For you non-North Carolinians, North Carolina has just passed an amendment to the state constitution banning same-sex marriage, domestic partnerships, etc. The amendment has far-reaching consequences for many families, not only GLBT families. A friend wrote in a hopeful post this morning that the fight over this amendment will bring about full equality much more quickly than having never had the fight at all. Because, through the lead-up to the vote, people have had to have conversations with their friends and neighbors and confront questions that they thought didn’t apply to them. This statement prompted me think about my own process surrounding GLBT issues – how I came confront them as a young person, how I integrated my support for GLBT individuals with my faith, the importance of all of it for my work, and perhaps, most importantly, how I confront these questions as a parent.
Growing up where and when I did, there was little need and no encouragement to think about GLBT issues at all. Other than occasional playground taunts directed at others, I remember very little discussion about people being gay or lesbian until late high school and then, there is only one conversation that I recall. Of course, that is very much in keeping with the time. HIV was just coming into the public conversation as I started college. And in our part of the world, it was HIV that forced straight people to actively confront their views of GLBT individuals. I remember being in my dorm room and hearing that Rock Hudson was HIV positive and recognizing that his disclosure was a turning point. A year or so later, a scandal rocked a church in my college town in which a married male pastor was found to have been having an affair with a young man in the church. That was the church you were supposed to go to when you were really serious about your faith. The pastor tearfully departed for “counseling” in Colorado with the goal of expunging his “demons” leaving many young people deeply disappointed and confused. I went to a different church and remember bringing up the situation in Sunday school. The teacher asked me the crucial question, “When did you decide that you were heterosexual?” I never went back to the Sunday school class. But I remembered the question, remembered I couldn’t answer it, and that paved the way for future learning.
Fast forward to my second year MSW field placement, at the NIH on the allergies and infectious diseases unit. On my first day my field instructor asked me, “How do you feel about working with people with AIDS?” Me: “I’m scared. We don’t know how it’s transmitted.” Field Instructor: “Mimi, we really do know. You can’t be scared if you’re going to do this work. ” Me: “Okay. I won’t be.” (You’re right. It was a little more involved than that but that’s the abridged version.)
Fast forward again, I’m working in inner city Baltimore in an adolescent health clinic where a girl explains her desire to continue a pregnancy that literally threatens her life by describing the taunts she receives about being lesbian and her belief that the pregnancy will prove she’s not. I did not know how to respond. Or, the young man in our clinic who was HIV positive. We assumed he was an IV drug user and that he was lying to us about his substance abuse. We never asked about his sexual orientation. So many people were in so much denial. But that same clinic had great people working in it, people that saw there were issues we were missing and brought in someone to talk with us about GLBT youth. This was a watershed moment for me. I finally got it and got that I could not sit by on the sidelines and “be neutral.” There is no neutral on people’s humanity. If I’m not affirming it, I’m diminishing it.
Next, I learned a high school friend was dying of AIDS. Like all of our high school gang, I had assumed he was gay from early in our college days forward. But I’d never talked to him to say, “You don’t have to pretend with me. Whoever you are is okay.” I watched as he brought young women to parties at my home when we both lived in Washington, D.C., while thinking, “I wish he knew he doesn’t have to do that.” But I didn’t say it – not until he was weeks away from death. Thankfully, I was given the opportunity to make that right.
So over time, I’ve become what some call a “straight ally.” When students ask me if they have to do readings about GLBT youth if they never plan to work with “them,” I smile and say yes while wondering, “Where exactly do you plan to work?” I’ve put my teaching evaluations at risk by allowing class discussions that become heated and supported doctoral students wanting to investigate questions related to the GLBT population. But perhaps most important is what this journey has done for my children. My sons, unlike so many in our society, do not have to grow up wondering whether their parents will accept them for whomever they turn out to be. And over time, I hope that they will spread this acceptance to their friends and if one of those friends is questioning he or she will know a family that will be supportive of them even if their own family is not.
There is a journey to take and it starts in different places for different people. It may start with me – telling my own story, supporting others in telling theirs, being compassionate as people struggle between their up-bringing and new information, yet standing strong in defense of the oppression of fellow citizens.
