A Covid Blessing

It doesn't make sense but it's true. Families are working together, eating together, preparing meals, cooking, cleaning, and taking in family members who lost their place to spend the night. I’ve been watching the children. Many are getting into the healing happiness of the covid blessing. We can heal with them.

 

Of course, the increase of interaction with family members can bring out the worst too. Many of us are bothered with so much relationship stuff.  We live in a culture that has demeaned family work to meet physical needs. It’s why we like school cafeterias, fast food, and propane deliveries. Now more of us are finding ourselves close to fires we build together, and rebuilding broken relationships is not easy. We are accustomed to easily walking away from the circle when the going gets tough, and conflicts rear up.  And now with covid still around, that’s more difficult, and more dangerous.  So many of us are swept into a family circle. Is it broken? Can Covid turn out to be a catalyst for healing?

 

Our collective memories have lost power to hold intact the ancient circle of Apsaalooke, German, Irish, Mexican, Asian and more heritages that once functioned here. They once kept our families together for the good of all. The power of the circle once was there because it included everyone. Not just because we would feel guilty sending anyone away, but because we were needed to keep our real needs met. Everyone had a role in some of everyone’s needs. And it was not only physical needs. It’s our need to be needed. And our need for emotional, spiritual, physical, and social connection.

 

A friend of mine had a brother who was incapacitated in his youth.  The tragedies led to a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Father, grandfather, and the two brothers took up a challenge to be helicoptered into the remote wilderness in the North Canadian shield. It was weeks walking distance from the planned point of access to safety. They prepared carefully for the risks, gathering equipment and tools for an extended time. They were conscious their need for each other would far outweigh the possibility of anyone being “on my own” during this expedition.  And that itself was scary. The risks were high of being together in a family fraught with trauma, even ancestral trauma. A family history of conflicts in relationship does not make such a venture easy to enter. To make a long story short, by the last week of the venture his symptoms were gone.

 

In “civilized” America, more of us than ever before can choose to survive on our own. It’s not easy to see interdependency as useful. We seem to have a culture built on easy escape from distasteful or even violent symptoms of trauma still engrained in our family system, from back when escape was not easy as it is now.

 

And now, covid has been putting children together with their elder relatives in ways that demand their loyalty and care for one another. I’ve heard it’s happening: the gift of covid.

 

For how many of us is this a terrible twist of covid fate? Can it be turned into the blessing the Creator may have intended?  Many of us, with ancestral trauma history, have difficulty opening our minds to this. Family dysfunction has become normal, as well as the normal ease to escape to another state. Now that escape isn’t so easy, we maybe could benefit together from a well-designed free program to heal together.  First see or read the story: thetraumatizedbrain.com/the-legacy-of-hollow-water .

Then look up hidden water, the new healing way built on science supporting what happened with Hollow Water: https://hiddenwatercircle.org/origin-story.

 

Or better yet, contact your local behavioral health provider, and ask for a human systems approach.

 

Might this be a way for the convergence of covid tragedies here with the Creator’s way to recapture the hope we once had in each of our ancestral pasts? Can all the varieties of heritages, languages, and religions here be an asset for healing?

Heart learning reposted revised

Fall of 1973, I walked into the new tribal school in  Busby ready to teach music.  Soon, I was discouraged. My students weren't listening or following my directions. They seemed resistant to learning. Worse, parents didn't seem to care about compliance; some actually seemed to value rebellion, offending my German ideals of child discipline. I shared my frustration with my trusted friend, a Cheyenne elder and grandfather of several of my students, and he turned my perceptions upside-down. The Cheyenne, he explained, enjoy seeing children physically active, not sitting down, holding still, being quiet. Adults pay attention to children, and children are expected to pay attention to adults. It builds respect. Children learn through games, dance, song, and stories--real life events. I didn't notice that resisting my demands for their attention showed strong heart, grit and courage. It took me a long time to see heart-learning as the foundation of education, not as a distraction or rebellion to be overcome. 

 

Outstanding new scientific research into effective education for life supports ancient wisdom. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL, or CASEL) in Montana's current standards and teacher training has made amazing progress back to the foundations for early learning, but progress is difficult in changing toward better systems in Montana. Under current benchmarks and resultant disempowerment of child upbringing accountability to the child’s circle, the very reasons for writing the standards remain unfulfilled. Our achievement gap, and quality of family life measures, remain unchanged.

 

Many programs outside Montana get it better, like Circle of Security International, Escuela Nueva Foundation (their “learning circle” program”), and the “phonemenon-based” learning promoted it Finland. It’s time for Montana’s early childhood programs to allow at least one alternative parallel path to credentialing of family, school, and individual caregivers through programs like the Association for Child Development (ACD) or the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). Many states have at least one now. 

 

LifeWays North America is being used in one preschool in Montana, in Red Lodge. Here children and their parents/caregivers are empowered to teach and to learn. Instead of initiating instruction, teacher learns and designs structure and scaffolding to invite children’s collaboration across ages with the whole heart, hands, body, and mind. Cognitive engagement is often not verbally directed by the teacher. Children are engaged with real stuff, with each other and with the teacher verbally and non-verbally with age-old normal rhythms of quiet play, food preparation, story sharing, eating, cleanup, rest, celebration, with songs and circle time activities at transition points in each day and through the week. The child can fail and try again, and learn trust of the teacher to collaborate with others, go exploring with full release of the caregiver, and full confidence the caregiver will be there when needed. Instead of unnatural age stratification of children, focus of Lifeways pre-schools is for -birth to age 6 or 7, a cross-age rainbow in the school that easily builds social and emotional learning with a caregiver trained in one of these ways.

 

It reduces teacher preparation load because it empowers the child. If a child’s heart learning foundation is applied to teacher education, lesson planning will be more the child’s job in collaboration with others across ages and generations. Teachers have rewarding community connections in heritage practices of food, shelter, celebration, space, and spirituality to their learning circle. Worry of meeting academic outcomes is replaced by ways of learning proven more effective even academically in later school years.

 

A 7th grade math teacher Finland was asked, “what is an important measure of success in your students, since you don’t have standardized tests?” He replied, “I want to know if my students are having fun. The rest then is easy.” Fear-based external mandates by outsiders are counterproductive to restoring the ancient learning ways of life. Many educators trained now as evaluators can be trained in building bags and boxes of materials and practices that work with the old ways of handling heritage life ways. Our emphasis on benchmarks and evaluation schemata with lists to check-off to determine accountability has been undermining acquisition of the very skills the lists were meant to measure. Any process of accountability with the child and that child’s expanding learning circle from birth is the right accountability. Any process that undermines this circle’s agency to explore, learn, and evaluate, needs to be questioned. The standards themselves are more useful when applied and owned in the child’s circle of family and teacher.

 

Culturally Sustaining and Revitalizing Pedagogies (CSRP) can be found in workshop sessions offered by organizations like LifeWays North America, at the Lakota Waldorf School in Kyle, South Dakota, and the indigenous pedagogy research in Canada, reveal many good options. These and other organizations are practicing heart learning in schools and preschools with success.   Heart learning can recover our Creator-intended learning systems and turn right-side-up our schooling and child rearing priorities here too. Join us in finding funding for an alternative learning program here.