a healing-centered and relational approach to social change

In Part 1, I talked about my own background that led me to narrative relational practices, and I referenced some of the theoretical influences as well as examples of reflective practice to support this work. Here I share a specific practice, which is an adaptation of one of the tools we used in CPE called story theology (Burbank, 1984) and which derives from outsider witness practice (narrative therapy) and the anthropological concept of definitional ceremony (Myerhoff, 1982). I think this practice can be adapted to almost any context, though it would be most effective if it’s engaged in as a team with ongoing reflective practice among all team members. I used it at the outset of a three-day staff development and training before the new year, and received a really positive response as well as a wish to continue the practice throughout the school year. I also introduced it to a religious organization that was in transition during a consultation project, and they liked it so much that they instituted the practice in an ongoing way during their board meetings. I do think it’s possible to use this pedagogy with children as well, though it may be easier to do it using a prop—a kind of show and tell—as a way of eliciting a story; and it would certainly require a lot of trust between both students and teacher and a classroom community that has already cultivated significant psychological safety. Hopefully this is a practice that those of you reading can find ways to implement in your professional learning communities.

In order to describe this practice further, it is a storytelling and listening exercise which helps participants reflect on the ways in which they bring themselves into the classroom (or hospital), family interactions, and their encounters with students (patients) and colleagues. It helps practitioners understand how we are always actively interpreting narratives, behaviors, and experiences, and it provides an example of interactive and experiential pedagogy through the co-construction of meaning, which can be practiced further in peer reflection groups and, perhaps, even in your classroom.

In this exercise, the listeners focus on the feelings evoked by and any personal associations with the story, in addition to identifying the themes and meaning present in the narrative. The exercise helps to illustrate how the act of interpretation and assessment is happening all the time, and how it can serve as either a point of connection or disconnection for the storyteller and story listeners—how we are or aren’t able to resonate or empathize with the life experiences of others.

The storyteller will choose any story from their life that can be shared orally within 5 minutes or less. The facilitator will start with their personal story, so as to model the level of vulnerability we’re going for with this. While the story is being told, the listeners attend completely to the narrative, without interrupting, asking for clarification, or otherwise impacting the way the story is told. 

The facilitator distributes or writes on a white board the following questions:

1. How do you understand the story from your own theology / worldview / value system? (or, if that language is difficult, what metaphors dawned upon you as you heard this story?)
2. What does the story bring up for you / how do you connect to the story personally? (or, what in your own life reverberated with these images?) 
3. What does the story tell you about the storyteller? 

After the story has been told, each question is responded to by each listener before moving onto the next question, creating a collective reflection that builds with each new sharing of experience. It is essential that the story listeners, when responding to the questions, speak in first person and draw from their practical knowledge—engaging in reflective practice—as opposed to a theoretical or analytic understanding of the story. Then the storyteller has an opportunity to respond and let people know what the experience was like for them. In this way, there is an explicit co-creation as each response builds on the other and reflects back something unique to the group and their life experience.

Ideally, everyone will have an opportunity to be the storyteller (in subsequent meetings one at a time; or, if it’s a one off grouping, then the smaller the group the better so several can be storytellers) and to have that experience of truly being heard, seen, and understood, but story listening also requires storytelling. No matter what, this exercise is a powerful relational experience where everyone shares something unexpected of themselves, and usually something that illustrates aspects of identity like class, race, and family culture without being as fraught as it would be in a more opinion/belief based discussion. Even if what a story listener reflects back to a storyteller doesn’t land exactly right, I haven’t once had the experience of someone saying they didn’t feel heard or of having the practice lead to anything but more connection. There is a responsibility on the part of the facilitator, of course, to maintain the expectations of pure listening and experiential reflection, and psychological safety depends on a lot of factors. But, this exercise provides an opportunity to strengthen relationships on a team and can be used at different moments for grounding and deepening the conversation.

I’d love to hear from others, especially those who engage in professional development with educators, or who otherwise educate educators, to see if you use similar practices already and/or if you think that this offers something new in some way. I’d also be interested to hear from classroom teachers who might use similar pedagogies with students and what subjects and age groups you’ve used it with. I’m hoping to get more comfortable with putting my “raw” writing out into the world again. It’s been a long, long time since I blogged and I have very different standards for my academic writing, but I won’t ever get anything up if I maintain that in this space. If you’ve made it this far, thanks so much for reading. I welcome your feedback and suggestions, questions and comments!