Some Thoughts Following the Passage of Amendment One
Parents and Paintings
As many of you know, I’ve been incorporating a lot of visual aspects into my work. This has been a collaboration that is becoming more interdisciplinary all the time and seems to be picking up steam, although not yet grant funding. We’ll take steam for now. Anyway, together with El Futuro colleagues in Siler City, we tried out a version of our arts work with parents. These parents were involved in a parenting retreat over spring break. The idea was to help prepare parents for their children’s transition from elementary to middle school, get them interested in a longer-term evidenced parenting program called The Incredible Years, and to continue building more parent involvement in schools where parents have not traditionally been as involved.
We used our works of art, selected by our colleagues at the Ackland Art Museum, as “elicitation” devices. (I’m trying to learn the science behind all of this so I’m practicing using the jargon – forgive me.) An elicitation device is supposed to help people talk – sometimes about a particular subject, sometimes about one’s self. A novel can be an elicitation device; a poem can be an elicitation device; or an essay, etc. In this case we used a collection of paintings and photographs from different sources and different time periods with the goal of helping parents talk and reflect about parenting.
This group of parents is comprised of Latino immigrants. We don’t ask anything about their documentation status – so please don’t ask me. They did not know one another prior to today. Most have low levels of education and I would bet that many have never set foot in an art museum. So the whole team was a little nervous about whether this idea would go over. The group facilitator who knew many of the families was saying, “Maybe we should throw in a few more pictures. I don’t think they’re going to be very talkative.” “ On the drive down, I was making up questions and vignettes in case the whole thing fell flat and we were left with 2 ½ hours to fill. When I met the father with multiple tattoos up and down his arms, my anxiety climbed a bit higher. What would he think of professors asking him to talk about pictures from an art museum? Then we put up the first picture – a photograph of young men diving and swimming in a river. And the parents jumped in with both feet –remembering significant moments, describing parenting struggles, noticing interesting details, asking questions, sharing views of themselves, and views of their children. They listened to one another; they were affirming; and over the course of 8 pictures and 2 ½ hours they became a cohesive group. The dad with the tattoos was a real leader in the process!
Tomorrow they will get into some knotty questions about disciplinary practices, what their communication is like with their children, the support they are providing for their child’s education. Hard stuff often with no easy answers, particularly when you work three jobs, a spouse has been deported or detained, and your own educational background is limited. But seeing this group’s willingness to explore and engage using somewhat unusual means, gives me a lot of faith that exciting things will come from this small beginning.
A Few Thoughts on a Great Book
Shortly after New Year’s I began reading one of “those” books, a book that sings and breaks your heart and now I am re-reading it, something I almost never do. The book is Colum McCann’s “Let the Great World Spin.” Although I have wanted to write and talk about it, I have yet to do so. But today is Ash Wednesday and the book is about grief and redemption, grace and pain. So here it goes…
The book is held together by the tightrope walk of Phillipe Petit, an event that has never held any particular fascination for me. The idea of tightrope walking between the twin towers makes my heart race and my hands sweat. It is not something I want to think about. But McCann uses the event to weave many lives together, predict the future, and illuminate the truth of Ash Wednesday: we are dust and to dust we shall return. In the meantime, we each walk our own tightropes in different ways and it is our compassion and that of others that allows grace to save us from a fall.
Corrigan is a monk who chooses to live in the burning Bronx of 1970’s New York. His faith is quiet yet completely obvious to all with whom he comes in contact. It almost seems as if his faith and the accompanying grace he bestows on others was given to him as a child and he could no more rid himself of it than he could his eye color, the shape of his brow, or any other in-born trait. We meet him first and all the other characters and emotions that form the book spin out from his compassion and suffering.
