The Future is a Matter of Choice: the Restorative Community as the Locus of Freedom and Social Change
Regina Feldman continues her reflection on the importance of genuine community connections, how community is shaped in our school cultures, and the nature of healthy communities based on trust and attention to Restorative Practices.
Community as a structure of belonging can be intentionally made, even engineered through protocols, practices, traditions. The predictability and sense of ownership that comes with intentional community-building create in us an at-home feeling comparable to the comfort of an embrace. Our adolescent community is rooted in values and ways of relating we agree on and try to cultivate every day. As a prospective parent said to me the other day when reflecting on what makes Metro different as a learning environment: “I can really see the comfort and affection between the guides and the students, and that connection drives the learning.”
Community also is a structure of feeling, most evident in relief against regular school. The prime example of community as a structure of feeling is Odyssey, a seven-day trip at the beginning of the school year entirely dedicated to community-building. You might even say that the activities we plan, though conceived to stretch the adolescent physically and social-emotionally, are ‘excuses for being together.’ Odyssey has its own dynamic: it bonds individuals over shared joys and hardships; it makes us known to each other as complex and whole humans because we spend 24 hours a day together; strong emotional ties are created between us and, at the same time, differentiate us from everyone outside Metro. Perhaps most importantly, Odyssey is a liminal experience (Turner). It temporarily dissolves or even reverses the social hierarchy of guides and students, for example, when an adolescent teaches a guide a skill or leads the way. I suggest that, as such, Odyssey as an immersive experience is an opportunity for agency and change. The careful design of an Odyssey almost unconsciously reflects a deep and honest desire: to be the community of the future in precisely the way we are together now. As it happens, an Odyssey projects possible answers to the questions: “How do we choose to be together?” and “What do we want to create together?”
When I consider these parameters of an Odyssey, the images that come to mind almost always take the shape of people in circles: a group of students stand in perpetual rain around the fire pit with a guide. There’s hardly any conversation at all, but they pass a ball around the circle, and, with it, the feeling among them, reinforced by the rain that drapes like an invisible cloak over them, is unguarded togetherness. At the other end of the school year, there are the last few hours of graduation day when we sit in a whole-community circle, passing yearbooks from right to left so everyone signs a book for everyone else. Every person, guide and adolescent is relaxed and unself-consciously themselves, singing along to Justin Bieber’s song Baby (a bit cringy, I know). The two-minute video I made, tracing the circle with my camera, captures what felt like a moment out of time in mesmerizing intensity.
To be honest, I think of every gathering as an example of the future we want to create together. Gatherings have structure rooted in the values we hold, the processes we enjoy, the jokes we repeat. If culture is the history of experiences we share and stories we tell, then each gathering is the occasion to take a stance and choose anew who we are and want to be in the future. Peter Block uses the word ‘context’ in contrast to ‘culture’ to indicate this moment of choice to open up the way we see the world to possibility, generosity, and appreciation of gifts each person brings to the community (Block 30; 60). The sense of belonging we feel then comes from shared accountability, our willingness to care for the whole.
Note that for the current purpose, I intentionally bracket the important and necessary differentiation of roles between the adult and adolescent. In the moment of the experience of community, I imagine us as emotional, spiritual, aesthetic, embodied people, claiming ourselves as our own persons in flux. The circle of communitas as imaginary domain (Cornell) offers freedom beyond permanent entities, imposed meanings, or clear boundaries. It implies free aspirations as feeling and thinking persons, including the freedom to create ourselves as sexuate[1] beings. In this space, a complete sense of identity is found, intimate life is determined, and no one is afraid.
COMMUNITY AS STRUCTURES OF BELONGING AND DIALOGUE
So how do we cultivate this feeling structure in the adolescent community? The primary tool is direct communication. When I speak with you, I can trust that you mean what you say, and I take what you say at face value. We vow to interact with honesty, empathy, and patience. Because of differences and tensions between us, the spiderweb of structures of belonging is in constant motion. We embrace and cultivate the aliveness of true community by engaging with powerful questions that are ambiguous, personal, and create anxiety on purpose[2]. They work at the differences between us to create a dynamic dialogue that, in turn, motivates social change.
How, concretely, does such dialogue occur? In the smallness of the adolescent community, the social space is raw and open. Maria Montessori called young adolescents “social newborns,” hyper-sensitive, primed to connect with their peers and, despite themselves, alert to adult modeling; they are invested in social justice, are in love with beauty, are easily fatigued, and yet absorbed to no end in the social, in-person, online. The adolescent classroom is a container, a safe space not by acclamation, but by the active building of trust in daily increments. We do so in casual conversation when we learn about our adolescents as people of diverse identifiers; when they share their good news and woes; and when we exchange genuine appreciations in Advisory or Council. At the center of communication is deep listening that patiently and actively gives attention to what is other in my companion and speaking that makes its contribution responsibly; listening and speaking taking turns in responsibility to each other (Kay).
The dialogic classroom teaches tools and strategies to recognize and prevent behaviors that injure such as micro-aggressions or biased language. Being able to live your identity and
embracing diversity in our community lay the basis for social justice in action. We practice what it means to be an upstander and ally, so we are ready to take action when we encounter even the worst instances of peer abuse like bullying, intimate partner abuse, or hazing. This is the adolescent community – a microcosm of society living the change.
