Relational Education, by Emanuel Pariser

Relational Education
by Emanuel Pariser
Dear Teacher,

I am writing you as a teacher/counselor who has worked with students for the past 26 years at a place called The Community School in Camden, Maine. Before I go into the theory and practice of Relational Education I want you to know a little more about the School, and who I am.

The Cschool is an "alternative" school, founded in 1973 , that works only with students who have left conventional schools and chosen to come and learn with us. The program is residential and small - eight students come for a five and a half month term in which they can complete high school regardless of previous credits or lack of them. There are six faculty members.

Some people think that working with "dropouts" is a tough job because they have experience with resistant, angry teenagers who want no part of the education that has been offered them. Our students , despite all the good reasons for them to give in completely to cynicism, or rage or despair, haven't. At the Community School they have found a place where they fit, where they have chosen to be.

The same goes for me. I began my teaching career in the early 70's, co-founding the School at the age of 21 with my colleague Dora Lievow. I did not want to be part of "the system" which to me meant big institutions, rigidity, rules, the military-industrial complex, etc. But I also wanted to find somewhere that I could do meaningful work, a place where I felt I fit, a community to be a part of, a place where I could engage people in their basic humanness.

What we came to realize over the years was that our school filled the same needs for teachers and students - the need for intimacy, for meaning, for community - and slowly we began to understand the primary emphasis which is at the heart of our learning environment - we want all members of our school community to develop healthy, reciprocal relationships which are embedded with trust, intimacy, curiosity, nurturance. We have come to call our teaching practice: " Relational Education."

This chapter will not be full of teaching techniques, mesmerizing curriculum ideas, classroom management practice or student assessment strategies. But, if practiced well, "Relational Education" will lead to particular solutions for these issues as they arise in your teaching practice. If you can hold on to the idea that the purpose of education is to fit the child, and not vice-versa, you've got it, from there it's just a lot of hard work to undo the trauma and damage thats been done over the years of un-fitting education which our children have sustained.

I know, you're saying to yourself, "This guy works with eight kids at a time, he runs his own school, doesn't have to deal with principals, school boards, students who don't want to be there, special education.....what does this have to do with my life?" Good question. Bear with me, it really does have something to do with the teaching practice of everyone who teaches because we are all - ourselves, our students - we are all human beings with the same fundamental needs to be engaged in meaningful activity, to be connected to others we respect, to be learning about who we are, to be cherished by others, and to cherish others.

A few more biases of mine before we go further. I am a great believer that small is better: small schools, small classes, small institutions allow people to function more like human beings and less like automatons. Our humanity does not get buried beneath an assigned or assumed managerial role, and we can see our students for the human beings they are, and they can see us reciprocally. I believe that humans are "hard-wired" to learn, and that only through a massive cultural and social effort can we dampen the organism's curiosity and desire to learn. Finally, I believe that the most important outcomes of a good education for the student are: a love of learning, an engagement with the social and natural world around us, and a positive sense of self.

I recognize that these are very different goals than scoring high on standardized tests and the SAT, getting a high GPA, competing with the Japanese in global economics, and making it into one of the top ten colleges. They are goals that have to do with the very mettle of our humanness, the essential elements that make our families, and our society work or dysfunction. Often these goals are set aside to allow for easier "management" of schools, consolidation of equipment, facilitation of teacher contracts, etc. in essence all those things which help to preserve the institution, but also take it away from its original mission.

What positive experiences do you remember from your own time in high school? Is it a particular lecture? A formula some teacher wrote on the blackboard? A particularly funny joke someone told? Think about this for a minute; put this book down and see what comes up for you - what stands out positively in your memory about high school? What most of us will find is that we remember something we did - a report we wrote that we were proud of, a basketball game we helped to win, a story we wrote or clay pot we created. Perhaps we remember a kind teacher who took an interest in us, who believed in us. But these are the elements of humanness I am talking about - meaningful activity, nurture, being paid attention to. They are at the heart of any positive educational venture - not how well your behavior was managed in the classroom, test scores, or "national standards".

Why do we need Relational Education?
Everything starts from where we are as human beings. At the turn of the twentieth century we live in a social flux which has never been more fragmented. The contemporary model of schooling was perfected in the early 1900s when we were most interested in developing a work force ready for life in the industrialized world - that is, life in a factory. These days, as more jobs get shipped out of our country, (see Michael Moore's film "Roger and Me", and "the Big One"), and our industry has turned to a post industrial "services" model, this form of schooling has been outdated.

At the same time, since the 1960's the nuclear family has been disintegrating. More than 50% of children in schools today 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 little time for informal, personal interactions. At home, both parents work, and are tired, or absent. In the community most opportunities, like work, put students in a highly defined unskilled role (hamburger flipper, cashier, etc.) and the worker is a highly replaceable commodity.

As communities and homes fragment - the question of meaning and chaos arises. For many students undergoing cataclysmic personal changes, the relevance of the curriculum to their lives takes on a heightened importance. They need an anchor. Something, in Jeanne Bamberger's words, "to grasp" - to hold on to. Any curriculum which does not engage them, which does not allow for the adults present to attend to them will be resisted and rejected, thrown on the trash heap of useless activities which adults have been trying to foist on students since they were asked to do their first worksheet in School. More than ever before, students must perceive their studies as relevant. Things must be connected to "the real world" in order to be worth studying. And the "real world" must include the tremendous suffering which they are encountering in their lives outside of school.

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." The internet is a wonderful example of this reality. With this unbelievably rich electronic database, students with access to computers have a way to get at the world's most comprehensive informational system ever created. But the entryway to this system has no adults to welcome them into it, to set a context for what they can learn there, to guide them in their use of it. There is no person, no librarian at the front desk to put a human, meaningful context around this massive store of information. The knowledge has become detached in a significant way from our humanness. In bad education computers are being used to substitute for human contact, further separating our kids from real human contact.