By way of introduction, I am new to secondary school education, fulfilling a kind of hybrid teacher/counselor/administrator role in the context of a Human Development Department in a small independent school. Of the four people on my team, none of us went through traditional teacher training, and none of us has an education degree. So, I come with a different perspective than many teachers do. And, still, I see so many of you talking in ways that reverberate with my experience. It points to the fact that the field of education is by necessity interdisciplinary, as is my discipline of practical theology (with sociology, psychology, and critical theory all very much informing it). My professional experience has been in higher education, municipal government, healthcare, and nonprofit contexts—always a helper/public service type. I am clinically trained as a spiritual care provider or healthcare chaplain, and it is this education that informs me most as a new teacher. In this post, I hope to share some of the wisdom of chaplaincy’s integration of head (reasoning) and heart (feeling) approach to learning and practice.

Central to chaplaincy education is the hermeneutic circle, defined as action > reflection > integration, an iterative process in which theory and practice inform one another, and a way of being in which we keep learning and refining our craft in the context of reflective practice that we engage in with other practitioners—both peers and those who have more experience than we do (usually a clinical supervisor). One of the most essential and longstanding teaching tools in chaplaincy education derives from the case study and is called the verbatim. The verbatim is a dialogic and narrative window into a clinical encounter that trainees bring to their peer group, in order to explore how supportive/healing the intervention was and to consider ways in which it could have been done differently. Storytelling is central to the clinical pastoral education or CPE pedagogy. Peers and supervisor are able to offer meaningful feedback because the group is also doing intensive identity work together throughout the clinical training unit, investigating beliefs, biases, assumptions, family culture, theological perspectives, and so on, and in this way is able to see where these subjectivities are possibly interfering in our ability to provide compassionate and caring responses to others.

In all my years of education (11 years of Montessori; 3 years of boarding school; 4.5 years of undergrad including courses at a community college, a Spanish university, and a liberal arts college; 2 years of a professional degree; and 7 years in a clinical-academic PhD program), the uniquely adult and learner-centered pedagogy of CPE has been the most meaningful to me. It’s a little hard to compare it to the extremely formative Montessori years that inculcated being a self-directed and lifelong learner, and gave me a belief in mutual respect between adults and children that I’ve rarely found since, but, I am confident that identity work and reflective practice together have perhaps the most significant healing potential at a time when we urgently need to find a remedy for the illnesses of white supremacy and cisheteropatriarchy (and the like) that plague our world. I am hoping to share some of what I’ve learned with educators, caregivers, and leaders who are looking for relational approaches to their work.

In my dissertation, I offer three mindsets and associated qualities as central to a relational methodology, deriving from relational cultural theory and narrative therapy, as well as my study and practice of Buddhism. They are:

1) Being willing to be vulnerable (mutuality)
2) Being humble (co-research)
3) Being curious (not-knowing)

While cultivating these qualities of vulnerability, humility, and curiosity, we engage in story sharing and listening practices to build resonance, or energetic connection between people formed through mutual understanding and sharing of experience. This strengthens our social emotional competencies and, particularly, our empathic abilities.

Narrative relational practices use story sharing and listening to very intentionally engender connection and resonance. To get a more complete understanding of this concept of building resonance, particularly as a precursor to doing deeper reflective work, I highly recommend listening to the following podcast episodes: Relational Culture & Undoing Individualism and the practice of Sharing Resonance. The companion episode on the practice of Relational Inclusion introduces us to a writing exercise that can be used after doing story sharing and listening called “What’s Wise About It?” In this exercise, practitioners consider someone in their life who offends them in some way, and then respond to the following prompts:

• What is a behavior others [this person] do[es] that is hard for you to include? What is intolerable for you about it? What value does it threaten?
• What might be wise about it for them? In what context might you find yourself in the same situation?
• What support might they be getting/looking for?

If one is in a space to really go deep with these questions, engaging in an exercise like this can be significant in terms of expanding our perspective. I think we also have to be careful to—at the same time as we may be working to deepen our own compassion for others, even those whose values are counter to ours—first and foremost take care of ourselves and know when we must hold our boundaries on harmful behaviors and when to no longer engage someone. We’ve probably all heard the cliche, “hurt people hurt people,” and while this can help us to understand others’ limitations and undeveloped skills, and to feel compassion for them, it should not be something people in the helping professions use to justify continuing to be wounded by other adults who are not doing their own work to address their wounds.

