Recognizing Community, Recognizing Its Members
By Bill Boyle
October 27, 2015
One of the more promising antidotes to the alienated individualism of the “ethic of achievement” in schools lies in the use of Restorative Practices. As I’ve written previously,
“We tend to look at schools through the ethic of achievement. Students’ purpose is to achieve success, and this success is measured by grades and test scores. Part of the hidden curriculum in this view is that students are valued in accordance to their level of achievement. This valuing is not overt, but it is nonetheless real. And achievement becomes the means to garnering future economic success. This, again , reinforces a privatized view of student as consumer, and sees the purpose of schools as being the production of economic achievers and consumers.”
The theory underlying Restorative Practices, on the other hand, is based on the use of the lens of community rather than the competitive lens of achievement as the view through which we see our relationships in school. This theory understands that the root of learning is the same as the foundation for being human- that is, that belonging trumps everything. That this sense of belonging is a fundamental necessity in learning. If I feel that I belong, that who I am matters and is honored, then I will engage as a responsible member of this community. Education, in this view, is not about the individual success that leads to greater “status” and an increased income and ability to consume. Such “success” functions to create the illusion of independence and thus distances us from the necessity of the context of community. Rather, Restorative Practices correctly imagine students as being dependent upon the nexus of relationships that occur within the context of school. It imagines that, rather than being a pathway out of community and abstracted from place, the purpose of education is to build and strengthen the social capital of community. These practices recognize and leverage the necessity of our interdependence with the people involved in our community, and thus require us to learn the skills needed to function within the communities we live within.
And all of this is crucially important.
But it doesn’t address what we mean by “community.” And a definition of “community” that isn’t explicitly broad will end up reducing community to being defined as people.
So join me in thinking this through a little.
If we define community as a nexus of interdependent relationships, that is, those relationships that we are dependent on for thriving, then community certainly includes, but is not limited to, the human. In addition to the people we are connected, knowingly or not, we are also clearly dependent on, among other things, the air we breathe, the water we drink and the soil we grow our food in. I don’t think I need to point out that currently our dominant culture commodifies these “members” of our community in a way that obscures our dependence on them.
And how is this working for us?
Let’s explore a local example. The governor of Michigan has appointed an emergency manager to the city of Flint. This move, and the law that allows for it, eradicates community participation under democratic elections and replaces it with an autocracy that prioritizes the value of economic efficiency over all other values. As a result, one decision that the emergency manager of Flint made was to save money by no longer getting quality water from the Detroit Water and Sewage Department, but instead to pump it from the local and polluted Flint River as a means of saving money.
The result?
As told by the Detroit Free Press:
“Mona Hanna-Attisha, a researcher at Flint’s Hurley Medical Center, analyzed blood-lead level information collected as part of a routine screening process, and found that the percentage of Flint children with elevated blood-lead levels has increased significantly since the city started pumping water from the Flint River in April 2014. In some ZIP codes — those considered most at-risk — the percentage of kids affected by lead has doubled.”
And how much lead is safe in children?
“The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that there is no safe blood-lead level for children. Lead poisoning causes a host of developmental and behavioral problems in exposed children. It is irreversible.”
A decision based on economics, one that was made outside of the bounds of community, has lead to the poisoning of Flint residents that has disproportionately affected its children.
Clearly, the adults of this community are dependent upon each other. Clearly, the children of this community are dependent upon the adults. And clearly, all are dependent upon the quality of their water. So each of these are important in the health of this community. Each of these need to have a voice that is heard.
The practice of community building and restoration always involves hearing the voice of the “Other”- those voices that would otherwise go unheard, unseen, that are marginalized sometimes in ways that we might be unaware of. So community building and restoration always involves seeing what we haven’t seen before, and hearing what we haven’t heard before. How, then, do we include the voice of the Other when the Other can’t speak? How do we include the Other when the Other isn’t human? Who, in this case, will speak for the Other?
The fact of the matter is that, when we are interdependent, the Other will always speak. The water in Flint is now speaking loud and clear. It is speaking through its toxicity. It is making its needs clear in the symptoms that it creates, in the damage it is doing. Children who are marginalized in a school speak through their misbehavior or disengagement. Poor water quality speaks through lead in the bodies of children. Poor air quality speaks through lung pollution. Poor soil speaks through drought and the addiction to chemical fertilization, which leads to poor water quality, which leads to poisoned children. The Other will always speak, and will always scream for us to recognize our interdependence with it through symptoms that affect our health and the quality of our communal life.