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), without real connections to powerful, fulfilled adults, 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, to be truly known is to be seen on TV., and to be happy is to have a lot of money.

Core Elements of Relational Education:
Trust: How does one build a sense of trust and intimacy within a learning community? In a relationship between adult and adolescent, student and teacher? Between teacher and administrator? Between the school and its community?

My answers to these questions will be mostly focused here on the development of trust at the student-teacher level, but as you will see there are ramifications throughout the entire strata of trusting/distrusting relationships in the school-community. As John Muir, the famous American naturalist, once said " when you pick up any piece of the universe, the rest of it comes dragging along after."

Lack of trust is one of the root causes of the educational establishment's stampede towards national standards - i.e. standardized tests for everyone in as many different forms as possible. This is called "accountability" because it has the pretense of "objectivity" for the media, the public, and in turn the state legislators who fund schools on a local and state wide level. Good test stores = good school, low test scores = bad school, its almost as simple as that.

This comes down to us as teachers in the form of edicts to make sure our children do well on these tests. At the same time we are allowed to study research like Howard Gardner's on multiple intelligences which stresses the different ways we incorporate and express knowledge profoundly contradicting a standardized testing approach.

So, as a teacher, perhaps you've felt the lack of trust from your school administrators, your school board, the community your school is in because they want you to "produce" these results. Then your students challenge you as to as the value and meaning of "your" curriculum (which has begun to disolve into tp &endash; "test prep," that is), or worse, they simply do what you ask them as another hoop to jump through to get to college to get a good job etc......

I am painting what may be your predicament with very broad brush strokes. Perhaps some of you have supportive administrators, understanding school boards, and energetic and involved communities that have not become test crazed. Even then, I am sure all of you have run into students who wouldn't or couldn't trust you. What I will say to you throughout this letter in many different forms is that our number one task as a teacher, as a school, is to make ourselves worthy of our kids' trust, and in turn learn to trust them as well. This process is wonderfully reciprocal - and as we practice it, everyone benefits all the way up and down the educational food chain.

How do we accomplish this task? As teachers the answer is embedded in the word attention. We must pay attention to them - by listening, by carving out space and time on a regular basis to be with them, by making it clear to them that they are active members of the process, not just "another brick in the wall", and by truly giving them choice and responsibility in the direction of their own education.

At the Community School we have an advisor-advisee system which brings students together with a teacher/counselor on a weekly basis for what we call a "one to one meeting". In these meetings which last anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, the teacher/counselor becomes active listener, coach, cheerleader, manager, and empathic audience. The student is given the space to unburden him/herself of the true curriculum of their lives which most often have less to do with fractions and more to do with fights, boys, beer, and the constantly elusive "future".

When a one to one pair works, there is a subtle focus of attention from the teacher/counselor to the student, and reciprocally, a focussing of attention from the student to his/her one to one. Expectations of support and acceptance get built between the pair. It is an elegant and powerful process as this adult-adolescent relationship proves itself trustworthy in distinction to previous ones, and, at its very best allows the student to open up to other members of the school community, teachers, staff, as well as an interior opening to themselves which we can talk about a little later.

Like all strategies this one has serious considerations. Relationships between one to ones can get too exclusive - the bond becomes an alliance - a separation instead of a bridge. Or the relationship never really develops into a trusting resource for either student or teacher/counselor and remains fairly shallow until it is changed. Or the relationship has difficulty weathering a "betrayal" of the developing trust and stalls out, similar to the ebbs and flows of intimacy in a therapeutic relationship. Despite these cautions, I cannot think of a time in my 26 years where I have witnessed a one to one do further harm to a student.

The increasing interest in mentoring relationships stems precisely from this need for each student to be connected in some fashion to a positive adult. These systems have been successfully incorporated into public high schools - The Jefferson County Open School, in Evergreen, Colorado started by Arnie Langberg, has a very strong advisorial system and I am sure many, many other schools have found this an incredibly effective tool for building the trust needed to sustain a meaningful educational enterprise.

To become an effective one to one, teachers have to go way beyond the blackboard, and way past the field of multiple choice questions into the messy, entangled, real world curriculum of life. We have rarely been trained for this work by our schools of education or through our teacher re-certification processes. In fact we may have been led to believe that this is what guidance counselors and social workers are for, and that we should not be getting "close" with students because we do not have the training for it! (Wonderfully circular reasoning - we won't provide you with the training to do a job which we won't hire people to do, and which you haven't had the training to do.)

As with any trade there are people who are naturals at this facet of teacher/counseling and others who find it a challenge. Not everyone has an empathic supportive presence conducive to helping others uncover their tightly held personal secrets - but this is not what makes a one to one work. Ultimately, and here is a leap of faith, ultimately, it is the actual human encounter, the being together, the connection which can be or can lead to transformative experiences for the dyad. The fact that we can create a space where the two of us can be real with one another - really listen, really speak,
………………………………

At the turn of the twentieth century we live in a social flux that has never been more fragmented. The contemporary model of schooling was perfected in the early 1900s when we were most interested in developing a work force ready for life in the industrialized world - that is, life in a factory. Ron Miller describes this in greater depth:
: I would like to give a little bit of a historical sketch of how we got this way and some of the voices that have come out in the last 30 years to remind us that we need to go back to our primeval knowledge of what it means to be a human being. When schools began to become established as a state function about 150 years ago it was not really to help young people develop their potential. It was not a caring gesture toward young people. It was a mechanical solution to problems of an emerging industrial age. And ever since that time the primary thrust of schooling as an institution has been functional, has been to fit people into their roles in an expanding economy. And the deeper we have gotten into that the more complex the economy has become, the further removed it is from our daily lives, the more we have lost the human element, the sense of community and participation. John Dewey was one of the first voices to come out and say this isn't working, this isn't what education is about if we are really going to nourish the best in the human being. And, of course, after Dewey we had an attempt to renew education called progressive education and by the 1950s that had been pretty much repudiated by the culture that was becoming more and more mechanical, more and more technocratic.3

These days, as more jobs get shipped out of our country, (see Michael Moore's films "Roger and Me", and "the Big One"), and our industry has turned to a post industrial "services" model, factory schooling has become outdated in terms of its form and even in terms of its mission.

