DEEPENING A RELATIONAL CULTURE THROUGH RESTORATIVE PRACTICES

Tina Yen

Background

I became the Upper School Dean of Students at Abington Friends School (AFS) in the Fall of 2021, as students and adults returned to campus after months of isolation, uncertainty, and hybrid-learning. I entered into my role with optimism, and perhaps a bit too much naiveté, because I quickly came to experience the emotional heaviness of the job. I observed that the hallmarks of the AFS community I had previously known - trust, connection, joy in student life - were ruptured.

The most obvious marker of this disruption in community life and student engagement I noted was in our attendance data. Looking back at documentation from the 2017-2018 school year, about 2-3% of the student body exceeded attendance policy limits for lateness and absences. In 2021, that number increased tenfold, not including a dramatic rise in the number of students who habitually went to class late, cut class, or left class for more than 10 minutes at a time. While attendance improved the following year, students continued to show gaps in their academic learning, in executive functioning, in their social-emotional development, and their enthusiasm to engage in student life.

The top priority that emerged from Upper School faculty conversations was the idea of studentship - how do we cultivate learners that are curious, growth-minded, and actively engaged? Informed by these faculty conversations, my inquiry expanded the idea of studentship to include social emotional learning (SEL) goals that equip students to engage as co-creators of a relational community. My action research aimed to explore how student training in Restorative Practices (RP) could deepen relational culture.

Exploration

The following queries emerged during my exploration of RP.

For the individual:

• How can I apply my learning about RP to my everyday practice to strengthen my relationships with students, colleagues, and in my personal life?

• How can I gather feedback from critical friends and others to support my own learning and growth around relationship building?

• How am I being mindful of my own emotions, triggers, and responses?

• What is my relationship with authority? Am I permissive, neglectful, authoritarian, or authoritative?

• How can I lay down ideas of power and control and still be authoritative?

• How can I use affective statements and questions to normalize emotions as part of relationship building?

For the community:

• How can we support SEL by incorporating a focus on mind, body, spirit connection?

• How do we emphasize cooperation and collaboration and de-center individual success over others?

• How can we show appreciation meaningfully for people’s work and efforts?

• How do we create learning communities that embrace risk taking and decrease the shame around failure?

• How do we engage with each other with open-heartedness?

• How do we normalize conflict and move through it respectfully?

• How do we interrogate our assumptions with curiosity?

Learning #1: Restorative Practices is the work of Community

The primary focus of RP is building and strengthening relationships, rather than addressing harm. As individuals, we can only maintain a limited number of strong relationships. Fully implementing RP, therefore, requires an examination of the relationships that exist within a school. How can we leverage all community members to collaborate, reflect on, and practice RP to strengthen connections and trust?

In my action research, I leveraged a team of adults interested in RP to co-create an RP training curriculum for students, with the idea that students would then be better equipped to engage with one another and mediate conflict as needed. Members of this team have also brought their understanding of RP into our 9th Grade advisory curriculum, creating a compounding effect that we hope will positively impact student behavior in future years. We’ve also implemented RP circles to address harm and reset team culture for our wrestling team. This was successful and has resulted in a stronger team bond for the students. Another notable observation since beginning our implementation of RP is increased student accountability and an acceptance of consequences.

As a first-generation daughter to immigrants, I grew up wrestling with notions of home, belonging, and community because of the way my parents built deep relationships with great care and curiosity for others. My childhood home was always abuzz every weekend, filled with the many people my parents regularly invited into our lives. grew up witnessing the connectedness of an immigrant community while never quite having one where felt I truly belonged. My parents’ story of care and curiosity for others continues in my work, driven by an optimism that whole humans and strong relationships can heal and transform communities.

Learning #2: Student/Adult Equity, Intergenerational Partnerships, and Liberatory Change

The fundamental premise of RP is that people are happier, and more likely to make positive changes to their behavior when people in positions of power do things with them, rather than to or for them. I see this sentiment frequently expressed by students who ask for opportunities to play and bond with peers.

Students identify participation in communal activities as a way to build connections. While those moments are valuable and necessary, I also wonder if what students crave is human connection - the kind of connection that comes with deep listening, empathy, and storytelling. My RP team incorporated these learning outcomes into our frst RP circle-keepers workshop.

We constructed the workshop on the premise that both students and adults are experts, and that we can collaborate and learn together as colleagues to move beyond models of adult-led or student-led programming, as well as to challenge the assumption that adults are gatekeepers of knowledge. The feedback was positive and students named learning and querying alongside adults as meaningful. Students also identified intergenerational partnership with younger divisions as a key goal for future community building.

Intergenerational partnerships help us to see, engage, and learn from one another as people, outside the structures of hierarchy, power, and oppression. It is through this type of RP work that we can build more relational, liberatory learning communities.

Next Steps

I will continue expanding RP education at AFS. This includes continued parent, student, and faculty/staff engagement. My team will continue training student circle keepers - some are already involved in collaborative problem solving with faculty. I will also be offering a new course in the upcoming year for all 10th graders to explore RP and Quakerism.

Feedback is an important component of RP. So, as my education efforts expand, I would like to collaborate with my US Director to develop a student and faculty feedback tool that will allow us to assess improvements in the school’s relational culture.

Final Refection

I have learned that building human-centered, relational communities sparks joy and a sense of purpose for me. This work is continuous and ongoing. Our understanding and our relationships are always evolving. This work has also changed me. I am more aware of my own emotionality in hard moments, and I also feel more grounded in a practice of critical refection in which I frequently re-examine my own relationship to authority and power as my personal and professional relationships continue to evolve. I am deeply grateful for having had this opportunity to learn and grow and I am thankful to everyone who has supported me along the way.

TINA YEN

Dean of StudentsAbington Friends SchoolJenkintown, PA

As a frst-generation daughter to immigrants, I grew up wrestling with notions of home, belonging, and community because of the way my parents built deep relationships with great care and curiosity for others. My childhood home was always abuzz every weekend, flled with the many people my parents regularly invited into our lives. I grew up witnessing the connectedness of an immigrant community while never quite having one where I felt I truly belonged. My parents’ story of care and curiosity for others continues in my work, driven by an optimism that whole humans and strong relationships can heal and transform communities.