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.