Since the 1960s the nuclear family has been disintegrating. More than 50% of children in schools today 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) and are tired or absent. For many teenagers, informal time with adults is almost non-existent - in school they are in classes only with age mates and teachers have little time for informal, personal interactions.. In the community opportunities, like work, put students in a highly defined unskilled role (hamburger flipper, cashier, etc.) and the worker is a highly replaceable commodity.

For many students undergoing cataclysmic personal changes, the relevance of the curriculum to their lives takes on a heightened importance. They need an anchor. Something in Jeanne Bamberger's words "to grasp" - to hold on to. Any curriculum which does not engage them, which does not allow for the adults present to attend to them will be resisted and rejected. More than ever before, students must perceive their studies as relevant. Things must be connected to "the real world" in order to be worth studying. And the "real world" must include the tremendous suffering they are encountering in their lives both outside and inside school.

Finally with the onset of a fully fashioned media 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." The internet provides a wonderful example of this. With the internet's unbelievably rich electronic database, students with access to computers have a way to get at the world's most comprehensive informational system ever created. But the entryway to this system has no adults to welcome them into it, to set a context for what they can learn there, to guide them in their use of it. There is no person, no librarian at the front desk to put a personal, meaningful context around this massive store of information. Knowledge has become detached in a significant way from people. As such it can become dangerous, giving people quick access to destructive knowledge beyond the framework of a human value system.

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), without real connections to powerful, fulfilled adults, are drifting through life under a barrage of "identity creating" advertising which tells them that to be "real" is to own a fancy car, wear clothes with the right names on them, to be known is to be seen on T.V., and to be happy is to have a lot of money and products.

Core Elements of Relational Education:
Trust: How does one build a sense of trust and intimacy within a learning community? In a relationship between adult and adolescent, student and teacher? Between teacher and administrator? Between the school and its community?

My answers to these questions will mostly be focused on the development of trust at the student-teacher level, but as you will see there are ramifications throughout the entire strata of trusting/distrusting relationships in the school-community. As John Muir, the famous American naturalist, once said " when you pick up any piece of the universe, the rest of it comes dragging along after." The same holds true for looking at trust in today's schools.

Lack of trust is one of the root causes of the educational establishment's stampede towards a national standard i.e. one standardized test for all students. Our communities, our businesses, our bureaucracies are not happy with the "performance" on the job or in college of our high school graduates. They don't believe that teachers and students in our schools can fashion a good education in classrooms without being held to an "objective" standard that can be assessed by a uniform test. Accountability of this sort has the pretense of "objectivity" for the media, the public, and in turn the state legislators who fund schools on a local and state wide level. It is simple, and fits perfectly with a sound bite media who can construct the following equation : Good test stores = good school, low test scores = bad school, and likewise for teachers and their class scores, and students and their individual scores.

The edict for teachers becomes making sure our children do well on these tests, which forces most of us who care about our jobs and the fate of our students to "teach to the test." At the same time we are allowed to study research like Howard Gardner's on multiple intelligences which stresses the different ways we incorporate and express knowledge and profoundly contradicts a standardized testing approach.

So, as a teacher, perhaps you've felt the lack of trust from your school administrators, your school board, the community your school is in, because they want you to "produce" these results. At the same time your students challenge you about the value and meaning of "your" curriculum, or worse they simply do what you ask them as another hoop to jump through to get to college to get a good job etc...... The classroom loses its flow, activities become sterile, and things get stiff. Learning has lost its intrinsic value and been replaced by an extrinsic one: doing well on the test.

I am painting what may be your predicament with very broad brush strokes. Perhaps some of you have supportive administrators, understanding school boards, and energetic and involved communities that have not become test crazed. Even then, I am sure all of you have run into students who wouldn't or couldn't trust you.

What I will say to you throughout this letter in many different forms is that our number one task as teachers , as a school, is to make ourselves worthy of our student's trust, and in turn learn to trust them as well. This process is wonderfully reciprocal - and as we practice it, everyone benefits all the way up and down the educational food chain.

How do we accomplish this task? As teachers the answer is embedded in the word attention. We must pay attention to our students - by listening, by carving out space and time on a regular basis to be with them, by making it clear to them that they are valued, active members of the school community, not just "another brick in the wall", and by truly giving them choice and responsibility in the direction of their own education.

Paying Respectful Attention
In 1962 Paul Goodman wrote that "adolescents (in America) are spiritually abandoned. They are insulated by not being taken seriously...Disregarded by adults, they have in turn excluded adult guidance." 4 "Terry", a graduate of the CSchool recently commented that as a teenager she often felt that her life had no meaning. When she saw the world this way she wondered what she could possibly gain from positive efforts? Why not find pleasure wherever and whenever available, before the whole miserable thing ended anyhow? Fortunately, she also had a sense that something was worth doing and that perhaps if she finished school she would find it.

As Terry reflected on her experience at the Community School, she said that it was at the school that she began to take herself seriously, because other people were paying attention and 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.

