Community, Interrupted: Reflections on a Paradigm Shift and the Role of the Adult in Adolescent Communities
Adolescent practitioners share stories and updates from their own schools and work in this series. If you’d like to share an update with us, please send an email to Kari@IMTIOhio.org. We’d love to hear from you!
In this first part of her three-part series on community building in schools during and after COVID closures, Regina Feldman, Program Director at Metro Montessori Middle School in Portland, Oregon, reflects on the need for adults to shift their thinking and embrace new paradigms.
I recently spoke with a former colleague who left education for another calling before the pandemic, and as we pondered all that had transpired since he left, I realized a chasm opening up between us, my words inflected by the hardships of teaching through the pandemic; his words light-footed, jumping back into the work at hand, bright with optimism and possibility. Educators are beginning to recover, communities are re-forming, but the pandemic changed us, changed our communities, changed the adolescents themselves, and we are still trying to figure out the nature of the shift.
COMMUNITY DURING THE PANDEMIC
Rarely is life a matter of black and white. In the depth of the pandemic that was a whole year of teaching online, our guide team created remarkable learning experiences for our adolescents. We invented an online Odyssey and sent students hiking on their own with backpacks filled with rocks to simulate an overnight backpacking trip. Students gathered in break-out rooms by “tent group”, cooked meals for themselves, spent a night sleeping in a tent in their family backyards. The pandemic brought blessings such as a cohort of five boys from Baltimore joining our online program, geographical distance and difference in time zone being minor nuisances as we bonded for a year over PE in the Park - in-person fun and games hosted by guides in Portland neighborhood parks and in parents’ backyards in Baltimore spanning the continent. We baked cookies together apart and proudly presented them to each other over Zoom. Locally, students drove by their friends’ houses to wish each other happy birthday from the safe distance of a car. In an Economics class, students interviewed local business owners about how their work had changed due to COVID-19, adolescents extending empathy to these adults. In another class, students grew vegetables in their backyards, a very place-based exercise and joyful lesson in self-sufficiency, then learned how to harvest and preserve.
The teaching team met in person whenever possible. We shared meals sitting very far apart and masked up to come a bit closer. We laughed over spirit day dress-ups and laughed and cried over all the ways adolescents will try to disappear when a camera points straight at their faces. We never felt as ‘on’ as when teaching online and never as empty as when we finally stepped away from our computers. Ironically, as muted as online teaching felt, equally extreme were the emotions we went through while doing it. The examples of meaningful learning and connection, bittersweet as we reached out to one another in mediated ways across physical distance and personal protection barriers, are, in fact, countless.
The greatest challenge for community - that is, in essence, the cultivation of relationships through direct communication and shared experience - was the lack of visceral texture that’s always there in face-to-face encounters, emotion travelling in free flow between us as we build structures of belonging (Block). No matter how hard we worked, that physical distance was palpable, and the adolescents, socially so sensitive, would slip away right under our eyes. Once we returned to in-person instruction, even with physical distancing precautions, cleaning protocols, and masking in place, the community started to re-emerge.
A NEW PARADIGM FOR COMMUNITY
Having worked our way through the 2022-23 school year, no one wants to think back much to pandemic school. Not long ago, we taught online for one day to bridge a day of bad air quality, and I still shudder remembering the post-traumatic effects of that day on all of us. No one misses teaching online. But, as the famous saying goes, crisis equals opportunity, and we learned a great deal from this one, including the fairly certain lesson that we may not be privileged to teach in-person forever. Extreme weather is the new normal, and I anticipate that life might be becoming more local to the effect that our adolescents’ homes will be satellite campuses. {1}
But for now, as we are again reliably gathering in classrooms, how are we rebuilding community and community culture with our students and among the adults? {2} Is the old solidarity that comes with spending extended time together good enough? Do we need new strategies? A different kind of effort? Trauma-informed care is no longer a post-traumatic, transitory way of looking out for our students, but the backdrop of a new paradigm, taking shape as part of a reconfigured adult-adolescent relationship. It reflects the uncertainty, tenuousness, and shifting boundaries between us as teens grow up in a world of climate change, gun violence, pandemics, and alternate accounts of ‘truth’. The disruptions of the in-person community due to fire, storms, a new virus, are likely to continue. Will they be too many and too convulsive to be sufficiently absorbed by the fabric of the side-by-side relationship of guide and adolescent?
What might the adolescent community of the future look like?
Every week, I find myself having this conversation with a colleague. I sense how the conversation that started as a mentoring one a year ago is shifting and becoming a dialogue attempting to bridge the gap between us. A new paradigm is spun as we speak. The paradigm suggests a structure of feeling and being that strains in new ways against secondary education as a system designed to reproduce rather than birth change. The new paradigm draws energy from a position of marginality, that privileged place so familiar to me as an anthropologist, to question the taken-for-granted. We have no choice but to recognize what we have taken for granted.