Not long ago, the class I am currently teaching was spending time at the Ackland museum. One of the objects that had been selected for us to look at was a photograph of someone jumping from one of the towers on 9/11. At first, many of us did not know what we were looking at. The jumper appears to be a bird or perhaps a skydiver. And the angle of the picture is such that it takes several seconds before the viewer notices the smoke and fire in the far left of the picture. The conversation that followed was poignant and difficult. If our class was any indication, as a nation, we still do not have good ways to discuss this event or the grief and disappointment that stem from it. Even within a class of nine we were on the brink of polarization very quickly. As a teacher, I was tempted to jump in and “get us back on track.” However, I didn’t really know how to do that, so I took a deep breath and waited. And, like the characters in McCann’s book, these students found a way to be generous, forgiving, and kind to one another. Their ability to listen to one anothers perspective and experience allowed us to maintain the open, seeking dynamic that is very important to this class, in particular. It was a small moment of grace and it reminded me of the many moments of grace found in ordinary moments in McCann’s novel.
I’m still not sure I can talk about this book very well. It is like a piece of music that makes your heart ache and soar at the same time. If you read it, please tell me how it affects you.
Here’s a link to an interview with the author. http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2009_f_mccann_interv.html
No Child
Several nights ago I had a new, fun experience. Playmakers, our local repertory company, called and asked if I would be part of a post-play panel discussion. Loving live theater and feeling very excited, I instantly agreed even though there is truly no time for such things… The play is called No Child. The author, Nilaja Sun, has been performing the show for five years to much critical acclaim. In the show, she writes plays 17 characters all of whom are part of a fictional New York City public school in the Bronx. The play brings the reality of teaching in an arts poor, inner city community to life in a way in which the audience is able to feel compassion for all of the characters. There are no villains and no heroes – just people kids, adults, parents, administrators, teachers, students trying to do too much with too little, becoming discouraged, finding their voice, losing it again, and achieving moments of transcendence but not necessarily a lifetime of it. It was not “Stand and Deliver,” where everyone aces the AP calculus test and the audience feels great. The play was thought-provoking and left me thinking about what constitutes success in working in very difficult environments.
UNC is a “research one” university. We want to find solutions to society’s “wicked problems” as our chancellor has referred to them. To do so requires measurement rubrics, scales, pre and post-tests, randomized trials, etc., etc. all of which are absolutely necessary to do good science. But art, like this play, sometimes conveys what science cannot. No Child is a “play within a play” about a teaching artist’s struggle to engage a class of inner city students in a six week effort to analyze and perform a play for their school. We get to know and care about each of these exceedingly difficult teens as well as their regular classroom teachers and administrators along the way. Through the small miracles that are a daily part of education, they do engage with the teaching artist and a play is produced – an outcome which seems unlikely at the start. But what the play does not do is pretend that one positive experience will solve everything. In the epilogue, the narrator provides a ‘what happened to whom’ kind of re-cap. Only one or two of the characters has what we would call a “good” outcome. One announces her too early pregnancy immediately following the play, another is killed a week later in a gang incident, and another is lost to the mean streets of his community. Yet, they had all experienced a moment of transcendence, a moment in which they did something that they did not believe they could do, in which they learned something about themselves and connected their own lives to the wider human experience. What is a moment like that worth? Is it worth the cost of the grant that brought the teaching artist to the school? Is it only worth it only if it lowers the drop-out rate or improves end of grade test scores? Of course not. Moments of transcendence make us more human, more compassionate, better citizens, better parents, better neighbors. If we have enough of them, they may even affect those outcomes that science needs so much to demonstrate. Toward the close of the play, the teen who tells her teacher of her pregnancy says something like, “Why are you crying? Why does everybody cry when I tell them? Don’t worry. I’m going to take my baby to see things and have adventures because you showed me I could.” Is that enough to make the students’ play worth the blood, sweat, and tears, not to mention the resources, it took to produce it? To answer that question risks a reductionism that dehumanizes us. But by putting science and art together, we may have a shot at those wicked problems that be-devil us.
A Post About Ghosts
The “ghostly book” is one of my seasonal favorites. An English professor here used to dress up in Victorian garb and read the story while members of the community drank cider at sat spell-bound listening. He has apparently retired. But listening to him perhaps prompted me to begin a similar tradition with my almost 11 year old son. We have read Dickens, A Christmas Carol, together for about the last four Christmas seasons. Skylar is an avid reader and finds pleasure in losing himself in a book, as long as we can keep him away from the infernal Ipad! So it is rare that I read aloud to him anymore and, in fact, I wondered what he would say when I made the offer of our annual tradition. But he gladly snuggled up and we began our journey into the world of Dickensian London, ghosts, and life lessons.
