Whenever any of us at SLA talk about our school, the ethic of care quickly comes to the forefront of what we talk about. At its root, the ethic of care is the idea that we care for our students, not just about them. It is grounded in the work of Nel Noddings, and it’s probably one of those ideas that sound really awesome in theory and can actually be really difficult in practice. It is also one of those ideas that you are never done cultivating. You have to constantly work at it, and there are times when, as a community, you really have to put time in to unpack it and think through it.
And in the eleven years we’ve been around, we have seen a growing movement in education around the idea of restorative justice. Restorative justice, at its root, is the idea that when we do wrong, we engage in rehabilitation by connecting with the community and with those we have harmed. There is a fair amount of overlap between the ideas of the ethic of care and the ideas of restorative practices / restorative justice. They are not a perfect fit – and where they do and don’t align might be a blog post in and of itself – but, when done thoughtfully, the two ideas can create a powerful sense of responsibility and community in a school. But to do so, you always have to do the work.
And a few weeks ago, we noticed that we were in a place where stuff didn’t feel quite right. We had a few issues that pushed people to think about what it means to have to face your community after you’ve made a mistake. We faced a few moments where the transactional sense of caring for one another wasn’t going quite right. And out of that, came a need to step back and reflect on who we are and what we believe as a whole community – and for us, that meant talking about these ideas in Advisory.
What follows is a whole-school Advisory activity that we did. For 9th graders, it was probably the first really big deep dive they’ve done into what we mean when we use these terms. For older students, it was a tuning activity – a chance to dig deeper into language and ideas that we talk about — and try to embody — all the time. The slides were meant to get us talking, to get some common terms down. The deck was created as a collaboration of teachers and administrators, so that it was a truly co-created document (and full disclosure – I saw it before we did it, but this was at a time when the district work was rather all-encompassing, so I had little to do with its creation other than agreeing that we were at a moment where it was needed.)
The conversations went well. Students and teachers discussed the ideas themselves, and then grappled with how to deal with the scenarios presented. The scenarios are ones we see all the time in schools, not just SLA. At the root of all the conversations was the thought that healthy communities have to be active communities. We cannot simply just say “we care for one another” without putting in the hard work of thinking about what that means. And we cannot forget that until the rest of the world operates under these principles, then we have to work to hold on to our values as a community, because the rest of the world sends very different messages to all of us.
And that’s the overarching message, I think. If we want schools where we truly care for one another — and where we understand that there is a responsibility to the whole community when we create that — we have to understand how hard that is, and we have to work at it every day – even when it’s hard.
So I’ve been lucky enough to spend a few days in Oslo, Norway, and when I’m not at the SETT conference, I’ve been able to spend some time seeing Oslo. I was talking to one of the conference attendees, and I’ve told him my plans for what I’m going to see, and his answer was, “Well, you’re seeing all the major things to see in Oslo!” But, of course, I’m not. And it’d be ridiculous to assume that I am anything but a tourist here – getting the superficial notion of Oslo with, perhaps, because I’m making the real attempt to watch and listen, a fleeting glimpse of what is really here for the people who know it and live it. That’s just what it means to be a tourist. If I really fell in love with Oslo and wanted to find a way to know it in a real way, I’d find a way to immerse myself. I’d look for a visiting professorship and move here for a year. I’d find a way to live this place in a much more real way, beyond the city square.
I was thinking about this idea as I stood on the Oslo Opera House and looked out over the city — and I was struck by the thought that, in education, we too often encourage tourism of the mind. With three hour workshops for teachers to implement complex pedagogical shifts or conference sessions that start, “Everything you need to know about…” or – on a perhaps more dangerous level – fast-track programs toward teacher or principal certifications, we encourage tourism of these ideas, not deep understanding, and then we wonder why implementation so often lags or why – to make the metaphor complete – implementation seems so superficial, so… touristy.