:27:56
Speaker
If I know I'm going to get in trouble for doing something that I did and I am a rational person, why would I admit what I did?
00:28:05
Speaker
It makes no sense.
00:28:07
Speaker
if there's going to be harm to me as a result of admitting what I've done, the only smart thing for me to do is refuse to admit what I have done.
00:28:18
Speaker
And so if a punishment is looming, I am de-incentivized from admitting what I have done.
00:28:26
Speaker
So punishment encourages lying.
00:28:28
Speaker
It encourages denial and it encourages the avoidance of consequences.
00:28:32
Speaker
What punishment does is
00:28:35
Speaker
is it motivates me to change my behavior because I don't want to get in trouble.
00:28:39
Speaker
I don't want harm to come to me.
00:28:43
Speaker
Accountability is encouraging someone to change their behavior because of the harm and the impact on somebody else.
00:28:51
Speaker
It's not about avoiding harm to yourself.
00:28:54
Speaker
It's about avoiding harm to other people, to a community, to a sense of safety, to another person's right to belonging.
00:29:04
Speaker
OK, so punishment makes us care and think about ourselves selfishly.
00:29:09
Speaker
And that is undercutting every effort that we might want to make toward building a community of accountability.
00:29:16
Speaker
OK, so I want to think about the skills and lessons that are required by self accountability.
00:29:22
Speaker
This is a set of 12 posters, again, that we have at our school that we post everywhere.
00:29:27
Speaker
I can name what I did.
00:29:29
Speaker
I can listen as someone explains how they were affected.
00:29:32
Speaker
I can describe the harm I caused.
00:29:34
Speaker
I can take responsibility for causing that harm.
00:29:37
Speaker
I can explain what I was thinking at the time.
00:29:40
Speaker
I can say what I have thought about since.
00:29:42
Speaker
I can work to make things right.
00:29:44
Speaker
I know that I cannot demand forgiveness.
00:29:47
Speaker
I can recognize my harmful patterns.
00:29:50
Speaker
I care enough to change.
00:29:51
Speaker
I can work to repair my relationships.
00:29:54
Speaker
I can work to restore my community.
00:29:57
Speaker
This is what is required by accountability.
00:30:00
Speaker
Punishment will not even get us the first thing.
00:30:03
Speaker
I can name what I did.
00:30:04
Speaker
It won't even get us there.
00:30:05
Speaker
Think about the work required to get somebody good at doing these 12 things.
00:30:10
Speaker
That's a curriculum.
00:30:12
Speaker
It's a lifelong curriculum and it's a curriculum that we ought to start early and that we ought to practice often.
00:30:18
Speaker
And I can't think of a better place to do so than schools and classrooms because they are microcosms of the world and they are gardens of conflict.
00:30:27
Speaker
And so they provide numerous multitude opportunities to practice accountability.
00:30:33
Speaker
What a beautiful opportunity to practice accountability together.
00:30:37
Speaker
Punishment will undercut any effort to practice accountability.
00:30:42
Speaker
Okay, I'm going to actually skip through here.
00:30:46
Speaker
I want to invite us to believe that stepping into our accountability can be a real moment of liberation.
00:30:54
Speaker
I want us to believe that for ourselves in our own conflicts, in our own lives, and I want us to offer this to young people because they deserve this form of freedom.
00:31:03
Speaker
They deserve the freedom of
00:31:05
Speaker
to learn how their behaviors impact others and to be in good and right and healthy relationships that are rich, that are thriving, that are joyful, that are balanced, that are just, that are fair, that are caring.
00:31:18
Speaker
They deserve those kinds of relationships.
00:31:20
Speaker
And we have an opportunity to help them to develop them.
00:31:26
Speaker
So restorative responses are really around harm.
00:31:29
Speaker
Okay.
00:31:31
Speaker
They're around harm reduction.
00:31:34
Speaker
And I really consider harm reduction as a key practice of human beings.
00:31:37
Speaker
So what exactly are you sorry for?
00:31:39
Speaker
How have you been affected?
00:31:40
Speaker
Who else has been affected?
00:31:41
Speaker
These are the kinds of questions that focus on impact to others instead of getting in trouble ourselves.
