Sustaining Hope Through Renewed Compassion

A Contemplative Pedagogy for Planning, Organizing, and Evaluating Curriculum

by Mary Ann Kahl, EdD

How does one facilitate a learning process with seasoned practitioners that provokes renewed curiosity and renewed wisdom on a subject that they feel they know—a subject which is entrenched in traditional paradigms?

This was just one of the questions I held as I participated in last summer’s Authentic Leadership Summer Institute in Halifax. As a professor of Educational Leadership, I left for Halifax in the midst of preparing the outline for a doctoral-level course on Kindergarten-12th grade curriculum planning, organizing, and evaluating which I would be teaching the following fall. I knew that I wanted this course to be more than the usual focus on the historical foundations of curriculum, traditional processes and management of curriculum. I wanted to design a learning experience that would enable these practitioners to look anew at the work of curriculum. I trusted that my participation at the 2007 Authentic Leadership Summer Institute would somehow provide me with inspiration to design the course in the unique way that I was envisioning. Indeed it did.

Energized by my participation at the Institute, I began preparing for the first class meeting in early September. The class would meet once a month as weekend intensives, to allow time for sustained dialogue, building of community, and personal and group reflective thinking.

During my preparation for this class, I called to mind the current state of reality in the curriculum field. In most public school settings in the United States, the curriculum is built around content standards, performance expectations, and narrowly defined assessments of learning. Personal pedagogies have gone by the wayside, replaced by a less personal commitment to the national agenda and a more industrial model with a standardized paradigm for curriculum. This current reality leaves little room for authentic responses to student learning needs, as it moves educators away from the more wholistic human development discourse to the rigid academic achievement discourse.¹ The profession marches willingly, but most would claim steadily, to the beat of the “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) mandates.

The conversation among educational professionals in the United States has turned its attention to how well one school or school district has performed on state assessments. There is a growing culture of despair among educators that is anchored in what amounts to a national prescription of “hope”—a hope which silences personal, authentic visions of schools and of learning. When educators do talk honestly of hope, it seems to be more about the hope that this NCLB nightmare will go away.

It is at this point of departure that the story of curriculum transformation for one group of educators begins. The first evening of our class I request that students “turn to one another” as suggested by Margaret Wheatley² and dialogue around the question: In the context of education, what is it that grabs the attention of your compassion and ignites your hope?

The request to engage in a conversation about compassion and hope left many participants a bit uncomfortable, as this request is rarely made. A silence blanketed the room. It was one of those uncomfortable silences where no one knew quite what to do or what to say. As the facilitator of this group, I had to trust that in time someone would speak through this tense transition. I made a conscious effort to ride the silence and not rely on my past behaviors by breaking the silence with unnecessary directions, verbal encouragement, or spouting examples from my own experience in order to hasten the process and to externally motivate the conversation to start. Instead, I chose to put into practice the contemplative pedagogy that I learned from my participation at the Authentic Leadership Institute. Through the awareness of my own breath and my own calmness I felt that I was helping to lessen anxiety in the collective space. Time seemed to vanish and a new organic rhythm emerged. I began to consciously form a heart to heart connection with each student in the room and pour out my love for them. Beth Jandernoa describes this type of facilitation in her description of the “Circle of Seven.”³

And then, as if the floodgates had been opened, voices began to fill the room. The chatter began loudly, with a quickened pace, and a “let’s get to it” kind of attitude that those positioned in leadership and management are accustomed to. I considered that perhaps the loud initial chatter of voices was an unconscious attempt to cover up the awkwardness of the subject—as if the loudness of the voices could disguise the uncomfortable emotions that were aroused as soon as the subject was suggested. Then, ever so slowly, the cadence of the collective speech took on a new rhythm. The quick and high energy chatter that broke through the awkward silence evolved into the slow and quiet rhythm that often accompanies profound conversation. I knew then that there was no turning back to a superficial discussion and that the group was delving deeper into the core of the matter.

The image of Otto Scharmer’s U Model⁴ came to mind, and I could sense that the group was going past the stage of simply downloading their current understandings of curriculum and entering a new stage of awareness, “suspending judgment and seeing reality with fresh eyes.”⁵ I thought, Can the group sustain this energy and go deeper into the field, past “open mind” and into “open heart?⁶

The conversations throughout that first evening drifted back and forth from describing hopes to sharing stories of awakened compassion. It was a humbling experience to hear what it was that aroused the heart and connected each individual to their work with children. It was a time of reawakening to the noble calling of caring, loving and teaching children. Sharing what it was that awakened our compassion was a sacred exchange, evidenced by the shift in the group’s demeanor, the quieting of their voices, and the stillness between the people’s sharing.

It was then that we reflected on the first of many “what if’s.” “What if we had conversations like these with our faculty at our own schools instead of “buy in” talks? We spend inordinate amounts of time and energy trying to convince faculty and staff to “buy into” curriculum initiatives and other reforms presented to us from the top down. It seems to me that when we touch the heart and ask each other what it is that evokes our compassion, then the need to “sell” is lessened. The path—the right thing to turn our attention to—is simply revealed.”

All of a sudden heads began nodding in unison, scowls of mistrust were replaced by profound sighs, and “but’s” were replaced with “and’s,” demonstrating the consensual building of new knowledge and new understanding. We were coming to the sacred agreement.