Deborah Meier, who also spoke at the May conference, describes the importance of this kind of attention:
: …one reason we need to keep our schools small and close and know our young people well is because it is only those of us who love them for who they are right now who can really protect their interest in who they could become tomorrow. This is enormously important in the culture we are currently in because decisions are being made about our kids that are increasingly removed from the people who cherish the children themselves for who they are right now. And I remember when I think about that, that it isn't only a need of children, it is a need of all of us as human beings to be in an environment where we are respected and the phrase that comes to mind is respectful affection or affectionate respect.5

At the Community School we have an advisor-advisee system which brings students together with a teacher/counselor on a weekly basis for what we call a "one to one meeting". In these meetings which last anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, the teacher/counselor becomes active listener, coach, cheerleader, manager, and empathic audience. The student is given the space to unburden him/herself of the true curriculum of his/her life which has less to do with fractions and French and more to do with fights, boys, girls, beer, and the constantly elusive "future".

When a one to one pair works, the teacher/counselor focuses caring, respectful attention on the student, and reciprocally, subtly encourages the student to focus the same attention on herself. Expectations of support and acceptance get built between the pair. It is an elegant and powerful process as this adult-adolescent relationship proves itself trustworthy in distinction to previous ones, and , at its very best allows the student to open up to other members of the school community, as well as to themselves.

Like all strategies this one has serious considerations. Relationships between one to ones can get too exclusive - the bond can become an alliance - a separation instead of a bridge. The relationship may never really develop into a trusting resource for either student or teacher/counselor. Issues may arise which require a deeper level of counseling and therapy,
and the advisor may feel overwhelmed by them. Or a relationship may not weather a "betrayal" of the developing trust and stalls out. Despite these cautions, I cannot think of a time in my 26 years where I have witnessed a one to one do further harm to a student.

The increasing interest in mentoring relationships stems precisely from the identified need for every student to be connected in a positive fashion to at least one adult. Advisorial systems have been successfully incorporated into public high schools - The Jefferson County Open School, in Evergreen, Colorado started by Arnie Langberg, has a very strong advisorial system (For an in depth discussion see Tom Gregory's book, Making High School Work) and I am sure many other schools have found this an incredibly effective tool for building the trust needed to sustain a meaningful educational enterprise.

To become effective "one to ones", teachers have to go beyond the blackboard, and past the field of multiple choice questions into the messy, entangled, real world curriculum of life. We have rarely been trained for this work by our schools of education or through our teacher re-certification processes. In fact we may have been lead to believe that this is what guidance counselors and social workers are for, and that we should not be getting "close" with students because we do not have the training for it! (Wonderfully circular reasoning - we won't provide you with the training to do a job which we won't hire people to do, and that you can't do because you haven't had the training to do it.)

As with any skill some people are naturals at this facet of teacher/counseling and others find it a challenge. Not everyone has an empathic supportive presence conducive to helping others uncover their tightly held personal secrets - but this is not necessary for a one to one work. Ultimately, and here is a leap of faith, ultimately, it is the actual human encounter, the being together, the connection which can be or can lead to transformative experiences for the dyad. The fact that we can create a space where the two of us can be real with one another - where we can really listen and really speak is a critical experience.

Brenda Wentworth, a 1979 Community School graduate, who is now a social worker writes of this experience:
: Meanwhile back at the Community School some staff person was deciding to make me her social cause of the year, or so I thought. Yes, I was a bit jaded for such a young one. Anyway whatever the reason, she took to focusing her love on me. I didn't trust her, pushed her away with words and behaviors, but she wouldn't budge.; She just stayed in my face with that stupid smile on hers and her arms opened wide...at a distance of course, which is all I would allow. Under the gates of my resistance, she slithered. I couldn't seem to defend myself from her insidious persistence. No judgments, no scorn, just gentleness and persistence.....; No matter what asinine behavior I exhibited, she always took the time to comfort me BEFORE asking "what had happened, why and what could I have done differently next time"...I found myself wanting to please her...to get her attention and win her approval....She had succeeded where many other had failed; she loved me unconditionally, just because I was alive and in her mind deserved a chance. With that she began to crack my solid steel fortress of rage and despair. 6

Dyads form one of the basic modalities of teaching even at the most prestigious colleges in the world - Cambridge and Oxford in England where students going for their advanced degrees meet with tutors, one to one, on a weekly or semi-weekly basis. Granted these sessions may not often go beyond the bounds of the "subject" matter being discussed , but if this form of education is good enough for Cambridge and Oxford students, its probably good enough for ours. So even if your school won't set up an advisor-advisee program, make sure that you have individual time with each student on a regular basis! It will not only deepen your relationship with them, but as we have seen above, it will deepen their own relationship to themselves.

When schools do not make this kind of opportunity available they create situations like the one Deborah Meier describes below,: ... [he was a recent graduate of a high school from a New York City high school but] he realized there wasn't a single teacher who could write him a letter of reference. Not because he had had a bad record in that school, it was because there wasn't a single adult in that school who knew him. As a result there was no particular reason for me to have any relationship with that high school because there was no one there I could have an alliance with because the odds were there was no one in that high school that knew my son well enough for me to go in and consult with.

So we have created schools in which not only young people are powerless but adults are powerless. More and more not only are young people not known by these adults, but these adults are not adults who could help them learn to be grownups. You can't learn to be a tennis player without having tennis players around you. You can't learn to play basketball without having basketball players around you. We have asked our young people to grow up into grownups in the absence of grownups, in the absence of people around who are powerful models of what it could be like to be a grownup, both school people and people in their communities. And, in fact, the most common thing that young people experience in school aside from teaching is grownups who will say to them 'well that is just the way it has to be'." 7

Attention Deficit: An Alternative Definition
As relational educators we understand that we can no longer sacrifice our students to the kind of inattention Meier speaks of. The primary "attention deficit" that exists between adults and children in our society sets the stage for the other attention deficits that develop as students grow . A student of mine once noted, that, "Yeah I have attention deficit, I never got enough attention when I was growing up, I crave it now!" You simply cannot underestimate the profound power that paying attention individually to your students has both for them, for your own practice as a teacher, and for the sense of community that it engenders in your school or program.