00:31:48
Speaker
Okay, so not what's the consequence to you if you do X, Y, or Z, but what is the impact of your actions on our community, on our sense of safety, and on other human beings and other living and non-living things to which we are responsible, all right?
00:32:06
Speaker
We are really having to unlearn generations of teaching that taught us how to dehumanize and encouraged us to prioritize punishment.
00:32:14
Speaker
What an exciting invitation to do this unlearning, to be better as educators, but to be better as human beings in this world of conflict.
Practicing Human Being and Justice-Oriented Care
00:32:26
Speaker
Wrapping up, human being is a verb.
00:32:29
Speaker
To be human is a verb.
00:32:31
Speaker
Requires practice, requires principle.
00:32:34
Speaker
It requires skill building.
00:32:37
Speaker
So what are the kinds of actions that challenge the culture of disposability?
00:32:42
Speaker
I'm gonna quickly review the difference between kindness and care so that we might understand care as one of the key ways that we practice freedom.
00:32:51
Speaker
Okay, so I want you to imagine a situation where a kindergartner with diabetes can't eat the sugary snacks at a class party.
00:32:58
Speaker
All right, the kind act here in response to that may be to provide a couple of snack options that the diabetic child can safely eat.
00:33:08
Speaker
That's kind.
00:33:10
Speaker
There's nothing wrong with kind.
00:33:11
Speaker
Kind is great.
00:33:12
Speaker
Okay.
00:33:12
Speaker
It's just, I want you to contrast that kind act, which is interpersonal and singular and individual with the justice work of care.
00:33:22
Speaker
A care response, a justice response here would be to learn with all the kids in the kindergarten class about all the dietary needs of that community and to design a snack menu for every class party where every child can eat every snack available.
00:33:35
Speaker
Okay.
00:33:36
Speaker
Engaging in that kind of work is political work.
00:33:39
Speaker
It's the political work of inclusion, care and belonging.
00:33:43
Speaker
It's skill building.
00:33:44
Speaker
So it's not it's my responsibility as a teacher to serve the special needs of this one sick child.
00:33:51
Speaker
It's that the illness is a fact of life.
00:33:55
Speaker
It is not a special need.
00:33:56
Speaker
It is a basic need.
00:33:58
Speaker
We all have needs around food and we ought to have a class menu that is inclusive of all people.
00:34:04
Speaker
It is a political shift, okay, toward disability justice, toward radical inclusion, toward safety, toward belonging, toward care.
00:34:14
Speaker
It interrupts a culture of disposability, okay?
00:34:19
Speaker
I'm gonna keep going for the sake of time because people can only listen to so much so much.
00:34:24
Speaker
I am going to go through one example here.
00:34:27
Speaker
So I want to think about teaching rules versus practicing cares.
00:34:31
Speaker
And I want to kind of focus on the mask mandate one, because I know that people think this one is untimely, but to me, it will forever be timely.
00:34:39
Speaker
And it is, again, fundamentally about disability justice.
00:34:42
Speaker
As a matter of fact, disability justice work.
00:34:45
Speaker
has been the most helpful body of literature in advancing my own understanding of what it means to practice freedom, right, because it really is about safety and access, and that radical kind of inclusion that politically shifts toward a constant
00:35:01
Speaker
awareness of how our behaviors impact the literal lives of those around us.
00:35:06
Speaker
Okay, so I want to think about the fact that mask mandates are no longer in effect.
00:35:10
Speaker
So now the rule is that everyone can just make their own decisions about whether or not to wear one, right, both in school and out of school.
00:35:18
Speaker
I want you to imagine a teaching and learning scenario instead of that rule.
00:35:23
Speaker
It's a freedom that people get to practice, right?
00:35:25
Speaker
You have the freedom to decide whether to wear a mask or not.
00:35:28
Speaker
I'll be done in one second, okay?
00:35:30
Speaker
So imagine instead that students read and discuss the science about how airborne viruses are spread.
00:35:37
Speaker
And they talk about individual choice versus the common good.
00:35:40
Speaker
They share their health and immunity vulnerabilities in their households.
00:35:45
Speaker
And then they consider wearing masks as an act of protection, right?
