In this article from 1999, Community School co-founder Emanuel Pariser talks about the importance of Relational Education. Though our Residential Program now includes a nine month residency, and benefits from the additional use of Restorative Justice Practices, Relational Education remains at the heart of our work as a school community.
Authored by Co-Founder Emanuel Pariser on 8/15/99
Over the past 26 years the staff and students at the Community School, Camden, Maine, have crafted an approach to teaching and learning we call “Relational Education”. This form of education places a primary focus on the development of trusting, supportive, and resilient relationships between all members of the learning community.
The Community School has been our “laboratory” for the development of this approach. Until five years ago when we began our second program – “Passages”, for teen parents – the form of the Cschool (as we most often refer to it) remained constant. Every six months we accept eight students from throughout Maine, and occasionally beyond, who are 16 to 20 years old. Having chosen to leave conventional education for a wide variety of reasons, these young men and women have decided that completing their education is important. They come to us looking for a different kind of learning experience – one which makes sense to them and will help them achieve their goal of completion.
What the CSchool offers is unique and attractive – a six month residence that combines work, community living, and academics and results in a high school diploma regardless of previous success or failure in traditional schooling. For students who have been told, as some of ours have, that they’ll “never get out of ninth grade”, this model offers a very different kind of learning opportunity.
For students who have attended the School for two months or more, the results have been noteworthy: 80% have gotten their diplomas, 40% have continued on to post secondary education, and 75% who were previously incarcerated or under some form of legal jurisdiction have remained free of serious legal difficulties. In five years of operation, twenty three teen parents who had been forced to leave conventional school due to their pregnancies and the lack of resources available to them have graduated from Passages with their high school diplomas.
With all the discussion on a national level of educational”standards” and “accountability”, of “outcome based curricula” and maintaining a competitive economic edge, one would think that the primary problems facing educators and students in the United States today are ones of content mastery, and assessment. The assumption being that if we just hold our students and teachers to high cognitive standards we will be able to develop a literate and effective workforce.
What these discussions do not take into account, and what most conventional schooling has been extraordinarily slow to adapt to are massive changes in the social landscape since the contemporary model of schooling was perfected in the early 1900′s. Since most of you reading this newsletter are probably all too familiar with these changes I will be brief in my reiteration of them.
First of all, and perhaps most importantly, since the 1960′s the nuclear family has been disintegrating. More than 50% of the children in schools now have experienced the divorce of their parents. A large percentage of students have always lived with a single parent. Many students now live in blended or mixed families, where each member of the family can have a different last name, and no two children may have the same biological parents. The extended family has also weakened: in 1900 96% of us lived in walking distance of a relative; in 1999 4% of us do. There are few aunts, uncles or grandparents to fill in when relationships at home get strained or stop working.
Economic and social forces have ripped apart traditional communities, so that most of us do not know our neighbors well, commute to work, and live in families where both parents work full time (if we are lucky enough not to be the victims of massive layoffs in industry due to corporate downsizing and shifting of work to cheaper labor forces in other countries). For many teenagers, informal time with adults is almost non existent – in school they are in classes only with age mates, and teachers have no time; at home, both parents work, are tired, or absent, and in the community most opportunities, like work, put students in a highly defined unskilled role (hamburger flipper, cashier, etc.). Finally with the full onset of a media fashioned world spanning from TV to the internet, students come to school as one educator put it “information rich, and responsibility poor” when they used to come to school, “information poor and responsibility rich.”
At its most devastating, not changing our model of education to reflect critical changes, can result in the Littleton Colorado scenario, where easy access to firearms, a huge impersonal school, combined with alienated, harassed, furious kids led to trauma and loss of life. But disasters like Littleton are not the reason to change our ways because solutions based on extreme cases are likely to be narrow and extreme themselves, ultimately resulting in more rather than less suffering.
We need to look at how education is not working for the majority of students who, unsettled from a home life in flux, without serious responsibilities in any of their living environments (school, home, community) are drifting through life under a barrage of “identity creating” advertising which tells them that to be a real human being, they have to own a fancy car, wear clothes with the right names on them, and to be truly known is to be seen on TV.
As this is to be a rather brief article I cannot go into depth on our model – but would like to sketch the broad outlines for you.
First, as a disclaimer, let me say that Schools, no matter how good they are, cannot remedy the cultural dysfunction we are currently experiencing. Education is generally a reflection of society rather than a force for changing it. On the other hand, by employing a relationally based approach we have the chance to have an enormous impact on the lives of the children we have in our care. They in turn may help our society move step by step towards more cohesive and nurturing communities where we can all experience our humanness more fully.
At our May conference on relational education, “Terry”, a graduate of the School commented that as a teenager she felt that her life had no meaning. Given that perception what was the sense in trying to do anything? What could possibly come of it? Why not find pleasure whenever available, and avoid discomfort for as long as possible, before the whole miserable meaningless thing was ended anyhow? Fortunately, she also had a sense that there was something worth doing and that perhaps if she finished school she would find it.
As Terry reflected on her experience at the School, she said that she began to take herself seriously, because other people were listening to her. For the first time she experienced adults who took her seriously, who wanted to know what she thought and felt, and also expected her to manage a wide range of tasks and responsibilities. Her life began to have meaning to her because she saw that it had meaning to others.