Developing a Sense of Belonging:
With the rapid fragmentation of society and the dissolution and destabilization of many of the institutions we used to belong to i.e., neighborhoods, organized religions, families, political parties, work places, the basic human need to feel a sense of connection, or belonging has been increasingly foiled. Schools offer this experience of belonging to their students and faculty. But, at the moment, a relatively small population of successful students, athletes, and teachers experience this sense of fitting in. How do we extend this sense to all students and teachers?

Giving Students Responsibility
Although many solutions to this problem of belonging go beyond your purview as a classroom teacher and speak to the structure of the entire institution, there are elements that can enhance a sense of belonging even within the unit of a class. The key here is responsibility and participation. We need to give our students opportunities to take responsibility for structuring their own learning environments at the classroom level. Students need to have choices within the curriculum, choices which allow them to follow a train of thought that intrigue, or bother them. Students also need opportunities to co-create the environment of the classroom with you - the decorations, the cleaning, even the furnishings to the extent that is possible. When a student has invested in creating or decorating a space s/he will feel more connected to it.

Involvement in Behavioral Issues
On a school wide level one of the most powerful ways to create a sense of belonging, is to involve students seriously in the development and implementation of the community's code of conduct. Behavioral management at last resort is often the job of administration - especially at the high school level .This does little to prepare students for a society that has no "vice principal" in it to mete out justice as s/he sees fit. Student councils, often a popularity contest, usually have little if any impact on the actual running of the School or the handling of behavioral issues.

In her interview for the book Changing Lives: Voices From a School That Works Patty, a Cschool graduate talks about the interpersonal responsibility she learned at the Cschool:
: I had much more freedom at the School than I did at home. But learning that with freedom comes a certain responsibility, and what you do not only affects yourself but other people - that's the big thing I learned. It's okay to make choices. But how do you make those choices? What has carried through until now is the thing of including others in your choices. How is it going to affect other people - the people I love, the people I work?8

At the Community School we use a quasi legal system in which the rule offender brings his/her misdeed to a panel made up of a current student, current faculty member, and "judge" (usually a Cschool graduate). This group decides whether or not to accept the misdeeders' or an alternate proposal, and the judge announces the verdict to the student. Other schools following the model established at Summerhill utilize a full school meeting which can be called at any time to deal with behavioral issues.

The point here is involvement - belonging will not be established without opportunity to be involved in issues which are critical to the of the community's functioning.

In his book, Making it Up as We go Along: The Story of the Albany Free School, Chris Mercogliano describes how this elementary school, started in the late 60's by free school pioneer Mary Leue, established a form of conduct called the council meeting:
: The mechanics of a council meeting, where many a future conflict is prevented and many a current one resolved, are as follows: Anybody can call a meeting at any time. By general agreement....when a meeting is called, we all drop what we are doing and go to the largest room on the first floor of the building where we sit in a large circle on the carpet. Three nominations are forwarded, and a chairperson is elected. It is the chair's responsibility to recognize speakers, keep the discussion on track, and maintain order only for urgent matters, and only after other alternatives have been....The general rule of thumb is that meetings are called exhausted..... 9

Running the Physical Plant
In another realm, belonging can be developed by student involvement in running the necessary functions of the School. Students come to school today, as one educator put it "information rich, and responsibility poor" when they used to come to school in the early 1900s "information poor and responsibility rich." At the Community School, students work in the community holding real jobs, and earning a portion of their room and board costs. Although most schools cannot easily duplicate this kind of real world experience, City and Country School in New York City pioneered an approach that meets this need by giving each grade a function to carry out - such as communications, meals, publications, mail etc. This approach consistently allows students to bring a much broader array of strengths to the educational enterprise than simply their current abilities to compute and read. It teaches them how the school runs, and puts them in a "co-worker" position with the faculty. Most conventional schools have always been such terribly impoverished environments for kinesthetic learners because these kinds of opportunities have not been made available, and conventional curriculum is usually extraordinarily unexperiential.

What happens when schools and educators increase the number and kinds of opportunities available for students as a part of their day and this work is considered as important as the development of academic skills? Students who have found no success in school and have created the equation that school = learning = failure, will find themselves succeeding at something which the institution deems important. Valued success subtly works on the aforementioned equation, loosens the connections between learning and failure, and counteracts the sense that school has to be a place where one suffers and feels bad about oneself. Success breeds success, and it also breeds hope. Students may once again be willing to risk effort in areas where they had previously failed once they have tasted the possibility of success. With the support of the interpersonal environment and the experience of their own successes - students' self confidence grow, and their energies become more organized and focused.

Carol came to the Cschool unimpressed with her own intellectual abilities and talents. She wanted to be done with school, and get on with her life. She had no idea of what she would or could do for her next step into the "real world". Having gotten an interview and a job as a teacher's aide at a local Montessori school, a light began to shine in her eyes. She became the only teacher in the program truly able to connect with a young hyperactive boy. By the end of the term she was a valued member of the Montessori school which offered her continued work, and she also had become an incredible resource to the family of the young boy. Carol left the School having found her passion, and continues to this day working with and running programs for young children in pre-school and day-care settings.

Informal Time
In "High Schools As Communities" Gregory and Smith discuss the community building importance of informal time being available to student and teacher:
: A major problem for teachers or students in any school is finding time to talk informally to each other. When a school is structured to fill every minute of the day, it eliminates most of the possibilities for students and teachers to "just talk"...when the daily schedule of a school is relaxed, time for spontaneous discussions begin to appear. Some small high schools have adopted a scheduling format where teachers and students both have large blocks of free time....During "free" time, students have the opportunity to engage in adult-like conversations with teachers: in other words, they can practice being adults....Both teachers and students, have the opportunity to really get to know each other as people. 10

Time is of the essence in modern schooling. Let's use it to benefit the quality of our learning community.