We heard from Jacob Marley last night… “It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness…My spirit never walked beyond our counting house.” And then, “I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.” I can’t help but wonder every year as we read this story, is my spirit walking far and wide enough, what chain exactly am I forging, am I sharing in the human condition to the extent I am able and turning difficulty into happiness? There is truly so much to do and it feels overwhelming much of the time. Can one person really be of much use? The paper daily provides a litany of miseries that need attention. Just walking up the main street of our small college town finds plenty of opportunities for acts of compassion small and large. Every good cause asks for money this time of year – how to choose when one’s own resources feel limited in light of no raises for multiple years, and whatever other good excuses we make.
And what about the hospitality we extend to our family and friends? Skylar has been assigned the project of writing his autobiography over the course of the next few months. As part of his chapter on his immediate family, I asked him if he could identify some sort of adjective or theme that would define our family. I can’t do it but I can do it for other families. Two are welcoming families, always including people in various celebrations, cooking for both family insiders and outsiders, to the point that it is hard not to feel like a part of those families. And it always seems easy, effortless. I can’t say we are like that – although I admire that in them. Another is a close family – close to those in the nucleus of the family and close to the extended family. Most weekends seem to include activities with some member or multiple members of the extended family. That family places a high value on spending time with all its members. Again, we love our extended family but we are not like that either. Another family may be athletic, another fun loving, another might seem sad, another mysterious, another high achieving, and another nurturing. Who are we? I truly have no idea. I’ll let you know what he comes up with…
Jacob Marley raises all of these questions for me because he demonstrates that we don’t know what we’re doing most of the time and we don’t know what we’re missing. We are caught up in looking down, unknowingly forging our chains. Taking a moment during a busy season to reflect seems like the least I can do to avoid Jacob Marley’s fate. I’ll close with his words in case you don’t have time to read them for yourself,
“Oh! Captive, bound, and double-ironed,” cried the phantom, “ not to know that ages of incessant labour by immortal creatures for this earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed. Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity missed!”
So although there may be other opportunities I will miss, tonight Skylar and I will commune with the first spirit. Perhaps you’ll join us.
Last Class
Last week I was walking to my health care practice class and ran into my dean. We chatted for a few minutes and I told him I was about to do a class on grief which always felt not quite right. Spending three hours, one class day talking about a subject that permeates work in health care seems a little weird, redundant, perfunctory, etc. and I told my students as much at the beginning of class. But onward we went and with this group, nothing is perfunctory or redundant. They are thoughtful, reflective new social workers and so basically everything I am supposed to teach, teaches itself through their insights and discussion.
In the course of our three hour class, the conversation took an interesting turn which I’ve been reflecting upon ever since. One student talked about recent experiences in her intensive care field placement that had shaken her. The sudden death of teenager, the realization that a child with cancer will likely not survive until the fall and her awareness of how she was changed by these experiences – changed in ways that are hard to talk about and permanent. Many of us are lucky to reach adulthood not having to confront the profound spiritual and philosophical questions that arise in the face of severe crisis, loss, and grief. When we enter this line of work, as a doctor, a social worker, a nurse, or other health care professional, our illusions about safety and control are quickly shattered. At that point we must make a critical choice. In a follow-up journal, this student wrote that she sought counsel from another professional about how to live with what she was feeling. The person told her that over time and more exposure she would become “desensitized” to these experiences and it would not be so difficult. I cringed when I read this and a memory from my own early days in the field came flooding back.
My second year field placement brought me in contact with a five year old boy from overseas. He was desperately ill and in the U.S. seeking last ditch experimental treatments. I was 23 and remember the absolute shock of first meeting him. He had been in bed for year, not outside for year, and had to go through painful treatments every afternoon that left the halls of the unit echoing with his screams. He was also full of life and mischief and managed to give everyone on that unit a run for their money. His parents were interesting and kind. They let me into their experience for what reason I’ll never know. In the time that I knew him, things got better. His father and I snuck him outside in his hospital bed to see squirrels and stars after CT scans. The medical team got on board and he got to go outside most days, IV poles and all. But his condition was not curable and things got worse, then still worse, and he died. Everyone involved was devastated, relieved, conflicted, angry, and sad. I grieve him still.