So the issue isn’t the “speech” of the Other, but it is our ability to listen.
The first step is recognizing this interdependence.
The second is to listen for it.
Restorative Practices are a fairly new movement within schools, but they are not new. We look at them as progressive, and they are in our times, but they are actually based on the traditions of the indigenous Maori of New Zealand. As practices they go back to what has worked within community for thousands of years. In this sense they are deeply conservative. And conservative really means “to conserve” those things that “work.” (I put this in quotes because in our times, what “works” is often reduced to that which is economically expedient.) The most “conservative” communities are always those indigenous to place. Their ways are the ways that necessarily “work” in accordance with place. If we are to live on what the Native Americans call Turtle Island and we have named America, we should probably look back to some of the traditions that have worked here for thousands of years. In fact, until relatively recently, most humans have necessarily acted with the awareness that we are always dependent upon the sources of our life that sustain us, the non human elements that make up our community. Chief Seattle famously put it this way:
“Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
All things share the same breath – the beast, the tree, the man… the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.”
We used to recognize that all of the members of our community, human and non-human, are “sacred.” By this I don’t mean anything spiritual in a woo-woo way. I mean something much different, something very concrete, and, in the deepest sense, something very practical. Parker Palmer said that the sacred is, “That which is most worthy of respect.” People, specific, concrete, living, breathing people, are most worthy of respect. The children we work with are most worthy of respect. The air we breathe is most worthy of respect. The water we drink is most worthy of respect. Anything that we are interconnected with is necessarily most worthy of respect. These are sacred. And one way or another, we always pay the cost for any disrespect. We always pay the price for treating the sacred as profane, for making a commodity of anything that is sacred.
How to live and work with this awareness? How to teach with this awareness?
Again, how to include the voices of the ignored?
I wish I had all of the answers.
But there is little doubt in my mind that we need to begin to educate in a way that builds and restores a holistic view of community. We need to resist the commodification of our teachers and schools, of our children, of our earth. We need to develop the means and skills of combining Restorative Practices with a strong grounding in Ecojustice. This work is all of ours, just as the consequences for not doing so are consequences that we all will face.
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Hello Mr. Boyle,
I am a student in Ethans class at Eastern Michigan.
I love the part on restorative practices. I believe that for students to truly to need to learn of the dependence and inter-dependence of all members of a community including the non-human aspects. Your example of Flint having an emergency manager is shocking. I was not aware this was happening and the fact that the focus is on economic stabilization through control and making sacrifices of the citizens health is disturbing. This shows that there is no focus on the community or the education of the community which has caused great health ordeals to the children that depend on the adults and the rest of the community.
Nick Goodrich
Hi Mr. Boyle,
First of all thanks for the post, and for allowing us to come and visit your school tomorrow and taking time out of your day.
It was very nice to read your post and how well it connects to the many things we have been learning in our classes at EMU and the tangential thoughts the classes have brought up in my head. You so very well articulate the thoughts of community as more than human and the interconnectedness therein that I am almost jealous. It is not a concept that I feel is easily explained but you do just that. I look forward to seeing how you have worked to build such a community in your school and what it looks like.
Your post also sparked some questions in my own head regarding place-based education as you see it and the city you practice it in of Bloomfield Hills. This is obviously a much different area than the other school we go to with Prof. Lowenstein of Cody/DIT in Detroit. Your talk of the “other” and its voice kept bringing me back to what the “other” to students in your district may be, and whether it is the students we interact with each week in Detroit. How do you think it has gone trying to change the ideas of “success” in students minds (i.e. not financial) in such a wealthy area? How do you think the hidden curriculum has changed in terms of fighting for what may be traditional “success” in schools? I have more but I will leave it at that.
Thanks again for your assistance in our journey as educators.
Hello Mr.Boyle,
Thank you for your time and your thoughts.
I am particularly captivated by a theme summarized in the following:
“The fact of the matter is that, when we are interdependent, the Other will always speak…The Other will always speak, and will always scream for us to recognize our interdependence with it through symptoms that affect our health and the quality of our communal life.”
Feedback is real. It is consequential. The status of our place and its elements effect us directly and give us information through how they effect us.
I am given the impression that restorative practices are an institution created or evolved for the purpose of dealing with this feedback in a way which enables us to make balanced decisions.
