Cultivating the Revolutionary Spirit of the Adolescent Service Provider
Oct 3, 2022- I was one of those “better to ask forgiveness rather than permission” teachers. (Now that I’m thinking about it, I’ve been a forgiveness v. permission employee just about everywhere I’ve ever worked!) While I appreciate rules of order, my Inner Rebel shows up when they are unethical or result in unethical actions.
As a middle school teacher, I once got called to the principal’s office for holding a “protest party” just before spring break. All classroom parties would be banned after spring break unless they were educationally related, something my students and I were vehemently opposed to. When I taught in a university psychology program, I was chastised by the department head for stepping outside the bounds of the programmed and highly scripted syllabus by designing a more holistic and relevant final assessment for my undergraduate students.
Some years later, I presented at an international child and youth care conference on teaching for imagination. Here are some of the arguments I made, words of wisdom I offered, and questions I asked:
“It is ‘psychic abuse’ never to have time to attend to emotional and reflective life and dreams. It is neglectful and torturous never to daydream, or muse, or wander freely along a mental path.” ~ M. L. Kittelson
“Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts.” ~ P. Palmer
What are the self-prescribed “laws” to which you currently subscribe? Who laid down these laws? What laws need to be broken for you to find a strong philosophy that would support your dreams?
Finally, I asked them, “What is the purpose of education? Whom and what should education serve? To whom are you accountable?” “It is vital,” I said, “that we know the answer to this question as we go into the classroom; otherwise, teaching, I believe, is a farce.”
The attendees were animated and participatory. The moment that stays with me the strongest, however, was when someone asked, “But how do we manifest this in the classroom?” In essence, how do we, as educators, step outside the laws of the systems we work within and allow for imagination, play, exploration, wandering, and digging deeper and deeper to find those pools of curiosity and wonder that lead to lifelong learning?
Sometimes, we just have to be brave and answer from the gut. This was one of those times. In an attempt to play it safe, instead of just naming what I had come there to say, my essential argument for teaching for imagination was hovering in the background, just beneath the surface of all of the images, poetry, and pedagogical points I was making. I had danced around it until that question.
“Teachers have to be rebels and revolutionaries in the face of what’s happening in our schools today,” I said. “If we don’t want to lose our souls and don’t want to participate or contribute to the soul loss of our kids, then we must tap into courage and start doing things differently. We have to be willing to ask forgiveness rather than permission.”
I know this is an idealistic answer to some degree. Many people cannot afford to put their jobs on the line to be rebels and revolutionaries. But there are degrees of rebellion in which we can each participate. It is a delicate dance, for sure. Even in the behavioral health field, where the ethics and boundaries are necessarily tight, there is room for revolution as long as it’s ethical, within the bounds of our work, and always in service to adolescents and their healing.
As adolescent service providers, it’s important to ask ourselves:
Why do we do the work we do?
To whom are we in service? Be assured it’s not the systems within which we work that we serve. Many of those systems are dysfunctional or irreparably broken.
How do we participate in our work with integrity without perpetuating dysfunction?
Is what we do in our organization and position best for the adolescents we serve? Are we actually helping them, given what we know about the essential needs of adolescence?
These questions are a compass for those of us in the adolescent service provider/youth development industry. The questions keep us on the path we chose when we decided to serve adolescents in whatever capacity: education, mental health, crisis intervention, community support, extracurricular, mentoring, pediatrics, etc.
This is about integrity. The integrity of our programs, of our kids, and our personal integrity.
One more story.
I interviewed for my first teaching position in a remote rural town at the foot of the Cascade Mountains. It was mid-year and the position I interviewed for had seen 4 other teachers come and go since the beginning of the school year. Among the predictable questions the committee asked, one took me by surprise, “To whom are you accountable?”
Without thinking—one of those brave gut moments where Truth with a capital “T” rose up, the consequences be damned—I answered, “First I’m accountable to myself. Then to my students. Next, families and the community. Then to my fellow teachers and the school program. Finally, I’m accountable to the administration, the heads of the school district, and the public school system itself.” And from that point forward, it has been my compass.
As soon as we stop being accountable to the calling that brought us into working with adolescents, then the gig is up. We perpetuate the very dysfunctions that harm the kids to whom we set out to serve.
It takes courage. At the beginning and end of just about every day since that day almost 30 years ago, I remind myself, “What other work is there to do but to be in integrity with myself and those I serve?”
And I did land the job at that school. The day the principal brought me into the classroom and introduced me to my first group of students I was to ever teach, a red-haired freckle-faced boy who towered above the other 12-year-olds raised his hand and asked, “Are you going to stay?” When I answered yes, he bounded to the front of the classroom, literally threw himself at my feet, clasped my hands, and shouted, “Thank you! Thank you!”
In that moment, Frederick Buechner’s words came to mind, “The place to which you are called is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
Do not be afraid to cultivate that rebel, revolutionary spirit within you. You are needed. You have important work to do.
Photo by: ysbrandcosijn