Developing a Compassionate Approach to Life: Why We Need to Intentionally Teach Peace Education, Empathy & Care

 

"I cannot do all the good that the world needs, but the world needs all the good that I can do." 

- Jana Stanfield

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"Christmas is doing a little something extra for someone."

- Charles M. Schultz

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This afternoon was a big day at our school - it is D-Day - Delivery Day! 

This afternoon we are delivering all the wreaths and cards students have made for a nearby Seniors' Residence, as well as the stockings students stuffed for 10 families from a partner school, and 4 families within our own community, that will be accompanied by donations of gift certificates from our generous community. 

The excitement is visible as we load vehicles and take photographs documenting this year's efforts to share warmth and care throughout our community and our city!

These are two Peace Education initiatives our school has adopted as a way to build empathy, care and compassion with our students from very young ages. We believe Peace Education has a multitude of benefits - including reducing bullying behaviours, fostering positive social interactions,  developing responsibility for our own behaviours and attitudes, learning the critical importance of humans caring for humans, creating opportunities to 'see' the world through the eyes of others, for example. Peace Education also deeply promotes empathy and care - two qualities essential to sustaining and advancing the human race.  

But why do we need to intentionally teach Peace Education, empathy and care to our children?

When we intentionally support children in building empathy, we are offering them ideas and strategies for trying to see things through the eyes of someone else, as well as attempting to feel the same emotions. The Roots of Empathy program - accessed as a support teaching strategy at our school on a weekly basis - teaches children it is critically important to develop nurturing relationships with each other as human beings for, if we do not do this from the moments of our births, we will simply not survive as a species.  Learning empathy is foundational to understanding the nature of human interactions - the essence of the human condition is reliance on each other through relationship. 

Children who have lived through trauma at a young age struggle to develop empathy, requiring a significant investment in re-building this foundational belief. For it is empathy - caring for others as humans - that fosters trust, independence, autonomy, commitment. 

We intentionally teach empathy to support our youngest learners with making investments in trusting, caring relationships that will yield personal well-being while also providing opportunities for others to build personal well-being too.

Care requires a person to make a personal investment in an act of kindness or concern towards another. It is possible for humans to be empathetic without an accompanying act of care - we acknowledge and feel emotions about someone else or the experiences they are living through, but we do not take the next step of investing ourselves in an act of kindness or help that will physically support them. 

We intentionally teach care through visible acts of kindness or acknowledgement, sharing of physical, emotional or spiritual support as a way to both demonstrate our concern and to offer someone else something they visibly need or have expressed a desire for support. It is possible for humans to demonstrate care - through donations, letters of support, conversations, etc without actually taking the time or energy to consider their personal perspectives or emotions. We can care without being emotionally connected at all. 

Compassion is the melding of empathy with care - when a person considers the perspective of another human, has a shared emotional connection and decides to invest in an act of kindness or concern in an attempt to influence and improve the other person's quality of life.

We intentionally teach compassion with all our children to foster recognition of the human connection through relationship as well as the active part we can all play in enhancing and improving each other's life experiences.  Compassion - taught through experiences with empathy and care - gives presence and form to Peace Education. 

I believe Michael Crawley said it best: 

"Compassion is the most powerful force in the world. It can defeat indifference, intolerance and injustice. It is able to replace judgment with acceptance because it makes no distinction between age, ethnicity, gender or disability. It freely embraces the rich diversity of humanity by treating everyone as equals. It benefits both those who receive it and those who share it. Every person on earth desires it, and every human being deserves it."

Compassion extends our abilities as humans to make the best of our most human qualities - empathy and care - to foster connection with each other, to attend to the physical and emotional needs and reasonable wishes of each other as other humans, to have a deep and abiding respect for all living entities. These are the seeds and roots of Peace Education. 

Through Peace Education, we foster attachment with each other, build strengths in recognizing and managing our emotions, develop clear, kind strategies for communicating effectively with each other and develop strategies for cultivating acceptance and inclusion of all regardless of our physical, cultural, emotional, intellectual or experiential life encounters.  Peace Education promotes active involvement with each other; encourages children to develop a profound appreciation for each other and all of humanity, and to seek ways to help and act kindly, to share deep emotional human connections.

We teach Peace Education so children will be able to recognize when experiences are not generous, kind or helpful and intentionally know how to respond with positivity, care and empathy. These are not easy lessons to learn, and they must often be repeated numerous times to be truly understood in a multitude of situations throughout a person's lifetime.  It is not an easy approach to living; it requires care and attention and thinking outside the box as often as not. Peace Education requires an abiding commitment to seeing others find happiness, joy and strength in relationships with one another. 