00:35:48
Speaker
So with the information from their actual community, they make an informed decision about whether or not a mask is necessary.
00:35:57
Speaker
A decision that is focused on impact to others and how do I use my freedom in a way that is responsible to the people around me and that is focused on those most vulnerable.
00:36:10
Speaker
These are all ways to politically shift, to use teaching and learning as a way to shift politically toward care and impact and harm reduction and inclusion and belonging, which are ultimately the ideal ways to increase safety and to advance life, to breathe life back into our schools, our communities.
00:36:34
Speaker
some more visual examples, okay?
00:36:37
Speaker
These are the kinds of posters we put up during Pride Month and all year.
00:36:42
Speaker
Everyone deserves love.
00:36:44
Speaker
We protect each other.
00:36:45
Speaker
Everybody is somebody.
00:36:47
Speaker
All bodies are beautiful.
00:36:48
Speaker
My body belongs to me, right?
00:36:50
Speaker
Thinking and learning and teaching about consent.
00:36:52
Speaker
I am perfectly made and everybody deserves access.
00:36:59
Speaker
These are the posters that guide our social studies curriculum.
00:37:02
Speaker
I wanted to include these as a way for you to understand the way that our actual content area curriculum is also still feeding and advancing our goal of restoring human being, of practicing human being.
00:37:16
Speaker
as a verb.
00:37:17
Speaker
So these are the anchor posters for the social studies and Laksh is for grade one, all bodies unique and essential is for kindergarten and miigwech as a way to again extend our relations, our web of relations and our web of kinship beyond human beings and toward land and waters is our third grade anchor poster for all of the third grade social studies and science curriculum.
00:37:40
Speaker
Finally, again, I want to think about even how the celebration of holidays can be an invitation to challenge a culture of disposability.
00:37:50
Speaker
We make sure that we celebrate the holidays that honor the lives of the people we love whom we've lost.
00:37:57
Speaker
We think a lot about grief, not as a social emotional, not just as a social emotional support, but as a political intervention toward insisting on the value of life.
Honoring Life and Embracing Grief
00:38:11
Speaker
an interruption of the idea that there is ever a such thing as a throwaway person.
00:38:17
Speaker
There is never a such thing as a throwaway person.
00:38:20
Speaker
And in death, we celebrate the lives and the legacies of those who've come before.
00:38:26
Speaker
We share space to be with each other in grief as a way to uplift life, as a way to interrupt logics of disposability.
00:38:37
Speaker
This is up in my house next to the sink.
00:38:42
Speaker
Wash the plate, not because it's dirty, nor because you're told to wash it, but because you love the person who will use it next.
00:38:51
Speaker
I'll leave you with one final poem as I close out.
00:38:55
Speaker
It is again by Naomi She Have Nye.
00:38:58
Speaker
It's called Red Brocade.
00:39:02
Speaker
The Arabs used to say, when a stranger appears at your door, feed him for three days before asking who he is, where he's come from, where he's headed.
00:39:13
Speaker
That way, he'll have strength enough to answer, or by then, you'll be such good friends you don't care.
00:39:21
Speaker
Let's go back to that.
00:39:22
Speaker
Rice?
00:39:23
Speaker
Pine nuts?
00:39:24
Speaker
Here, take the red brocade pillow.
00:39:27
Speaker
My child will serve water to your horse.
00:39:31
Speaker
No, I was not busy when you came.
00:39:33
Speaker
I was not preparing to be busy.
00:39:35
Speaker
That's the armor everyone put on to pretend they had a purpose in the world.
00:39:39
Speaker
I refuse to be claimed.
00:39:40
Speaker
Your plate is waiting.
00:39:43
Speaker
We will snip fresh mints into your tea.
00:39:46
Speaker
Okay.
00:39:49
Speaker
With love, with gratitude, with care and in solidarity.
Closing Remarks and Encouragement
00:39:53
Speaker
Cannot wait to be with you for the live Q&A.
00:39:56
Speaker
Thank you for your work and your commitment to the practice of human beings.
00:40:03
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
00:40:06
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change.
00:40:10
Speaker
If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player.
00:40:14
Speaker
Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
00:40:21
Speaker
Thank you.