Related, though specific to educators, I also want to recommend this recent discussion between educators Min Pai and Betina Hsieh on the Heinemann podcast where they talk about identity work, which is an essential aspect of any narrative relational practice. My hope is that we all find supportive colleagues who want to go deep and excavate patterns of oppression in our own ways of being in the world!

As a bonus 🙂 I am including some additional terms and concepts that are important for engaging in this work with some references to follow up on.

Reflection is looking at something with hindsight, critically, with some depth; it is giving careful attention to the relationship between theory and practice.

Reflexivity is looking at oneself and one’s subjectivities and how they inform one’s experience and relationship to the material. It is the tool that allows the work of reflection and introspection to expand outwards into a more structural understanding of the issue at hand.

Together reflection and reflexivity constitute reflective practice, and with intercultural and antiracist commitments, it has the power to deepen our understanding of the ways in which we have limited our empathic abilities, allowed for a significant gap between our professed and actual values, divorced theory from practice, and been complicit in oppressive systems of power. As such, it has the potential to cultivate compassion, to further justice, and to challenge inequity.

Relational mindfulness (Jan Surrey) is a deepening awareness of the present relational experience, with acceptance; and connection is the core of psychological wellbeing and the essential quality of growth fostering and healing relationships.

Additional methodologies worth taking note of include, mindful inquiry (Valerie Malhotra Bentz & Jeremy Shapiro), which is an awareness of self and reality and their interaction, an investigation of one’s own subjectivities, an understanding of social context, an ethic of care, and an overall approach to research as a way of life; as well as ethical mindfulness (Marilys Guillemin & Lynn Gillam), a state of being that acknowledges everyday ethics and ethically important moments in clinical practice.

Using ethical mindfulness in professional learning communities, we share stories of practice; reflective prompts might include:

• Why have I chosen to tell this particular story?
• How has the process of writing this story prompted me to think differently of the event or experience?

In Part 2, I share a specific practice that I have found to be extremely generative when used in the context of a team that is doing identity work and reflective practice together.

What if we acknowledged our deep human need for connection by centering, from the very beginning, webs of meaningful relationships?

We need each other in this thing called life. We grow and flourish when we have intergenerational, interreligious, interracial, intercultural partnerships; when our connections are many and diverse, when our perspectives are enlarged by one another’s life experience. This more communal approach is nothing new, though it certainly hasn’t been the dominant paradigm in the United States for a very long time. Recognizing our interdependence and mutual influence, especially in the helping professions—those who are parents of young children, teachers, healthcare providers, and leaders too—we have a responsibility to further a relational approach.

By cultivating moment-to-moment awareness and presence of body, mind, and spirit in whatever context we are in, we have the potential to transform our everyday experiences and relationships. Approaching this work as both a discipline (or practice) and as a way of being, we can grow most fully into our meaning and purpose. When we continually tap into our embodied wisdom in this way, we can learn better, we can listen better, we can cultivate trust better, and we can be better, whether that is as a teacher, parent, partner, healthcare provider, or leader. Ultimately, we can do relationship better.

Centering relationship means being curious, asking open-ended questions, and listening deeply. It means building trust, engaging others with care and compassion, and allowing whatever is most true for someone to emerge in that moment. With emotional intelligence we can manage difficult feelings, conversations, and conflict and cultivate more connectedness as a result. 

Centering relationship means bringing greater and greater awareness to our “stuff,” the stories, the norms, and the assumptions that color the way we perceive the world and other people. By reflecting on and understanding our selves better—knowing our values and strengths, our biases and weaknesses—we can develop more empathy for the experience of others, and we can engage our relationships with deeper understanding, clearer communication, and more meaningful connection. When we are able to integrate the social and cultural into our learning through this reflection process, we can increase the growth potential for both ourselves and those with whom we are working or otherwise being in relationship, as well as the larger structures (which can be either empowering or oppressive, healing or harming) within which we operate.

My hope is this site will grow to include practices, resources, and research supporting this work— specifically relational parenting, teaching, caregiving, research, and leadership—as well as ongoing exploration of these existential questions by way of writing, reflection, and dialogue with others. It is a slow work in progress.

Thank you for being here.