I actually took a series of the entire sculpting process.
But this one will be #37
I want to own the fact that this is kind of a rant segment today. My writing is part of my work with the Tutu's book, but I hope people can relate and get something interesting out of it. Oh well... not supposed to apologize before I read (or you read).
Have you ever sat down by yourself and made a list of people you might forgive?
I wanted to do it today and what came out was a complete surprise for me. I thought it would center around baby stuff, but it didn't. The first person who came to mind and brought a ring of true anger from me was a Harvard professor, whom I barely know.
The story is kind of confusing and I won't go into particulars, but I was hired to do research looking at whether teaching health education (and in this case curricula on nutrition, stress management and breast cancer) as content for teaching reading, writing, and speaking English changed students' health behaviours as well as increase their literacy levels. Did students quit smoking, change their eating habits, add exercise routines to their lives if they were exposed to health information while learning literacy skills? These curricula were based on what's called Participatory Education and involved the students in building the learning environment.
Anyway, the research project and the framework were much too large and unwieldy and I needed someone to step in and help me reframe the data in a less complex way. But instead after a kind of embarrassing presentation at Tufts, I was taken off the project and my data was given to this professor who wrote up the data in as uninteresting a way as possible, gave me no credit for collecting, designing nor framing the project; she just wrote something up under her name and everyone swept it under the rug.
I have never forgiven that group of colleagues and what is interesting to me and why it came up for me today is my hypothesis (which was ignored by everyone else) was, students who were involved in literacy programs that encouraged participatory education and community development showed greater change in health behaviors than students in other types of adult education. I also hypothesized that change in behavior came when students were given safe spaces to tell their traumas or stories. They moved from I stories to we as community stories and showed support for each others' changes communally.
Now my research design was not tight enough for this hypotheses to be proved, just explored. But I still hold today that my hypotheses was correct. And I find it fascinating that the Tutu's fourfold process of forgiveness looks very similar to my original hypothesis.
So as part of my personal process, I own the fact that I need to forgive this group of individuals. It doesn't help me to hold on to my anger and I am sure they could give a damn. I need to not forget my theory though. I was getting close to an important concept and I got derailed by anger.
There are other examples of anger derailing me; this one came up first. I would have sworn yesterday that I didn't give a damn about any of that stuff anymore. But the ferocity in which it came up clued me in that I need to forgive this group and re-embrace my ideas about students who are trying to learn while recovering from trauma situations.
If you are interested from either a teacher's or a health educator's perspective Google S.A.B.E.S. of Massachusetts and look at materials that were developed for this project. Teachers all over New England designed materials for adult education classrooms that are superb. An example is The Change Agent a periodical produced by The New England Literacy Resource Center.
A short word about my sculpture photos today: it is Winter Carnival here and there are 14 sculptors competing by creating an ice sculpture on Main Street. It was really fun watching them work today on a very cold but sunny afternoon.
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