The paradigm is sore with the suffering of the young, chaffing against how their psyche is reined in by societal categorization and associated expectations. It invites self-reflection on how we as adults have been shaped and may, unintentionally, be doing violence to the adolescents in our care. I find myself pausing more than ever to observe and ponder a third way of being together I want to call “restorative,” since that is my intention. The pandemic has laid these feelings of our adolescents bare; now in plain view, if you’re looking, they strike me as an incongruent mix of frustration and pain, rebellion and yet utterly defiant self-acceptance and joi de vivre.
Not surprisingly, questions of sexuality and gender, so central to adolescent identity, are the generative ground of questioning the status-quo. What if boys were free to express their most tender emotions? Would there be less emotional and sexual abuse of women? What if girls abandoned a vision of themselves as objects and creatures of circumscribed intellectual and social potential? Would there be less anorexia and anxiety? Isn’t the worry and fear of parents when their child adopts they/them pronouns to a large extent symptomatic of a society unsettled, even terrified by fluidity? Can there be relaxation into the unknowable, more openness and freedom in how adolescents understand and present themselves? To match, can we, the adults in the adolescent community, support a new form of community, more flexible, inclusive, and exceedingly kind?
I suggest that though the pandemic may be petering out, the world has changed unmistakably, and with it the psyche of our students and the very idea of what community may look like. The demands on the adolescent community post-COVID have risen and are to a significant extent brand new. Precisely because secondary education is the hotbed of reproduction or change in society, contemporary culture wars play out right here. The stakes are high. Who takes hold of the space the shifting identifiers of Gen Z stake out? These are questions of power and structural violence, and the new answers necessitate a shift in the role of the adult: to extend empathy beyond the known, especially if there is a gap between the guide’s self-understanding and the adolescent’s, and to level the social field so we do things increasingly WITH them, rather than FOR, TO, or NOT at all. {3} This is the restorative intention.
Perhaps more significantly, since fluidity is not commonly accepted in society, the school ought to be a safe container and provide an environment in which adolescents can explore who they are and want to be. In an important sense, an adolescent program today does not entirely ‘prepare for adult life’ but is primarily a safe haven. Today’s adolescents do not face just the challenges of ‘adult life’ - becoming economically independent, finding a satisfying job, starting a family, etc.; they experience very real and overwhelming anxiety in the face of climate change and other man-made disasters, unsustainable spending of resources, and degradation of the environment. A yawning gap opens up between their nascent self-confidence and stark adult reality. The middle school years in particular can be the time/space to fortify the young person on their own terms before they step out into the bigger world of high school and life beyond. Who the adolescent ought to be, including gender and race identifiers, matters in the contest between reproduction of a failing society and radical change necessary so humans and the planet can survive or even thrive. As guides we can return to the text and appreciate Maria Montessori’s focus on adaptability as a key outcome (Montessori), meaning in today’s terms a call to “participate in an interdependent planetary relationship with the rest of humanity--which includes an economic collaboration” (Ewert-Krocker). As guides we can be allies, even co-conspirators as this moment of danger flashes up (Benjamin) and claim the adolescent community space as one of belonging and becoming.
{1} At the core of our online program was the idea that by de-centering campus, we could best bridge the challenge of physical distance. For Limited In-Person Instruction (LIPI), we met students in the four quadrants of the city, close to their homes, to make attendance easier to manage for families. Guides spread out to four different neighborhood parks for PE in the Park, a loose concept for physical education and a range of Advisory activities, with the primary focus being in-person socializing, by far the greatest need of our adolescents. Online, class curricula were adapted so the student’s home and neighborhood could be the locus of their hands-on work and study, see the Economics and Build Your Own/Preserve & Harvest example mentioned earlier.
{2} While this essay is reflective in nature on community during the pandemic and how we have changed because of it, Part II will discuss concrete ways in which we build community post-pandemic.
{3} For classroom strategies that aim to build community through conversations see Matthew R. Kay, Not Light, but Fire: How to Lead Meanigng Race Conversations in the Classroom, 2018. Restorative Practices offer a comprehensive framework for positive community building and for addressing conflict (https://www.iirp.edu/; Stutzman).
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History”.
https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html . 1940. Accessed Jan.16, 2023.
Block, Peter. Community: The Structure of Belonging. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Inc., 2018.
Ewert-Krocker, Laurie. “Email to Regina Feldman”. April 28, 2023.
International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP). https://www.iirp.edu/. Accessed Jan. 16, 2023.
Kay, Matthew. R. Not Light, but Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom. Stenhouse Publishers, 2018.
Montessori, Maria. From Childhood to Adolescence. Clio, 1994.
Stutzman, Lorraine et al. Establishing a Restorative Mindset. Highmark Foundation:
Center for Safe Schools, 2018.
Regina Feldman grew up in a small town in the Austrian Alps. She holds an MA in Medical Anthropology, a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology, and she completed the NAMTA Orientation to Adolescent Studies in 2008. After teaching college and working as an editor, Regina was a founding member of the Montessori High School at University Circle in Cleveland, Ohio and taught and worked on curriculum there for ten years. She also taught at the Affiliated High School of Peking University in Beijing, China before moving to Portland, Oregon where she is currently serving as the Program Director at Metro Montessori Middle School, part of Childpeace Montessori. She enjoys cooking, reading literature, yoga, biking, traveling, hiking, and camping with her family.