Several months after his death, I was working in my first “real” job in an emergency room in a different hospital but one that had been involved in a consulting basis in this little boy’s treatment. His parents were there for some follow-up meetings with doctors and called me for coffee. We sat outside and talked about their son, my new job, etc. I rambled on about this and that and said something about my supervisor helping me learn about keeping professional distance, not letting the situations I was involved in overtake me, etc. etc. The father paused and looked at me with a penetrating, almost stern stare, and in accented English said, “Don’t learn that. Whatever you do don’t learn that.” At the time, I thought, “maybe he doesn’t understand exactly what I’m saying. Or maybe he doesn’t know what I’m dealing with every day in the ER.” But, of course, he knew exactly and that is precisely why I cringed when I read the advice given to this student. I want her to be able to do this work and be able to experience the joys and happiness that life offers. But if she is “desensitized” to the sorrow she sees in her work, she will be desensitized everywhere. She will suffer and so will her clients. It is a strange and difficult balance to find ways to fill up our own wells so that we can pour the water out again for others. And the struggle to allow ourselves to be changed but not desensitized is on-going not something that can be answered in a three hour class session, a semester, or a year. Indeed, it is a challenge for a lifetime.
Working without a Net: Mothers in Tongji Village
Note: If you are reading my blog and commenting, I’m not ignoring you. I can’t get to my blog right now. A colleague is uploading these for me.
Today was spent mostly in Tongji village with mothers who have migrated from the countryside to work in Shanghai. They’ve been working on a photovoice project and today and tonight were the discussion sessions for their photos. For those of you unfamiliar with photovoice, it is a participatory research method that asks participants to take pictures in order to answer a particular question. Then, in a group format, individuals describe their pictures and a conversation ensues. And what conversations they were. I’m still reeling from tonight’s which concluded about an hour ago. The first mother showed her first photograph: A self-portrait standing in her workplace, a hotel where she cleaned floors. Her opening words: This is where I work. I cannot read or write so this is the kind of work that I am able to do. Two or three photos later she took us to a hospital bed where her youngest son was donating bone marrow for her 14 year old son who has leukemia. They moved to Shanghai after the diagnosis because they could not get treatment in their home province. Now they face bills of 10,000 rmb per month. The younger son has returned to live with neighbors in the home province because the family must work and spend time at the hospital. And following treatment the older son will return to the home province for middle school without his parents because of the complex schooling situation for migrant children.
Each mother had her own story and each was struggling and working hard in different ways. One cooks three meals a day for ten people in a kitchen the size of a closet. But the most devastating stories concerned health care. What I am learning as I continue to work in China is that life here brings many of the policy questions we struggle with in the U.S. into very sharp relief. Should people have access to health care that doesn’t devastate them financially? It really is a yes or no question. Fed up with the media? Try living without an independent press and see if your opinion changes. Are you sure you want the government intimately involved in your family planning decisions?
There were other heart-stopping moments during the evening. Mothers who reached out to one another saying, “Call on me when you need help…I’ve been too harsh with my children and felt bad too. You are not alone…We need each other. We should have meetings like this more often.” And, my Chinese colleagues…by the end of the morning meeting there were plans to build a playground because the mothers talked about there being no safe place for children to play in the village. These social workers already built a library, started a tutoring/study hall program, in addition to doing individual work with residents. By the end of tonight’s meeting, there were plans to coordinate with the children’s hospital where the above mentioned boy was receiving treatment and to start a support group for moms. Such suffering and compassion all together seems to have produced an explosion of ideas an intervention points and a group of 17 moms willing to be part of making a difference in their community.
A Morning with Chinese Students
This morning I had the good fortune to spend time with Chinese MSW students. A professor here invited me to talk with his class. I did a formal presentation but, as is often the case here, I had to go a bit off message because there are so many questions about differences between the U.S. and China.