I know that is at best a sweeping over generalization of what you’re saying. Please let me know if I have the right idea, and please let me know what specifically I should think about or investigate in order to understand these ideas better.
Thank you for your time and expertise,
Jeff Tyburski
Hi Mr. Boyle,
Thank you for your introduction to Restorative Practices. I really like the idea of instilling in students that they belong to a community and that the community is a complex series of interdependencies between human, non-human and the environment.
I would like to comment on one of your statements that stuck out to me: “So the issue isn’t the ‘speech’ of the Other, but it is our ability to listen.” I think that our ability to listen to or maybe even acknowledge the voice of the Other is one important factor that keeps us from making significant, long-term progress towards respecting these interdependent relationships with the non-human world. Referring back to your example of the water problems in Flint, the Flint River has probably been speaking to us for decades; it probably started speaking of its suffering soon after the first factory in Flint started pumping pollutants into the air, water and soil. Unfortunately, it took the poisoning of innocent children for us to really take notice, to really hear the voice of the Flint River. Just imagine, the savings in human and environmental suffering if we would have been taught to listen and pay attention to the Other from the start. It is my hope that teaching students the significance of community and all community members (both human and non-human) through Restorative Practices and EcoJustice will help us hear the voice of the Other before it becomes a scream.
Thank you again. I look forward to hearing more about Restorative Practices tomorrow.
Hi Mr.Boyle,
I would like to thank you for taking the time to discuss restorative practices with our class. Similarly to the issues you addressed above, we have been discussing in class what is essential to build a healthy and sustainable community. If we are going to continue to thrive as a society, we must eliminate our egocentric thinking in order to see how the decisions we are making today can have an effect on the outcomes of tomorrow. The only way to eliminate the problems we have caused from our individualistic thinking is to come together as a community. Before gaining a deeper understanding of what constitutes as a community, I simply based it upon humans and their abilities, ignoring the fact that we live dependently on our environment. We as future educators must live by example in order to demonstrate to our students that in order to have continual “success” we must not simply base it on our ability to do well individually, but rather being able to see how we can come together for the sake of our world.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts and opinions tomorrow, as well as taking a tour of your school.
Jada Rachal
Mr Boyle,
First off I would like to say thank you for taking the time and inviting us as a class to your school. Any experiences within a school at this point in our careers is always beneficial.
My name is Jeffrey and I am apart of Mr Lowensteins class from Eastern Michigan University. After reading over your blog a few points stood out to me. The way you construct ideas is admirable and very well put. The idea that we categorize students based on academic “successes” is very real. Although these successes are based on paper grades and test scores.
One sentence that I could not agree with more is when you talk about your theory of belonging.
‘That this sense of belonging is a fundamental necessity in learning. If I feel that I belong, that who I am matters and is honored, then I will engage as a responsible member of this community.’
This idea is something I would love to expand on more. I truly believe this theory to be relevant and realistic. This is sometimes a fundamental problem we personally see when dealing with children within DIT at Cody High School. At times the sense of meaning and relevance when it comes to their own lives and education is sometimes absent.
In conclusion, I believe the trip to Model High School should be able to give us a different atmosphere within a school setting than we are accustomed to. We have heard many great things about yourself as well as the schools themselves so I am looking forward to meeting you soon.
Hi Mr. Boyle
Thank you so much for writing this blog post. It was both insightful and reaffirming to read your thoughts about the important link between students and their sense of community. I have been thinking about these very ideas for awhile now, but wasn’t sure how or if I would be able to implement these concepts into my future classroom. Independent achievement should not be the sole take away from high school. It is vital for students’ future success that they know how to belong within a community . Being able to feel a sense of belonging during such a tumultuous time in a person’s life (high school) can make a difference between life and death, success and failure. With so much emphasis being placed on test scores and individual student achievement, I believe that it is imperative for school systems and educators to take a step back from the constant standardized testing and tell their students, “I see you. You matter to me as a person. I believe in you” and maybe most importantly of all, ” I respect who you are” because sadly enough, respect is something that adults are often reluctant to give students.
For many decades, our society has placed emphasis on the economic prosperity of businesses, schools, and individuals that it has become our sole measure for success. Not surprisingly, our levels of happiness and fulfillment plummet the more that we measure our successes by our economic gains. When the “bottom dollar” becomes the sole focus of a community or its leaders, the people and the environment tend to suffer as they did in Flint when the water source was switched to save money. As a society, if we continue to only value the balance of our pocketbooks without also valuing the amount of empathy and compassion we have for our community, we will soon be digging ourselves into a hole so deep that we may never make it back to the top.