It takes time to foster Peace Education in the same way it takes time to design a building, create recipes for new meals, prepare and launch a new artwork for the world. These are not small ideas - they are enormous, all-encompassing and truly remarkable! 

In this season of giving, we reap the benefits of developing a compassionate approach to life as we see our students take such pride and enjoyment in the valuing of others' needs. These are not discussions about others who don't have enough as much as we ourselves do, as they are discussions about acknowledging widespread human needs in a multitude of ways.

I believe children change the world. They have the power to take up new ventures and ideas and make them real for humanity. They have the power to re-think quickly, re-address an idea swiftly and move to another plane of thinking without barriers. They have yet to become jaded with life and its' myriad obstacles. They have the determination, grit and desire to see things play out better - differently - for themselves.  The possibility to find all of these skills rests deeply in the intentionality of teaching Peace Education. 

And it is also how we develop a compassionate approach to life - one person, one connection, one interaction at a time.

May your winter break be restful as we contemplate a quiet, constrained holiday season. I am personally investing in a new tradition with our family - the Icelandic tradition of Jolabokaflod,  or 'Christmas Book Flood' where everyone curls up on Christmas Eve with a new book to read, a cup of hot chocolate - and maybe some chocolate to eat as well! Sounds like the perfect new tradition during a pandemic - and it carries all the elements of compassion for humanity too :)

 I invite you all to join me - and wish you the very best of quiet holiday seasons celebrated safely and healthily at home.  

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal

Eric Harvie School

 

 

Balancing Losses and Benefits for Children when Learning Gets Disrupted

 

(December 2020...)

(December 2021...)

"I think a hero is any person really intent on making this a better place for all people." - Maya Angelou

"Making difficulties into the path." - Buddha

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    Just over three months into the 2020-21 school year, with a history of almost nine months of disrupted learning experiences behind us, I find myself having numerous - sometimes ongoing - conversations with parents, colleagues, family members and friends about the 'children' and how they are faring through this extended time of learning - and living - disruption.  

These conversations have given me pause to thoughtfully consider what I am observing, hearing, noticing, encountering with students as we travel unfamiliar landscapes. Since none of us have lived through this type of experience before, it is impossible to 'know' with any certainty what the potential impacts or outcomes on children will be. Although we will all, I am certain, strive to apply our best knowledge and wisdom as we attempt to unpack the question of 'how are the children doing?' in the coming months and - perhaps most particularly - post-pandemic - when the world begins to tilt a bit more towards the familiarity of our past experiences.

One thing I am coming to know for sure is that there are losses and there are benefits, as there are in any life experience. And it is in the balancing of these experiences that the children will find a way forward. I also know they will look to the adults to help with the balancing and with finding ways to move forward successfully into what is sure to be a familiar yet significantly altered future.

As a child, I lived through the experience of losing my mother to complications from diabetes. She was almost 34 years old and I was 11, with two younger sisters. My paternal grandmother had always been the grounding influence in our large extended family and she attained mythic status for me during the years following the death of my mom.  She gave me many 'stars to guide my way' through her words of wisdom and advice and when I consider the path ahead for the children I know, love and work with every day, I hear her words as crystal clear as if she were here: 

Make the best of,  not the worst of your experiences. 

Since I am now a grandmother myself who has always held these words close to my heart, my goal will be to balance the losses and benefits children have experienced through this pandemic in such a way as to make moving forward into a post-pandemic experience a growth opportunity rather than embracing the impediments that might seem to be a challenge to relinquish. 

And we are not post-pandemic yet; there may be many terrains to navigate still ahead.

Here is what I do know...

I have the great good fortune to teach the youngest children in the public school system - it is on my watch that they enter the world of school, learning, socialization and emotional development that will shape and guide their growth through some of the most formative years of their lives.  How they come to see themselves as learners and humans reflects, to a large extent, the experiences they will have within the school environment I endeavour - with the help of many colleagues - to design, structure and invite them to participate in as students. Their elementary learning years are critically important - they are the times when children establish foundational skills, understandings and attitudes towards learning, thinking, relating, questioning, caring, wondering that will carry them forward to living successful, fulfilling lives. 

It is a great good fortune, yet also a truly awesome responsibility.

I also know the routines, learning environment structures and strategies, supports and services, attention to learning challenges and successes, opportunities for engaging with ideas that provoke novel thinking, encountering multiplicities of information in various formats while feeling safe, secure and capable, provides learners with the essential qualities of a school environment that will promote both successful academic achievement and healthy personal growth and development. 

And I absolutely know our youngest learners have experienced unparalleled disruptions to learning, the security of their learning environments, and their social interactions over the past nine months on a scale that really eludes clear comprehension by any of the adults in their world. 

What I also know, however, is that humans are adaptable, flexible and have an enduring capacity to thrive even in the most unimaginable circumstances.