Soon the conversation shifted, and people began telling stories that centered on their hopes and what their hopes could offer students. The tone of the group’s discussion took on another form of energy as we drifted into the realm of “open will.”⁷ The conversations of hope were much livelier, as if the topic of hope breathed a new life into the space, which is what hope tends to do; yet, even though the energy and voices were pitched higher and quicker, there still remained a sense of reverence for what was being discussed.

This is a far different approach to curriculum planning from the more commonly used strategic planning methods that are extensively the work of management and administration. In this process there was no “problem to be fixed.” The process did not rely on elaborate plans of action with activity descriptions, persons responsible and timelines. Instead, this process asked the participants to discover their compassion and respond to that compassion with a vision of hope. Hope, used in this way, becomes a plan of action; in a sense, it is compassion in action. Hope and compassion must dance together. Without compassion, hope turns into rhetoric; and without hope, compassion turns into a series of random acts with good intentions. On their own they do not merit the type of response that students in our public schools so need from us.

Our children today need more than a charismatic speech; they need more than hit or miss good intentions; they need more than a strategic plan on some office shelf. They need school leaders to respond compassionately and create curriculums that reflect visions of hope—hope for their future, their talents, their wellness, and their being. The group’s excitement could be felt as they collectively discovered the wisdom in knowing that hope is the work—their personal work—as emerging educational leaders.

The conversations of hope and compassion continued on-line for the duration of the following month, supported by the reading of educational thinkers who speak the language of compassion and hope—thinkers like Stephanie Pace-Marshall, Thomas Armstrong, Paulo Freire, Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, Ron Miller, Kristin Poppo, and Patrick Shade. In retrospect, I am somewhat amazed that the on-line technology could help facilitate the group to reach deeper levels of wisdom. The on-line community was a container much like the classroom. It provided a space for “collective crystallizing.”⁸

The group began to voice their hopes more confidently and more descriptively as they explored their individual forgotten pedagogies. I say “forgotten” because the educational profession has not encouraged the discovery of our own ways of knowing, our own paths of being, our own understanding of how we learn and how we teach. As they began to reconnect with their compassion, these educators began to see more clearly the connection between their vision of hope and their own pedagogy. They explored pedagogies of faith, potentiality, humor, compassion, peace, love, joy, and goodness. They heard the strong voice of commitment and identity coming from each other as they shared their personal pedagogies. Each pedagogy was unique, yet strands of a universal core were evident; in each pedagogy, life-affirming values were at the core.

At the end of the second month the group was immersed in their final project, which was to examine one area of their school’s curriculum through the lens of their compassion, their vision of hope, and their personal pedagogy. The questions that guided the evaluation were:
• Is the curriculum a compassionate one?
• Is it hopeful in its vision for children?
• Is it compatible to your own pedagogy?
• Will you need to compromise your own hopes and pedagogy in order to implement this curriculum?
• Does the curriculum need re-visioning based on collective compassion and a collective sense of hope?

In a sense they were prototyping a curriculum evaluation process, one that enabled them to look at the current curricular structures through a more wholistic and authentic lens.

This process is distanced from the traditional evaluation process that views curriculum effectiveness through the lens of alignment to standard-based outcomes. Tools for evaluating curriculum usually involve creating management planning matrixes, reading extensive scientific research, seeking out the advice of external content based experts, taking surveys, and reviewing assessment results. I would dare say that the process this group created is far more organic and sustainable; however, it does require an “open heart, open mind, open will.”⁹ It is this openness that allows us to reflect on what awakens our compassion and the hope that arises as a response to that compassion. This same process is iterative, encouraging us to return again and again to deep inquiry and conversation in order to renew our compassion and re-envision our hope.

I believe that this process can be used in any field to renew and sustain the deep purposes of our work. Connecting people to their compassion, helping them to bridge their compassion with hope, and then acting on that hope through lived experiences and commitment will help to provide the generative culture that we so desperately need in our organizations today. I have found both the participation in the Authentic Leadership Institute and the work of Otto Scharmer to be invaluable to my own growth as a facilitator of learning and to my overall understanding and respect of contemplative practice. Putting contemplative practice at the core of my daily university teaching has brought me to a profound awareness of the effect that such practice can have on the emerging collective wisdom. It has become a lived practice for me, and one that has clearly benefited my students. It provides a vehicle for me to create classrooms, not merely of transmission, but transformation.

Endnotes

1. Armstrong, T. (2006). The Best Schools: How Human Development Research Should Inform Educational Practice. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, VA.

2. Wheatley, Margaret J. (2002). Turning to One Another. Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, CA.

3. Scharmer, C.O. (2007). Theory U: leading from the future as it emerges. Society for Organizational Learning, Inc., Cambridge, MA.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

Mary Ann Kahl, Ed.D. is an Assistant Professor in the College of Education at National-Louis University. She has attended three Authentic Leadership Institutes and has been incorporating the teachings of the Institute’s faculty and staff and her own learning from these experiences into her professional work with preparing school leaders. She is currently working on a project in collaboration with her students from Appleton, Wisconsin to incorporate student-led peace initiatives with Web 2.0 technology tools for greater sustainability and authenticity. They will be presenting their paper, “Technology-Based Collaboration Tools to Enhance Peace Education Initiatives,” at the International Association of Technology Education and Development Conference held in Valencia, Spain, March 3-5, 2008.

Mary Ann welcomes the continued conversation of compassion and hope and invites you to email her at Mary.Kahl@nl.edu