What Skateistan Learned About…Safe Spaces
Here at Skateistan we are always striving to get better at what we do. We don’t have all the answers, but when challenging situations arise, we try to be proactive, turn problems into solutions and learn from our experiences. What Skateistan learned about…is a new mini series here on our blog, which shares what we’re learning and how it helps us to improve. For this first edition, we caught up with Mbali and Kelly from Johannesburg, who told what happened when a new partner organization started to visit the Skate School.
Words by Kelly and Mbali.
We talk about safe spaces a lot at Skateistan. We’re really proud of the fact that we provide havens for our students where they can get away from the outside world and whatever is happening in their lives, they can come and have fun and know that they’re welcome, safe and celebrated for who they are. But a space can only be truly safe if all of our students understand this as well.
Recently we had a little situation in the skatepark here in Joburg. We’ve been running girls only sessions twice a week for a long time now and we’re really proud of our girls. But when a new partner organization brought their students for the first time a little while back we realized we had a bit of problem. Our students were not being as welcoming as we would hope and the new students were made to feel like they shouldn’t be there. We were really disappointed to see this happening in a place where we want everyone to feel welcome so we started brainstorming straight away about how we could turn this problem into an opportunity for our students to learn something.
We came up with a series of lessons around the idea of safe spaces so that our students would understand why this is so important in terms of their own behaviour at Skateistan. The lessons use a combination of a discussion format and experiential learning techniques. We ran these straight away so that students could relate the lessons to their own experiences.
Special Lessons: Creating Safe Spaces
Lesson One: Unseen Trust
In this lesson, a student on a skateboard was blindfolded in the skatepark and the other students had to lead them to designated ‘safe space.’ By putting their trust in their peers, the blindfolded students learned how much their experience is impacted by others and the supporting students understood that their behaviour was important.
Lesson Two: Invisible Community
The idea of this lesson was to help the students to safely explore how it feels to be isolated and unsure of themselves. Blindfolded students were led to different parts of the skatepark and then had to find each other to form a group. Once they found each other they could hold hands and search for the other blindfolded students. Skateboarding students (not blindfolded!) had to distract them from being able to find their team by skating around them and calling out to them. In this lesson, students learned how lonely it is to be away from friends and support. When they compared this experience with the first lesson, in which they all supported each other, they really started to understand the impact of their actions. The activity is then switched around so that the skateboarding group actually helps the blindfolded group by guiding the blindfolded students towards each other. This shows how different an experience can be when we all help each other.
Once the students had completed these two exercises, they reflected on how they felt in the skatepark. Educators asked them to think about how they had behaved with the new students, and our own students started to understand how they had affected others. Together with their Educators, students then made welcome posters to remind themselves and their new peers that Skateistan is a place where everyone should feel welcome and safe.
Creating Future Leaders
We wanted to run these sessions because we wanted to improve things for our existing students as well as our new ones. The situations that they live in are often challenging. For many of them, this is the only space where they feel truly safe so it’s understandable that they would worry that they would lose out on our attention. It’s our job to prove to them that we will always look out for them, but that we can all welcome new students into our community too.
What we’re trying to do is to help them to become future leaders — that means both inside and outside of Skateistan. It wouldn’t have been enough simply to tell them they had to be nice — we had to show why that’s important so they can carry that lesson into the rest of their lives. We also want our students to know that we are prepared to invest our effort and time into helping them to develop these life skills. For some of them, this is the only place where adults are looking out for them all the time and we want them to share that feeling with others.
The Situation Now
Having run these lessons, the situation has really improved. The new students are coming every Saturday and they are really enjoying their time in the skatepark. In fact, this organization was the first one to get in touch with us in 2019 to tell us they wanted to come to sessions at Skateistan.
We’ve noticed a change in our students. They really thought about the situation and they changed their attitudes. It’s not just for the Saturday sessions either — they are being more friendly and helpful in all their lessons. We’re so happy that we managed to turn this situation around. Now we have a welcoming space for new students and a crew of girls who understand how important it is to have safe spaces. We hope this will be the start of new friendships.
Now that we know that this kind of situation can cause tensions, we will keep repeating and evolving these lessons. We have also shared the lesson plan with the other Skateistan Skate Schools and it has been repeated in Afghanistan and Cambodia.
If you want to know more about what we do, head on over to our website for information on our programs, where we work and how to support us. www.skateistan.org.