The challenges and losses due to pandemic disruptions are real and the true dimensions of these losses - academic, social, emotional, physical, familial - are not yet clearly revealed or finished accumulating. 

We are seeing more young children displaying symptoms of anxiety - sometimes they are able to verbally express their concerns, sometimes they act them out as a call for our attention to concerns they cannot clearly understand or express.

There are numerous academic gaps that are surfacing as learners navigate typical academic learning expectations midst periods of isolation following the reduced, emergency learning situations from the spring. 

Students who thrived as learners in a vibrant, lively school environment that encouraged and supported the social construction of knowledge as a collaborative, engaging exchange of ideas and practical applications are finding it very challenging to focus their thinking and energy on controlling their bodies 100% of the time under the constraints of physical distancing, mask wearing, vigilance to sanitizing surfaces and hands. As their minds are concentrated on keeping their bodies in one place, their learning energy is reduced and understanding new ideas takes much greater concentration and focus than ever before - sometimes more than seems possible in a learning moment. Out of necessity, learning environments are accommodating health precautions rather than promoting best learning practices. 

Social interactions are tightly controlled and limited by adults with the very best interests of children and health safety at heart. Even lunches and outdoor experiences are controlled with physical limitations. Learning to share, negotiate, discuss, imagine together, invent, collaborate, compromise - these are just some of the skills that will need to be acquired at a later date in a different learning environment.

Children's expressions of emotions are visibly changing - anecdotally, we are observing less spontaneity in the school setting, fewer outright peals of laughter, greater frustration with trying to follow layers of directions and instructions, a 'flattening' of discussions and enthusiasm during interactions. When negative emotions erupt, they erupt quickly and fiercely. Children are holding in emotions as they hold their bodies in check too. There are conversations, smiles and laughter of course (sometimes well hidden behind masks), and children are naturally inclined to be cheerful and upbeat. However, these anecdotal observations are on display every day as some of the exuberance of learning and being together in school has been diminished and stifled within the school environment.

There are visible benefits to the pandemic constraints that will carry young learners forward successfully.

 I have written in this blog about the resiliency students are demonstrating every day as they come to school - their willingness to adapt has been exceptional in so many ways! They wear their masks without comment, line up in physically distanced lines to enter school or go to the washrooms. They sanitize and handwash every time they enter or exit a space in the school almost without fail - often, as I collect a child to come and work with me in the Learning Commons or the Hub they will effortlessly and without reminders stop to sanitize before they leave their classroom and then again as they enter the Learning Commons well before I remember to do the same! Playground times and playmates may be controlled and cohorted but their play is still active, enthusiastic and noisy. Every invitation to try something new - like bang on pails for drums or find reading books online through Epic or use sign language to give 'voice' to a song performed in an assembly when singing is not allowed - is met with enthusiasm and delight as children thrive on the novelty of something new to do. The resiliency of our children remains strong, visible and beneficial for keeping our children active and engaged.

I have observed, as well, and gleaned through many conversations, that families are building different and sometimes stronger relationships as a result of cohorting and isolating at home. Many parents have mentioned to me (including my own children) that they will not be returning to the previous levels of social engagements, sports activities or the pursuits of other childhood interests with the same scope of commitment as before the pandemic hit, preferring this quieter, slower pace of life for their families. Family dinners are on the increase - a daily social interaction opportunity that is vitally important for building emotionally connected, happy families as well as sustaining and enhancing beginning social skills of young children - not to mention, greater appreciation for home-cooked meals!

Families are more aware of children's learning strengths, challenges and attitudes as a result of the pandemic school closures that began last March - for young children, sustained learning of any kind required a significant investment of time and energy on behalf of parents (greatly appreciated and valued by teachers and students alike!). As parents connected more deeply with their children around learning, they also came to appreciate the particular learning quirks and approaches specific to them. Recognizing individual differences related to learning, parents also became more aware of the best ways to meet their children's learning needs - information they have willingly shared with teachers to ensure ongoing successful achievement with their children. 

So, there are notable losses and benefits for children surfacing as the pandemic continues to unfold.

We are not through the journey yet - not at all!  As we work with children, their families, teachers and support staff to map both losses and benefits for both particular, as well as all students it is crucial for us to all remember humanity thrives with adversity - maybe not at first, maybe not completely visibly - but to adjust, to be flexible, to find a new path is the very nature of being human. As we seek to balance losses and benefits for the youngest learners in our care, I hope we never lose sight of human nature and the potential array of responses to adversity that have scattered across our history as humans on this planet Earth. 

Yes, learning has been disrupted. It also continues. It is in the continuity of learning that we find a path to balancing losses with benefits and move forward with our children into a brighter, safer, healthier future.