Co-Creation of Knowledge and Resistance to Authority: Work With Your Students
The central overt purpose of the schooling enterprise is the mastery of basic cognitive skills such as reading, critical thinking, and computation. The assumption being that the mastery of these skills will "prepare" students for successful functioning in the "real world" where they will have to compete with others toget into college or training programs, and eventually hold a job and support themselves.

When students and families resist this sort of future-oriented, lock-step thinking - they are often asking us to make the actual experience of school immediately relevant and engaging - not a preparation for some looming future. And, as Cschool graduate Pat asked ten years ago after being told by a visiting adult that "things will be different in the real world", "If I'm not in the real world, then where am I? And why would they take me out of the real world and put me in school to prepare me for the real world?"

The learning we do in school should have intrinsic value to both teacher and student. In the relational model learning is founded on a reciprocal relationship between student and teacher. The student teaches how best s/he can be taught - as she learns more clearly who she is and what her strongest learning modalities are. At the Community School, we try to get an oral history from each student covering his/her schooling that addresses traumatic and positive schooling experiences, learning preferences, anxieties, interests, strengths and weaknesses. Many times we will encounter students who have never been asked these questions, and must first begin to find answers to these questions by observing themselves carefully.

The teacher/counselor's function in this relationship is to bring their love of the subject matter - whatever that may be, their ability to pay attention to the student's learning process, and their desire to facilitate the student's success. Recently a student commented to me that he found it remarkable that I got so much joy from the progress that I saw students making at the Cschool. He was right, I get an enormous charge our of Cschool student success as do all the staff, I just never realized that the pleasure was so visible.

Speaking from her own experience, Brenda Wentworth, describes a common dynamic between teacher and student in a conventional school which stratifies teacher above student:
: So what about the traditional educational process, why didn't it work for me? I say this, externalization of power, power over the need to exert power over a person I believe is the nemesis of the traditional education process. When a student feels less than and the teacher feels more than there can be no real helpful educational exchange.....Anyway, there is a time in all of our lives when we discover that truth and reality are very relative concepts. It is at this time that we need the most guidance but it is too often at this time that many people perceive this to be the most threatening. when a student realizes that a teacher's beliefs are just that, beliefs. The student often begins to challenge the teacher and here is where the traditional educational process often takes a major nosedive. Instead of perceiving this as a perfect educational juncture, the teacher fearing exposure often perceives it as a personal attack and attempts to hide behind his or her armor of adult status. The student seeing through the teacher's defensive maneuver steps up the intensity of his or her offensive tactics which often causes the teacher to impose punitive measures.

Students are often left feeling overwhelmed and confused asking themselves, "Isn't this teacher supposed to be teaching me about life, why am I being punished for asking questions? After repeated encounters like the ones above, students often retreat into despair. Sometimes this despair turns into depression, sometimes rage. Behavioral implications become quite obvious and it is sad to say we don t have to look too far for concrete examples of what despair and rage can actually do in an adolescent. 11

A Glance at Curriculum: Don't be Mesmerized by the Mandates
Do not be mesmerized by mandated curricula. They are generally speaking a loose amalgam of information amassed by someone in a text book company or a "curriculum development office" at the state level, or a college professor somewhere who has determined what "one needs to know" about a particular subject at a particular grade level. The principle lying behind this process assumes that some distant expert knows what your students should know and therefore what you should teach them, and besides, you don't have the time or knowledge to figure this out for yourself.

For a relational educator this assumption raises questions: How does this expert know what my students need to know if s/he doesn't know my students? Is the curriculum really a body of knowledge which can stand outside of our lives - and is automatically relevant to us because it is so profoundly rooted in reality? Why can't I have the time to fashion an authentic curriculum relevant to both my students and my interests?

My favorite definition of curriculum comes from Arnie Langberg. He proposes that one create a matrix with unplanned experiences, and planned experiences on one side, and in school activities, and out of school activities on the top. Most curriculum developers work to put together material for the matrix box which covers "in school, planned experiences."

"This choice leaves out the three matrix boxes that constitute most of the real world: unplanned experiences in school, unplanned experiences out of school, and planned experiences out of school. The decision to design curriculum this way further concretizes the separation between Schools and the real world - a separation that relational educators are trying to break down in order to make schools more real, more relevant."

Why don't conventional schools give many credits for experiences in the three other kinds of matrix boxes. One simple reason is power. As long as the only thing that can help get you through school is a credit derived from planned in school experience, the curriculum developers, state and federal bureaucracies and to a much more limited extent, teachers, have control - the "power over" that Brenda was talking about previously. As soon as we introduce unplanned or out of school experiences power shifts to the student, because she is in charge of learning from these, as she will be for the rest of her life. Where are the most important, life shaping experiences going on for a teenager? My guess would be in the "out of school, unplanned" matrix. Do you want an active, engaged, curious student? Build time in your curriculum for attention to these experiences.

For the relational educator all curriculum is relative to the individual student. We encourage depth as opposed to the often superficial horizontal coverage that canned curricula give to subject matter. We encourage personal relevance as opposed to rote memorization of pre-determined hierarchies of knowledge. We hope that as Professor Bill Ayers has put it so beautifully, teachers become "improvisors, co-constructors of interactive, flexible learning environments, engaged in the improvisational dance of teaching."

The result of a relational approach is that every student is no longer on the same page, probably not even in the same book, and where you once had one curriculum you now have 25 variants. You will not cover all the concepts outlined in the syllabus - some students will never get to page 332 in the mandated textbook; but each one of them will walk away from your classroom with a greater sense of who they are as a learner, and of what interests them in your field. Is this more important than "mastering" a smorgasbord of facts and opinions well enough to regurgitate them on a test? Is this a process which does less harm to the developing mind than forcing it to ingest knowledge for which it has no intrinsic appetite?