The hardest question, of course, concerned child protection. In China at the moment child protection systems only serve children who are abandoned. There is no clear definition of maltreatment and no system to deal with it, even if there was. Students here apparently hear about situations in which Asians from many countries move to western countries and run afoul of child welfare authorities because of child-rearing choices that are considered maltreatment in the host country are ostensibly acceptable ways of discipline in the home countries. The students asked how social workers in the U.S. negotiate these divergent views. This is a question that I dread. I was first asked something similar when I was a new professor. An adult MSW student from another country, not an Asian country, stated, in the course of a class discussion that as a young child she had stolen something and had had her hand burned on the stove as punishment. She stated emphatically that this was not abuse but a common cultural practice and that she maintained a close relationship with the family member that burned her. As a new teacher, this was a moment of horror. In addition to terrible image of a child being deliberately burned, there was the implicit challenge in the statement from the student to which I needed to respond. Breathe, feel, think, speak. Another student in the class expressed deep sympathy for what had happened to her, giving me the space to think how to approach her statement. What might the consequences of a burn to the hand be – infection, nerve damage, loss of mobility? How would someone know whether they had burned too much or too little? How angry would a caregiver have to be to do that? Does true discipline come out of anger? If discipline is teaching, what was this practice teaching? Is that what every parent in that country did or were there some families that would have chosen some other method to teach their child not to steal? My husband, the lawyer, does not find all of this as complicated. You live in a particular country, you abide by its rules. But in the social work role, it is complicated. We spend a lot of time thinking and talking about cultural competence but what does that mean in the child welfare context? Is the same behavior maltreatment if you are American and a cultural difference if you’re not? And if I’m a social worker tasked with intervening, how do I demonstrate respect for cultural difference even as I say that particular behaviors cannot stand? There are no easy answers accept the simple ones: breathe and take time to listen; feel and find compassion, it really is so hard to be a parent; think, use your education; then speak honestly and say what needs to be said.
Hooray for Hessler!
Wow. Peter Hessler, one of my all time favorite authors, has won a McArthur genius award. Every year I get really excited when these awards are announced. I love the idea that a person could be doing his or her work, perhaps getting lots of recognition, perhaps not, and out of the blue someone calls and says, “We love what you’re doing. Here’s some money to keep doing it.” And each year, I hear about some amazing musician or poet or scientist whose work I don’t know. But I do know about Peter Hessler.
Many of you know that in recent years I’ve been learning and working in China. That started after I received tenure several years ago. I’ve since learned that a “post-tenure slump” is common in academia and that it represents a real threat to productivity. Some people seem to fight their way through it and all the interesting things that are supposed to come with tenure proceed – work going in new directions, great teaching, etc. However, for some the result is stagnation – not knowing where to go when the pressure cooker of being an assistant professor without tenure disappears. But, when I received tenure, I did not realize that this was a “normal” phenomenon. Although I kept working hard, on some level my heart was not in it and that was not a feeling I could see living with for very long. So I made a decision to start walking through whatever doors happened to open to me that year. And one of doors that opened was China. But I walked through it with great trepidation. We were supposed to be teaching students in the course of a summer abroad experience. How could I possibly presume to teach about some place that I truly knew nothing about? I racked my brain to think what I learned in high school world history or the foreign policy class I took in college – nothing had been retained! So I started from scratch four months before we left and thankfully came upon Peter Hessler. River Town, Oracle Bones, and most recently, Country Driving. I was reading then, and have since read, many books about China – many of which I’ve really liked and from which I’ve learned much. But only Peter Hessler’s work taught me how to teach American students in China. Because his writing is about a place and about himself and how in learning about a place and it’s people, he learns about his own “place” and his own personhood.
When he wrote his first book, River Town, the Three Gorges Dam was not yet constructed. All over the world, there was controversy about the dam – its environmental impact, the consequences for those who would have to move because their homes would be flooded, and Hessler clearly loves the natural world. His concerns mirrored everyone else’s. Yet, while living on the Yangtze his view of the issue enlarged. Here’s an excerpt:
...There were days I stood on my balcony and felt a touch of sadness as I looked at the Yangtze because I knew its days as a rushing river were numbered. But there were many other days when the smog was so thick that I couldn’t see the river at all.