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal 

Eric Harvie School 

December Joy in a most challenging time...

 

"No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another." 

     - Charles Dickens

"I cannot do all the good that the world needs. But the world needs all the good that I can do."

        - Jana Stanfield

December has arrived, paying no attention to rising COVID-19 infection numbers or the warm weather we have been enjoying the past few days.  

As we contemplate moving into what is traditionally a month of joyously excessive festivities and fun, the 2020 holiday season is absolutely bringing an uncertainty and constraints that will change so many of the typical activities we all enjoy every holiday season.  

It comes at the end of a most trying and disproportionately challenging year for pretty much every corner of the world and will, I am sure, present a whole new set of challenges for virtually every member of our school community as we adjust family celebration plans to acknowledge new restrictions, move our gatherings outside and try to tweak traditions enough to be familiar yet safe.

We have been reflecting on December as well, at EHS. 

Having safely navigated the first three months of the 2020-21 school year, there is no question it is more imperative than ever that we strictly adhere to the many layers of precautions we have implemented and follow every day at school regardless of the time of year - this school year appears to be merciless in requiring all of us to be increasingly attentive to every precautionary strategy possible as our only defence against an immensely erratic virus.  The greatest non-negotiable for December 2020 is that there will be no easing of safety precautions, especially in elementary schools that remain open while all schools province-wide have moved to online learning until January 2021 for students in grades 7 - 12. 

That does not, however, mean that December cannot still bring joy - and that is what we have, as a staff, determined will define December 2020 for our school. We will not remember this Christmas for the virus (well, not completely anyway!) but rather for the joy we are hoping to bring to our school, our community and the hearts of everyone we are able to touch. 

Welcome to the "Light Up Our Hearts December of Joy" at EHS for December 2020!  Our ultimate wish for this month is to bring joy to as many aspects of our school and community as possible - and oh! do we have ambitious plans :)

Our first initiative is, of course, our 'Families Helping Families' initiative - a peaceful communities project we began our first holiday season five years ago. Each year our families donate so generously to help other families (this year, as in past years, from Col. J. Fred Scott School) whose needs are so much greater than most of us (thankfully) are able to imagine. Usually children are encouraged to contribute to purchasing appropriate gifts for their classroom's family, but the the tentacles of the pandemic managed to change this as well, and we are so grateful for our families donating over $2800.00 towards the purchase of gift cards to support 14 families - a most generous gift of joy marking a remarkable fifth year of this peace project at EHS!

We are adding a new joy project this year to share some warmth and festive spirit! We want all our Seniors - our grandparents, great-grandparents and the carriers of wisdom in our world - to know how much we value and appreciate the gifts they bring to us, including helping to ensure our planet is such an amazing place to live :). So we have partnered with The Manor Village at Varsity and will be making and delivering holiday wreaths to cheer the Seniors' shared residential areas and the medical spaces during this time when isolation will be the expectation. Each classroom will be decorating two wreaths in the coming days, to be delivered to the Manor on December 11/20. Children are also making cards for each of the 166 residents at the Manor.  We are planning to also share parts of our holiday musical celebration with our Senior Friends, and hope to keep our connection with the Manor Village at Varsity long past December of 2020. We are excited to develop these new friendships and connections which will bring us all greater joy!

Mrs. Coulson, our most remarkable Music teacher, is leading an exceptional internal project to bring joy to the school through December. This will include events such as crazy sweater day, crazy hat day and a pyjama day as well as a musical celebration "December Around the World" we will be sharing with classes and parents in video form.  We will literally "light up our hearts" with all the donations of holiday lights parents have brought to the school over the past couple of weeks - thank you for your generosity! Classroom opportunities to decorate both our learning spaces and our bigger gathering spaces will offer our students creative outlets with a festive spirit and energy! We are looking forward to continuing to bring light and joy to our school through the next three weeks :) 

While we are continuing our learning journeys through these unusual circumstances we know even these events intended to bring light and joy to our school will only slightly diminish the focus on all the constraints and dubious news that impact our daily pandemic-dominated lives. Our hope is not to divert attention from living safely during this time, but rather to find positive ways to weave opportunities for also remembering that celebration, fellowship and caring for each other are fundamental to human existence and improve the quality of all our lives. While we cannot engage in our usual boisterous, exhilarating gatherings we are still capable, willing and eager to know we share our gifts of creativity, generosity, kindness and laughter with each other in the school, in our community and around the world. 

Challenging times mean investing a little extra energy into bringing joy back into the school is a most worthwhile endeavour - and be prepared for an outstandingly enthusiastic celebration of December festivities in 2021 because we are already making post-pandemic plans :)

Hope you all enjoy this festive month in as many ways as possible!

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal

Eric Harvie School