It is my belief that by forcing knowledge of no intrinsic interest upon students, conventional schooling creates many of the learning disabilities which it then tries to remediate. Others like A.S. Neill, John Holt, John Gatto, and Ivan Illich would agree. We are doing harm when we forget the person, and focus on the subject matter, and as students get older, we tend to do this more and more. In high school, the curriculum becomes a holy thing, and credits are critical. At the same time our students are entering a period of their lives that is tumultuous and they are extremely vulnerable physically, emotionally, and socially. In secondary education we lose sight of the person too often - and it is the goal of relational education to reverse this trend.

As a relational educator you will need to have faith that your support of students' intellectual and emotional functioning, your encouragement of their interests, and aptitudes will do far more to prepare them for success in the "real world" than getting "through" the required curriculum. Remind yourself that in the "real world" there is no discrete thing like biology - that things happen in a deeply interconnected way, and that all life is a composite of interrelated basic processes involving all academic "fields" at once. As analytical creatures we created these distinct bodies of knowledge to study them, but the world itself does not come this way, and many academics have forgotten this! For this reason have faith that when a student needs to know something they might have missed in your class because you allowed them to "stray" from the curriculum, they will be able to go back and pick it up - especially if you have helped them to find their confidence and autonomy as learners.

Martha came to the Cschool when she was 15 and graduated at 16. She was bright, rebellious, and nobody was going to tell her how to do anything! Despite her resistance she had chosen to come to the School because traditional school was completely boring and unsuccessful for her. For six years after she graduated Martha traveled across the country- holding part time jobs and returning home to Camden to rest every few months. She got involved in working on the Schooner Boats which provide summer excursions for tourists in Camden and fell in love with the ocean and sailing. She decided that she wanted to become a captain of a small vessel.

To get her license she had to apply to a maritime academy which told her that she needed more math to get into the program. What Martha remembered of math included some algebra, percents, and fractions, but there were many pieces missing. As the year prior to her going to school developed, she ended up with eight weeks to cover algebra 1, 2, and trigonometry. Martha was panicked but determined. She arranged tutoring for herself, and an independent study course, and kept in touch with the Cschool's Outreach program that supports former students.

Martha worked six hours a day for most days of those eight weeks, and scored very highly in her course work, which was unfortunately enormously dull. Despite these constraints she had found her math sense, and pulled together three years of math in 40 days of intensive study Although Martha had missed important segments of high school math, she was able to recoup them quickly and effectively when she had a specific goal in mind and the necessary self confidence.

Chris Mercogliano explains how the same thinking is applied at the Albany Free School with elementary aged students,: The reason we pay so much attention to emotional and interpersonal issues is that we have found, over and over again that when these issues are given sufficient value and attention, academic learning tends to flow like water. When children have the freedom to know themselves, like themselves, and belong to themselves, academic learning requires amazingly little time, certainly not the countless thousands of hours conventional schools spend.12

What are Essential Qualities of a Relational Educator?
Daria Brezinski asked me this question in a radio interview with me and it is such a good question that I would like to give it some space here.

1. Cherish the children you work with for who they are right now, as Deborah Meier put it so well. There is no substitute for this kind of nurturing acceptance which is especially needed when students become teenagers and are moving headlong towards the unknowns of adulthood. And remember, teenage boys desperately need this kind of attention despite their frequently adversarial and standoffish stance to adults.

2. Be honest and self-reflective in your teaching practice. Let students know how their behaviors make you feel as a person - both the good and the bad. The courage you display in your honesty and self-reflection is one of the most fundamental gifts you can offer. Be real , it will make students feel real in turn .

3. Understand that you are a co-worker, co-facilitator, co-creator of students' knowledge. Everything that they learn will be governed by how ready they are to learn, and your primary function is to create the environment that sponsors readiness, and then to be there with resources when the moment arrives.

4. Pay attention to your students as learners and human beings. Have them teach you how best to teach them.

5. Understand that students need informal time with you in order to discover who you are as a person, and to be able to identify with you on a deeper level than your role as teacher often permits. Be aware that this "small talk" is not a "waste of time" or a sidetrack from the important curriculum - it is absolutely critical in laying the foundation of your relationship with students.

5a. Understand that your relationship with many students will be essential in their cognitive as well as affective development; once they have a trusting common place to stand with you - they will be more ready to engage the intellectual challenges ahead of them.

6. Fill your classroom with choices so that students feel ownership of what they are studying.

7. Include all aspects of your student's lives as part of the curriculum.

8. Be respectful of your students, and in Brenda Wentworth's words, "open to their truth' while holding your own center."

9. Pay close attention to your reactions to your students; do not be afraid of negative emotions!

10. Know when you don't know. Get good case consultation from your peers or a social-work/psychologist type when you need it. One of the most common experiences of relational educators is burnout. Your openness to the pain and suffering in your students' lives needs to be balanced and protected by support from the system you work in. (See #15)

11. No matter how much you like a student and want them to succeed, do not do more than 50% of the work with them otherwise you will become a barrier to their autonomy rather than a support.

12. Understand that learning like evolution is not a steadily paced, linear progression of experiences. It comes in bursts and only when the learner is ready. So, don't measure your success or failure by how much time you or your students have or have not spent on a subject ñ positive outcomes may appear years from now, and a student with self-confidence and motivation like Martha, can pick up missed but necessary information much more effectively than you or I could teach it to her when she was not ready.

13. Give students roles and responsibilities in your classroom which are real.

14. Continually break down the barriers between schooling and the real world, by bringing the real world into the classroom, and by getting students out of the classroom for projects, independent study, trips etc.