Thank you again for this moving post, I look forward to seeing you tomorrow to learn more about the positive affects of restorative justice in the classroom.
Meredith White
Hello Mr. Boyle,
I am a student of Ethan Lowenstein at Eastern Michigan University.
I really enjoyed reading your blog and I think it is very helpful to anyone in the education profession. You kept talking about a community that needs to listen to other peoples’ voices to be able to make decisions that will benefit all. In class we have discussed what we believe to be a sustainable community and we had said how everyone in that community must have a voice. We also discussed the importance of human interdependence with the natural world and how humans must protect the natural systems for them to be able to regenerate. As you said above and we have been talking about it in our class, as future teachers we need to teach our students this information for our society to live on and be sustainable. We need to teach our students that picking things based on economic efficiency is not always the best or healthiest choice and that they need to listen to others before making decisions for their community.
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us and I look forward to meeting you tomorrow!
Nicole Nanez
Hi Mr. Boyle,
I am a student in Ethan Lowenstein’s place-based curriculum design class at EMU. Thank you for taking the time to discuss restorative practices with our class. I’m looking forward to discussing the concepts mentioned above further during our time together tomorrow.
One of my initial thoughts in response to this blog is that it lends itself to co-curricular learning, which reflects how well these concepts are able to be addressed in all content areas. For students, the term “community” is often thrown around without a concrete definition of who makes up a community. Your emphasis on interdependence as the key component of a community is crucial because I think all students should understand community interactions as ones of reciprocity. I had never thought of, in a way, personifying the “Other.” I think another important aspect of the “Other” is that the community members not only listen to what is spoken, but they also respond.This is where schools must step forward and student voice comes into play. I appreciate your example of the water crisis in Flint because it’s relevant to our work at the Detroit Institute of Technology this semester and, also, it’s local. There are massive ecological and social issues in our very own backyard, and these are the types of issues I hope would prompt teachers and students to act. Individual achievement isn’t going to help us solve problems within our diverse communities.
Dear Mr. Boyle,
I really liked how you kept bringing it back to community being the root of everything. I think this is very true. We need our communities to survive and within those communities we are all dependent on each other and I think that’s what we have a tough time seeing. Our children need to be able to trust us that we are making good decisions for them but also allow them to have a voice in those decisions too. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us!
Annie Krupsky
Hello Mr. Boyle,
My name is Steven Price. I am a student in Ethan Lowenstein’s class at Eastern Michigan University. I am looking forward to meeting you tomorrow and discussing a few of the things you talked about above. I am also excited to see your school and the community you are building there. Thank you for taking your time to help us as we look to become teachers and educators in the near future. While reading this, I couldn’t stop thinking about how great this is to implement for students. My biggest question would be, what conflicts or challenges do you face or see the most in trying to implement restorative justice with the standards given by the state? Thank you for your time again and I look forward to meeting you tomorrow.
Hi Mr. Boyle,
I’m a student in Ethan Lowenstein’s place-based curriculum design course at Eastern Michigan.
I felt encouraged after reading this post. It’s strange how uncritical we tend to be when we hear or read about “achievement” being the sole measure of student success in public education. Students must be equipped with skills that will serve them later in life, but I think we need to look closely at which specific skills we are imagining for them, and broaden our conception of such skills. Students ought to be allowed to learn meaningful ideas in an environment where, as you write, “[they] feel that [they] belong, that who [they are] matters and is honored.” This would be an ideal space for learning to occur; it would give students the opportunity to integrate their academic learning with the knowledge that they bring in with them on the first day, self-awareness.
It might be useful to have some way of perceiving what is lost and gained when schools channel students toward individual achievement, and when they create a different, more “relational” atmosphere, where students come to appreciate how their psychological-interpersonal capacities can enrich and transform whatever academic capacities they’re acquiring.
While test scores are important for purposes of getting into college, if we over-emphasize tests and rote skills, we run the risk of alienating students from their intuitions, values and social needs, which will ultimately determine how satisfied each one will be with his or her life. If schools produce students in tune with themselves and each other, and who also have the necessary “academic” skills for adulthood, they will enter adulthood with a huge developmental advantage over students who are thinking strictly of their individual financial status later.
I’m really looking forward to talking to you about restorative justice next week! Thanks!
Beth Solberg