MONTESSORI AND RESTORATIVE PRACTICES
Both Montessori and Restorative Practices rely on a values-based and needs-led mindset, on the agreement that our relationships are close and personal, fair, consistent, and contextual. As flat as the social field may be, there is differentiation of roles and responsibility: in the adolescent community, guides hold the space as compassionate and empathetic adults so students can be present as embodied and empowered whole selves.
At least that is what we strive for. Empathy is misunderstood if we conceive of it as a form of relating that prevents any kind of misunderstanding, disconnect, or tension. The challenge of empathy, and with it of community, is to be present exactly when we experience difference, even conflict, and yet feel and say: it’s okay, you are one of us, we’ll figure this out together.
So community today, and in light of the pandemic in particular, means to a large extent efforts to reconcile, to heal and restore faith and trust between us. At Metro, we use a restorative practices approach, so supportive of trauma-informed care, to, above all else, make community. The fundamental hypothesis of restorative practices is that human beings are happier, healthier, more productive, and more likely to make positive changes when we do things WITH them, rather than TO them, FOR them, or NOT at all (Costello, Wachtel, and Wachtel 2009). These practices range on a continuum from very informal to formal and comprise affective statements, affective/restorative questions, small impromptu conversations, circles, and formal conferences of varying sizes.
● Affective statements: We use affective “I” statements such as “I appreciate that…,” “I am concerned about...,” or “I am uncomfortable when I hear/see…” to make each other aware of the impact of words and actions. They are delivered in a respectful way. Guides as the modeling adults aim to voice them strategically at a time, place, and in a manner that has most impact and focus on behavior and not to question the intrinsic worth of the person.
● Informal conversations, restorative questions: Though we aim to spend 80% of our time and energy on positively cultivating community, we, in fact, spend a lot of time and energy mending what falls way short of perfect. Where to draw the line between constructive community-building and restoration is hard to say. Is an informal check-in with a student because we sense that something is off community-building or restoration? What about intervening in a low-key way in physical contact between students at lunchtime? In truth, there is a continuum of care we extend every day because we are paying attention. Somewhere we tilt into conflict management and activate the protocols of restorative questions, starting with the intentionally open-ended check-in question: “What happened?” then go on to: “What have you thought of since?” and “Who has been impacted in what way?” and finally to the future-oriented question: “What do you think needs to be done to make things right?” These questions draw a hopeful arch from the past to the present and into the future and seek emotional truth and commitment to do better moving forward.
● Circles: We meet in circles every day and in multiple contexts. Circles are our preferred forum to meet for social gatherings, small ones like Advisory, whole-community ones like Council. We meet in circle for seminar and for getting a class or activity like micro-economy or play started. We meet in circle as adults to check-in, share a meal, talk as a team. Circles are not a panacea in themselves; they need forethought and structure, but they are the formation in space that sets up a participatory, egalitarian conversation of all.
● Formal conferences: Formal conferences come into play when harm has been done; often conflicts arise from an interaction where feelings were hurt going both ways. In every instance, we take ample time to help the individual reflect on what happened so they can realize their responsibility and impact without tumbling into shame, and we support them in thinking about how to repair the harm. Only when they are ready to speak to all these aspects, do we bring the adolescents supported by their Advisors together for a formal conference. Conference, structured by a time-proven protocol rooted in restorative questions, may be as small as two students, their Advisors and a facilitator and as large as the whole community, if serious harm has occurred and most or all community members have been impacted in a significant way. We end with refreshments and know the conference was successful if we see all parties in a relaxed conversation with each other while enjoying a cookie or two.
These are the concrete ways in which community is made, every day, in the miniscule spiral between two people or more. It is not an abstraction, but a face-to-face reality we make and constantly re-make from the moment the adolescent steps in the door to the late night when we restlessly turn over in our beds anticipating the social-emotional (rarely academic) complexities of the next day. School becomes life, and life becomes big, a web of social relationships expanding out from school to families and future communities we can’t even see. Will our adolescents be safe and happy? As we hold them lightly for a couple years in the cocoon of the Montessori adolescent community, we vow to engage every day in emotionally true communion to fortify them in self-confidence and courage to transform for the better the world to come.
Works Cited
Block, Peter. Community: The Structure of Belonging. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Inc., 2018.
Cornell, Drucilla. At the Heart of Freedom: Feminism, Sex and Equality. Princton University
Press, 1998.
Costello, Bob, Joshua Wachtel, and Ted Wachtel. The Restorative Practices Handbook. IIRP,
2009.
Kay, Matthew. R. Not Light, but Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the
Classroom. Stenhouse Publishers, 2018.
Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Routledge, 1969.
[1] Drucilla Cornell uses the phrase sexuate being to represent the sexed body of our human being in the context of a framework (that historically includes race and class as identifers) by which we define our sexual identity. As "sexuate beings" we imagine ourselves as bodies turned toward particular objects of desire. Through the sexuate expression, we claim ourselves as our own persons and come out to the world by projecting our bodies in image, integrity, senses, and libido. In other words, how we project ourselves as sexuate beings dictates how we feel, think, and behave (Cornell). Importantly, the idea of the sexuate being is consistent with the ideal of the free person.
[2] Peter Block suggests questions that extend invitations, explore ownership and possibilities, open up dissent, ask for commitment, and acknowledge gifts are the drivers of conversations that create community as a structure of belonging (Block).