15. Take Care of Yourself

Be aware that relational education is transformative work, and as such it is risky. If you are doing your job properly you will come into contact with unexamined aspects of yourself that you avoided or ignored until a student illuminates them for you by his/her behavior or response to you. Getting in touch with and working with your emotional baggage is the reciprocal product of helping students to confront their own behaviors. You may want help with this process, and ideally your work place should support private consultation on personal issues which have been triggered by work. How much more authentic will your referrals to "professional counselors" be if you have made use of these same services yourself. How much better a listener and empathizer will you be when you recognize that similar issues connect you to your students.

Outcomes of a Relationally Based Approach: 26 Years at the Community School
If you teach in a conventional situation, how can you defend the time to follow this approach, meet the demands of the curriculum, and the cognitive needs of your students. I will offer a few arguments to support your adopting this perspective.

First, think of the amount of time lost in the classroom to "behavior management" - at an extreme how many tens of thousands of hours of schooling were lost to the students at Columbine High? If schools made Relational Education a primary focus of their efforts, it would take no more time than is now being expended on the "management" of students who are not engaged. And even if it did, it would insure that the chances of another Columbine would drop drastically because there could be no completely unattached students in any effective relationally based school.

Second, our experience with some of the most unsuccessful students, has been so positive once they have recovered their sense of confidence and hope. They have found goals worth working for and their limited time working on academics at the Cschool did not seem to impede them, but rather set the stage for a re-opening to learning in general.

Over 350 students have arrived at the Cschool since 1973. To start with they were demoralized, angry and resistant. Yet they were also 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 (with well over 600 contacts from former students each year); and many have created families that have been more successful than their families of origin.

In 1995, the University Press of America published a book by Jane Day about the Community School called "Changing Lives: Voices from a School that Works", that documents stories of students who have graduated from the Cschool since 1973. This effort is an inspiring collection of individual outcomes - one life at a time.

Our commitment to the relational model of education has led us to start a new program for dropouts whom we were not previously able to serve called: Passages: A New Model for Teen Parents, inspired by Arnold Langberg, founder of the Jefferson County Open School in Colorado, and based on the Walkabout model of education. The School began the Passages program for teen parents in 1994.

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 help these young women and men develop as self-directed learners. Our task is to support and enrich the very demanding lives 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 23 graduates. The extraordinary work of teachers and students in this program has been recognized by Maine's Office of Substance Abuse as one of the finest examples of primary prevention programming in Maine.

Other outcomes of valuing relationship and community have been the amazing networks which the CSchool has created, become a part of, and helped to support. In 1973 there were no alternative programs in the Mid coast Area of Maine, in 1994 there are eight. In 1973 no-one in Maine considered alternative education a form of primary prevention for substance abuse; in 1998 a statewide commission cited alternative education as an effective model for primary prevention in part using data from the Cschool's efforts.

Conclusion:
Many of us are teachers because we love to learn and want to do something useful and productive with our working lives. We find ourselves working more and more with children wounded by our culture, who are neglected, scapegoated, and sometimes spoiled. They all suffer the changes in the society around them, and for the most part are the victims of those changes.

To get the intellectual skills and "habits of mind" offered by schools, these students need reciprocal relationships with caring, empowered adults. When they feel connected, a sense of belonging, and a revived confidence in themselves, their cognitive abilities can bloom. As a teacher, once you have experienced the power of this process you will see how closely connected the coginitive and the affective, the mind and the heart, really are.

I hope that writing this letter to you has supported your best impulses as a person and a teacher because you are probably aware of doing many of the activities I have discussed above. I hope that you can go back into your school and carve out time for students who need it, and help your school see the vital importance of becoming more relationally focused. I hope that you can use the material in this book to validate your attempts to change things on whatever level is possible, but most importantly at the level of your work with individual students. Take care of yourself and give me a call if I can help.

Good luck!
Em Pariser
8/31/99

I have enclosed below a reading list and email addresses of books and people who are resources on many aspects of relational education.

Footnotes:
1. Roger Waters, "Another Brick in the Wall" (New York: Pink Floyd Music Publishers, 1979).
2. Miller, Ron, Addressing the May 8 Conference on Relational Education, Camden, Maine, May 1999.
3. Ibid 2
4. Goodman, Paul, Compulsory Miseducation (new York: Vintage, 1962) , p 74
5. Meier, Deborah, Addressing the May 8 Conference on Relational Education, Camden, Maine, May 1999.
6. Wentworth, Brenda, Addressing the May 8 Conference on Relational Education, Camden, Maine, May 1999.
7. Ibid, 5
8. Jane Day, Changing Lives, Voices from a School that Works, University Press of America, Lanham Maryland, 1994.
9. Mercogliano, Chris, Making it Up as We go Along: the Story of the Albany Free School, Heinemann, 1998 pg. 30
10. Thomas B. Gregory and Gerald R. Smith, High Schools as Communities: The Small School Reconsidered (Bloomington, Indiana: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, 1983), pg. 45
11. Ibid 6
12. Ibid 9, pg. 58

Other Important Books:
John Holt, How Children Fail, (New York, Dell, 1964) pg. 12
Deborah Meier, The Power Of Their Ideas,
Culture Against Man, Jules Henry
Neil Postman, Teaching as a Subversive Activity -
Tom Gregory, Making High School Work - - Teacher's College Press, New York.
Maurice Gibbons The Walkabout Papers,

email addresses:
Emanuel Pariser: emanuel@cschool.acadia.net
Arnold Langberg arnie_langberg@ceo.cudenver.edu
Ron Miller: milleron@together.net
Deborah Meier: dmeier@essentialschools.org
Jeanne Bamberger: jbamb@mit.edu

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