I also gained a new perspective on this issue during the winter, when there were periodic power cuts to conserve electricity. My apartment had only electric heating, and sometimes these blackouts lasted for hours–long, cold hours, the dark apartment growing steadily more uncomfortable until my breath was white in the candlelight. I found that during these periods I didn’t think too much about whether Fuling’s new dike would hold, or if the immigrants would be well taken care of, or whether the White Crane Ridge would be adequately protected. What I thought about was getting warm. Cold was like hunger; it had a way of simplifying everything. [pg. 115]
Notice that I said that his view enlarged – not changed. He did not give up his concern for historic preservation, the environment, or the well-being of residents. He added to his concerns. Many people in China at that time did not have access to something we in the U.S. do: as much electricity as we are willing to pay for whenever we want it. What Hessler taught so beautifully through his own journey was, that if there were to be alternatives to the Three Gorges Dam, they would have to address all of these concerns not just one group or another’s particular issue. And the transferability of that lesson to so many of the problems that our social work students must address is obvious. Just yesterday, I was using another amazing book in my class on social work in health care. The book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, is an exploration of a clash between the culture of Western Medicine and a Hmong community that results in misunderstanding and unnecessary suffering. In this situation, as in so many, choosing one side’s view of a situation without incorporating the view of the other creates only winners and losers – not solutions.
So, if you haven’t read Peter Hessler, read him. He writes about China but, at the core, he writes about compassion for ourselves and others as we navigate waters we have yet to chart. And congratulations to him. I’m so glad he can keep doing what he does so well.
A Third Thing
It’s been two weeks since we did our latest version of our Puentes teacher training. Together with a doctoral student, an art historian, school personnel and community partners, I’ve been attempting to adapt a training to help teachers think about mental health for new immigrant youth. The original training, authored by a colleague and her team in New York, was for teachers working with teensy (3 to 6 year old) refugees. Our target group is teachers working with middle schoolers who often come from mixed citizenship status families in a small town in North Carolina. These students, grappling with all the daily slings and arrows of middle school, also find themselves political hot buttons for reasons that must seem unfathomable to them. And they are not alone. Their teachers walk a difficult path littered with the larger society’s ambivalent attitudes while attempting to sustain their individual commitment to their work. You can see we had our work cut out for us.
We tried a simple adaptation last fall and it fell flat. Not for lack of organization or effort or good will. Not for lack of terrific content. But something was missing. To make a difference this training could not be about information alone – it had to speak to teachers in a different way. Somewhere not cognitive but not just emotional either. I needed what Parker Palmer calls, “A Third Thing.” Coincidentally, or maybe not, I’d begun unknowingly working with “third things” in my classes by working with art. You may be thinking “Social Work? Art? Don’t get it.” But think about what happens when you look at a painting or photograph. Without the caption or the audio guide, it’s just you and the object. That means that what or who you see is on some level what or who you are. As you talk about what you see with other people, your lens changes as they lend their vision to you and you to them. And through this process, you may learn something about how you tend to see the world, or at least this painting, what you tend to miss, and what you need to know or ask to see it in its fullness. When you get the caption or the audio guide, or the commentary of someone who actually knows something about art your vision is really enlarged. You learn about the context in which the image was created, the artist’s interest in the particular subject, etc. Now, as you look at that object, you have a lot to work with. You’ve learned a lot about the object and you’ve learned a lot about yourself as well.
So what happened with the training? We took a big risk. We brought 40 middle school teachers to the Ackland Art Museum on campus. Our wonderful colleagues there hung eight photographs from an amazing photojournalist named Janet Jarman. [Check out her work at janetjarman.com.] The teachers looked and talked and reflected. Through these photographs we were able to talk about migration journeys and the baggage the young people carry with them about which teachers are rarely aware. We were able to think together about how these experiences impact learning and how school can either contribute to or alleviate suffering. The list goes on. Did it work? We’ll have more definitive data in a few months. But, yes, when people open up in a group of 40 about dark moments in their past, their struggles as both teachers and parents, where there is laughter and camaraderie, I think I feel confident saying this type of approach has legs. There is always more work to do and I’m excited about our next steps. But even more, I’m intrigued with “third things,” poems, stories, pictures, that take us into a space where our heads and our hearts work together to learn and to understand.
