Case Study
A Rural School and Community
Winds of Change: Dune Ecology in a Boreal Forest / Maritime Community
Thoughts from Alan Furth, G/T Coordinator and
Director of the Cobscook Community Learning Center
Have you been to White Sands or Great Sand Dunes National Monument in the
American Southwest? Have you seen these magnificent slow moving geologic seas
worked into a maelstrom with countless cutting crystals raging in a dry desert
storm, and then been there the next day - the next hour - and experienced
the landscape as unchanged - fluid yet constant. It takes slow careful study
to read the features to begin to understand the dynamics of stability and
change in this paradoxical environment. Remember the dunes.
I moved to Lubec in 1978 at the age of twenty-four to live here
and to teach in the public school. I was amongst the first of a wave of new
educators in the K-12 system which enjoyed an enrollment of over 400 (current
numbers hang at 255 and we have just had the bottom drop out of the aquaculture
and sardine businesses). There was also a new superintendent that year. He
moved here from New York City and lasted just a single year. He replaced Guy
Look, a Downeast native who had enjoyed a long stable career in the school.
Most of the veteran teachers were nearing the end of incredibly long service
in our schools. Forty years was a common achievement.
I walked into my first classroom twenty-three years ago here
in Lubec and at that point the time-tempered professionals were skeptical
of anything driven by a grant. "There is nothing sustained in grant driven
initiatives. They will be here and then they will be gone, and then someone
or something else will come along ..." They all blow through - each a
desert storm, tossing surface sands high and mighty - for a moment. The dunes
adjust and shift a bit and then remain unchanged.
"We are not here to serve a broken world,
we are here to serve a sacred one."
(peace activist, Marta Daniels)
The people of the Downeast region are incredibly resourceful
and adaptable. They have been deeply grounded in this place, raised with stories
twined around family characters and place names which equate with a "home"
experience rare to people in this country. Until the recent demographic shift,
with people-from-away finally getting the upper hand on property ownership,
local families had been here for many generations. People were raised working
and living together off the land and sea, children beside elders, whole families
out on the clam flats, husbands and wives working a woodlot, raising a family.
It has been interesting watching the grants come and go and
to wonder about the community's response. An interesting interrelationship
seems to have evolved. The money is a commodity we can almost always appreciate.
The countless short-lived programs which accompany the funds are more or less
generally (on a school-wide level) accommodated. Some people find employment
and enjoy worthwhile experiences. The short term gains can be extremely rewarding
at many levels even. But, the transience of well intended change-agents supports
negligible consequential change. Perhaps too many individuals within community
and school, who make up the local system, have developed a sort of immunity
or resistance to the gusty winds of change.
Aside from the lack of funders' sustained viability, focus and
commitment, (Remember, we are talking about long term systemic change: tidal
time - slow) there are flaws in the design, implementation processes and evolutionary
track of most grants I have experienced. Recently I attended a retreat which
was focused on establishing values to bind the mission and vision of a small
grassroots community education venture. The facilitator referred to the work
of systems analyst and consultant, Don Coyois who forwards four laws of change.
They stand as good measures for any efforts towards sustained change.
˜ If there is going to be change, it must come from within.
It will not come about through the efforts of bureaucratic agencies.
˜ There must be a vision before we can have an action.
˜ There must be a great learning.
˜ There must be a "healing forest". You can't
heal the forest one tree at a time. You must tend conditions in the entire
ecosystem.
In my opinion, Lubec's aquaculture program is a "one tree
at a time" approach. Though the program is very exciting, offering transformational
experiences for many of the students who have passed through it in recent
years and continuing into today, it has a tenuous lease on life. The school
community has not found a way to enter into focused dialogue on what positive
systemic change could or should look like. The aquaculture program, like so
many other initiatives, is a grand program struggling to exist on a faulty
foundation.
Challenges. What are the challenges to empowering changes to
happen in teaching and learning in the Lubec school/community?
˜ Many of you appreciate how much people here learn and
know. Social change initiatives informed by and honoring of cultural diversity
issues unique to resource based economies in rural low income America are
rare. Grants reflecting old-style missionary or patronizing orientations to
our communities will not get far.