So, one aspect of our approach is that teachers must become listeners. We actually call our faculty teacher/counselors because teaching has become so connected with information output as opposed to receptivity and reflection which we usually associate with counseling. To formalize this listening process, each student is assigned a “one to one” or advisor, who they meet with regularly, on one level , to go over their progress in the program, on a more fundamental level to develop a trusting and supportive relationship in which the student can begin to experience her life as having meaning.
We have created spaces and times in our program to allow community members to go beyond our roles as teacher and student and experience each other as human beings. Teacher/counselors live-in at the Community School – most spend at least one overnight, enabling them to be with students in a more full and natural context. Human interactions occur over a breakfast bowl of cereal, on a ride to work, in a late night discussion in the living room, during “informal” times when our “official roles” in the community are not as sharply defined. It is here that we find out that we are more alike than different, that our experiences as human beings, despite the differences in our histories, age, experience, are remarkably similar – at our core we all wish to love and be loved, and to find meaning in what we do.
Due to the cataclysmic betrayals and dysfunctions which our students have experienced from the adult world – abuse, neglect, disinterest, – they have good cause to be distrustful of adults. They have good cause to expect that the future will bring nothing worth working for because “things never work out.” At the most fundamental level for learning to occur, students must be able to trust their teachers as well as themselves. The key elements in the development of trust at the Cschool are:
As described above, contemporary culture lacks places for people to belong to and has substituted material wealth for interpersonal richness. Because of its small scale (eight students, six faculty), residential nature, and focussed goal, the School creates a learning community which invites a sense of belonging from the participants. And, the experience is a short one – six months, so, the actual experience of belonging is enriched by the School’s Outreach program which works with graduates and families to help them with their post-graduate lives. Students find that the School has become something very important to them, particularly after they have left: over 600 times each year, former students contact the Cschool, looking for resources, connection, help with college applications, and to give or get advice. Former students also play a role with current students through volunteering as tutors, panelists, special class presenters, and working in the program.
The relational approach understands that adolescents have been forced to “grow up absurd” in Paul Goodman’s words. Our society has extended childhood by increasing the amount of time kids spend as recipients of our educational system, without giving them truly meaningful roles in their families, communities or economy. Students at the Cschool hold jobs in the community and owe room and board. They do not graduate if they are not paid up. They have to find and hold these jobs in order to complete the program. This happens in the “Real World” outside the four walls of our building. Similarly, students are held accountable by the community for their chores and their behaviors in the School. We are continually trying to break down the barriers between the “Real World” and the School, because as one student put it so well, “what’s the point of taking us out of the Real World, if the idea of school is to prepare us for it.”
In the relational model, teacher/counselor and student have reciprocal roles. The student teaches how best s/he can be taught through discussion of her “learning autobiography” – an oral history of her schooling that addresses learning preferences, anxieties, strengths, and weaknesses. The teacher/counselor facilitates the student’s progress towards completion of his competency exams and self-designed projects. As much as possible, the criteria for success in any academic endeavor are established together by the teacher/student dyad; and the hoped for outcome is that in tackling academic problems together teacher and student will co-create relevant, integratable knowledge.
In her summary speech for our May 8th conference, Brenda Wentworth – a Cschool graduate from 1979 who is currently working as an MSW substance abuse counselor with addicted HIV+ clients – made it clear that she experienced her resistance to traditional school as deriving from the structural power which teachers seemed to have over her and the weight which this seemed to put on the teacher’s “truth” as opposed to the student’s “truth”. She explained,” Power over is the nemesis of the traditional educational process. When a student feels less than and a teacher feels more than, there can be no real helpful educational exchange…when a student realizes that a teacher’s beliefs are just that, beliefs, the student often begins to challenge the teacher….the teacher fearing exposure, often perceives this as a personal attack, and attempts to hide behind his armor of adult status and authority…the teacher then imposes punitive measures to shut down the student’s assault…stud! ents often retreat into despair..depression, and sometimes rage.”
It is our job as relational educators to keep a vigilant eye on this dynamic, and always challenge ourselves to work from a co-creative rather than “power-over” position with our students.
Inspired by Arnold Langberg, founder of the Jefferson County Open School in Colorado, and based on the Walkabout model of education, our Passages program for teen parents is non-residential. Teacher/counselors work with teen moms and dads in the comfort and chaos of their own homes. The program is founded upon the essential one to one relationship established between a teacher/counselor and a student. Although there are group requirements, most of the work is done through this dyad, and a primary goal of the program is to develop these young men and women as self-directed learners. Our task is to support and enrich the already responsibility laden lives of these young parents by guiding them through a curriculum focused on their current life-situation as parents, and help them achieve a high school diploma in the process. Since 1994 we have had 56 graduates.
Relational education works. Over 350 students have arrived at the Cschool since 1973. They have been demoralized, angry, resistant, yet hopeful and willing to give this new form of schooling a chance. 80% of these students have completed high school; 40% have gone on to post-secondary programs; 75% who had previously been incarcerated have not recidivated; 70% have been in contact after leaving the program; and a majority have created families that have been more successful than their families of origin. They have broken through cycles of despair, rage and abuse to create meaningful lives in a culture which all too frequently values goods over goodness, and which all too frequently scapegoats our young people as the problem instead of looking to them for their “truths” and their solutions.
Dora Lievow and Emauel Pariser, Co-Founders of The Community School
