The case for place-based learning amid our mental health crisis
by Chris Henderson.
This article was first published in The Press on the 11th of August 2017.
Christchurch based, Chris Henderson is a Principal Consultant for Cognition Education. His work focuses on the role of teachers and schools in community and youth development in New Zealand and around the world.
Two days after the February 2011 earthquake I was walking the streets of Aranui, checking in on the wellbeing of my students and their families. On the corner of Hampshire and Portsmouth Streets, I bumped into Aaron. He was often truant, suffered debilitating depression, and when at school was one of my more disengaged students, scorning any attempts to connect. But here he was, knee-deep in liquefaction, shovelling silt, and directing others with fervour.
I asked how he was holding up, and with a beaming smile he replied: “This is great! I’m learning way more out here than I ever have with you!”
Christchurch, like many cities recovering from a natural disaster, has been exposed to new possibilities and new policies, all jostling for the opportunity to influence change.
An earthquake provides fertile ground for different agendas and innovations to take root. But as we have experienced here, the forces of renewal must find equilibrium alongside our need for tradition, routine, and recovery.
This is particularly true for our schools, where teachers — on top of their own trauma — have worked tirelessly to nurture our children and young people’s learning and wellbeing in an unsettled environment.
Yet still, our children and young people are arriving at school each day with lingering remnants of our earthquake’s force: their mental health, behaviour, and resilience are at all-time lows, severely disrupting their ability to learn and impacting on their achievement.
A quick scan of international research from UNICEF and the OECD on New Zealand and Christchurch’s situation makes for sobering reading. Our child health and wellbeing and youth suicide data is the among the developed world’s worst.
Through my role at Cognition Education, I have asked principals about the support they need to make their schools the best possible places for young people’s learning and wellbeing. Overwhelmingly, better provision for teacher professional development in child and youth mental health and resilience is their response.
Teachers are not trained to deliver the level of psycho-social support our most vulnerable children and young people need. Nor should it be their role to provide that level of service. But we should support teachers’ acquisition of skills that mitigate trauma-related issues in the classroom, rehabilitate our children and young people’s sense of belonging, and create in children and young people their genuine sense of importance to our city.
Our teachers have the privilege of more face-to-face time with children and young people than any other profession. Each day, thousands of teachers engage with the tens of thousands of children and young people who make up 33% of Christchurch’s population. Within this mental health crisis there is an opportunity to champion the teaching community in our response.
Children and young people often experience interventions within a deficit paradigm. Repeated interactions with a raft of experts reinforces the self-perception that something’s broken, something’s wrong, something about me is not quite right. Within the child or young person these deficits are internalised and very hard to overcome. Our collective response in Christchurch must activate a new narrative.
When Aranui High School re-opened, I invited Aaron to share his learning. He turned up, full of accomplishment and pride, and spoke with authority about the role he played making his community a better place. Teachers and students alike noted his changed demeanour and improved engagement. For all the interventions that had come Aaron’s way, it was an active and respected role in his community that catalysed a change. At an elementary level, and by his own accord, Aaron experienced the rich benefits that a place-based and service learning approach can have on a young person’s sense of purpose and worth.
Disengagement and disruptiveness might be the symptoms of underlying distress and discontent. A case of mismatched dispositions and distorted directions; manifest in learning behaviours that just don’t fit.
Sometimes, we punish poor behaviour but fail to understand its antecedent, sentencing our young people to a cycle of reactive interventions instead of responsive and restorative care.
Our best teachers create classrooms that are community connected incubators of enterprise and possibility. Full of young people energised by a sense of purpose and excited by the traction their learning has on the world. In my view, these classrooms are as much a service in public health as they are educational.
We need an approach that has deep roots in our schools. One that authentically and actively connects our young people to their tūrangawaewae — the place where they stand — and validates their worth through the influence they have on the places they learn and play.
I have seen young people progress from disengagement and despair to representing New Zealand youth at United Nations forums.
I have also experienced the very worst-case scenario.
At Cognition, we support an approach to learning in which literacy and numeracy, the arts and sciences, intersect with identity forming and self-validating actions in service of the places we live. Imagine the difference it would make if our young people’s voices, ideas, identities and aspirations were evidenced in the everyday experiences that our city provides them.