˜ At the same time, it is essential that we create space
and work from a place which is informed about the deep-seated issues played
out in destructive patterns here. The statistics are real, but (and this is
critical to every ethical aspect of engaging in this work!) they alone are
incomplete and will serve no end beyond sustaining the mental health industry
professionals. We must look closely and critically at this issue.
˜ Funding. A challenge to our community is the inequity
in state and national funding of education. We need good, clean, no-strings-attached
money. I hear the chorus now, "But then, where does motivation and accountability
for change begin?" From within. We must support conditions in which the
seeds for change can spring forth. The wisdom and ideas abound. There really
is not much new: place based learning; student ownership and motivation; integrated
study ... It is all older than the hills, and wonderful. But the vessel, the
American education system, is archaic, not well equipped with the fundamental
concepts nor designs to support the evolution from ideal to applicable reality.
The forest, the whole environment, needs tending.
˜ Change the academic calendar by adding twenty professional
days. Use them to train, move into and through a mission, vision, values,
goals, tasks, outcomes set of processes. Include members of the entire learning
community (students, teachers, administrators, parents, interested community
members and representatives from local groups, grants directors/workers, and
state education administrators) in the process. Venture into transformational
designs. Structures and mindsets are a major challenge. In the current system
we have no solid values, no mission we can own, no vision we can be clear
of. We do not function as a team, a dynamic, responsive honoring whole.
˜ Time. We are all so busy. In this small school we are
all pulled in a million different directions. There are so many grants and
mandates.
James Hillman wrote a story about a Navajo elder who was teaching
lessons to some Anglo visitors. He said, "We are friends with all of
creation - everything." The visitor inquired, "Even the snakes and
spiders?" "All of creation." the elder assured. They then went
on to arrange to meet the next day way out near the back end of some range
land where fencing needed to be repaired.
It was late the next morning when the Anglos made their approach
to the area. It was clear the old man had been at it for hours. When they
arrived at the scene, they were horrified to see dead rattlers all over the
place. "I thought you told us all of creation was your friend! What's
this?"
Calmly the old man wiped his brow and responded, " They
are my friends, but I had so many friends around this morning I couldn't get
no work done."
It is a major challenge for a small school such as ours to approach
the spirit of change which lies at the heart of the bulk of the increasing
number of grant driven initiatives which seem drawn to our system. We do well
to fulfill the technical obligations, but pathways to sustained systemic change
lie out of sight, across the proverbial unyielding central city avenue of
thundering traffic - the demands of daily operations for the school. "Oh
the water is wide, I cannot cross over. Neither have I wings to fly...".
Structures. We need supportive structures to sustain and empower systemic
change.
We need administrators and educators who believe that daily
meaningful engagement with content across disciplines and for all students
is not a pipe dream but an attainable goal.
Strategies. This gathering makes me hopeful. Really. All the
language is in place. But, the understanding of the collective dynamic is
missing. But again, there is this gathering.
How Can Innovative Programs in Lubec Be Sustained?
˜ Attention to the foundation - our system
˜ Commitment to proceses which support change from within
the community with practices and language honoring and respectful of the local
populations
˜ Time to engage in meaningful, substantive, honest dialogue
and design work
˜ Active and positive relationship to evaluation and mentoring,
to peer reflection and professional growth and change plans
˜ Retention of faculty and administration
˜ Better pay for educators in the system
˜ Money to support healthy engagement in change making
processes
In order for us to be effective we need to do a lot more good
active listening. We need to speak from our hearts - honestly, unafraid. We
need to create the space where that can and will happen. We need to offer
spaces where Lubec community members can emerge into the glory of spirit which
is already prepared to match the splendor of any Quoddy Head first light dawn,
any splash of northern lights across our star filled night sky, anything which
is an expression of the beauty and spirit of this place.
If we want to support and work towards systemic change we must
do more than dance dramatically upon the surface of a landscape. We must be
more than a windstorm playing upon the dunes. To engage in the real transformation
we must be - breathe now - we must be in the community for the long haul.
We must twine water (blood, sweat and tears) with the substance of life here
- all of it - and work to percolate the whole thing down deep - until what
was once wild, shiftless and unanchored becomes bedrock: solid, beautifully
grained with the true stories, and a collective vision secure, accessible
and enduring.
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