School safety… during a pandemic. Part III.
A six-part dialogue between an architect + an educator. With a soundtrack. One year later.
In the 2019–2020 academic year, Barry Svigals was a fellow with our K12 Lab at the Stanford d.school. The purpose of the fellowship was to utilize design approaches to reimagine school safety. Barry brought decades of experience designing K-12 school buildings to this endeavor, including the design of the new Sandy Hook Elementary School. When COVID-19 forced us to shelter-in-place, Barry and I were in the last week of co-teaching a course called Safe By Design which brought together Stanford students and students from ASCEND Middle School in Oakland. We were in the midst of digging into research on student wellbeing, developing collaborations with several national organizations dedicated to school safety, and designing prototypes to help change conversations about what safety can and should mean for K-12 communities…
To get a full background on the letters below, which Barry and I wrote to each other a year ago this week, check out the first post in this series.
DAY THREE
April 11th, 2020
Barry,
This weekend, I started listening to a book called We Keep Us Safe: Building Secure, Just, and Inclusive Communities by Zach Norris, who is the Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center here in Oakland. Similar to the distinction we made in our course between ‘schools of fear’ and ‘schools of joy,’ he delineates between two approaches to safety: an approach that attempts to achieve safety through fear and an approach that attempts to achieve safety through care. He is looking beyond schools at communities. When he talks about a fear-based approach to safety, he is talking about the media focus on crime and politicians’ focus on being ‘tough on crime’ over the last several decades, and the way that these things have penalized Black and Latinx communities, and let the actual super-predators — big banks and businesses that prey on people through schemes like subprime mortgages — generally get away scot-free (or even get rewarded through bailouts).
There is some triangulation of Norris’s notions of societal safety, our work on school safety, and the issues of safety that the pandemic has surfaced. What is the fear-based approach in this moment? What is the care-based approach? And what of joy? Is there any room for that — or is it offensive to even introduce the word in this moment?
Modest acts. Community. Powerful constituency of students. What do these look like in action? How are they mobilized? Or can they be?
What are three things I can do tomorrow?
Is it through one of us doing something, however modest, that we inspire a few others?
Can/must the response to the virus be as contagious as the virus itself?
April 11th, 2020
sam,
You raised so many important questions. Where to begin?
That last sentence regarding the response being as contagious as the virus brought up this: it can and must.
The longing we feel now for community and human connection and the urge to reach out is a boundless resource. If we look for it, the modest acts of kindness are everywhere and can be catalytic if encouraged. Our part may be exactly that: to call it up. Yes, I believe that it is through each of us that the current of belonging flows and our individual actions in that spirit matter more than we can know… and we are called to call others by those actions.
Fear and joy… what do they look like now?
As we discovered, in school safety, fear drove solutions that focused on the very rare extreme acts while marginalizing the much more prevalent and damaging incidents of violence and trauma found in bullying. The present conditions are entirely different. Our fears now are real and justifiably focused on an unseen killer. I feel our joys remain very similar: a joy in life itself and, as we were saying, the necessity of human contact. It is ever more essential to invoke that celebration in the face of it being imperiled.
But our current response with either fear or joy… that’s another thing. As we discovered with school safety, it’s much easier to respond with fear than joy. We can now see it’s divisiveness in ourselves as we judge others for their response to what’s needed. Why isn’t he wearing his mask? Why can’t we go to restaurants and bars? But the care and joy are also there. We see the response to the needs of the health care workers. We see the care for those in need of food and shelter.
I keep coming back to the importance of not only embodying that joy and care, but also amplifying the call it represents. More of us need to hear that call, and hear it more often.
So what are the three things we can do right now? …Back to you as you raised the question! What are your three things? My first one is found in the quote below.
“These conditions are a precious occasion to be together in rediscovering the reality of what can truly unite us as we are deprived of our habitual forms and exchanges. For each one of us, it is a sacred task of discovery. That demands a new attitude, and each person is responsible for an invisible, mutual support to maintain the purity of this effort.”
Today (a year after the letters above were written), the New York Times displayed images by 28 Asian and Asian-American photographers in a collection entitled “Seeing Hate, They Focus on Love.” The photographs were accompanied by “Keeping Love Close,” an essay by Celeste Ng. She writes, “The artists in this collection strive to show a contrast to the climate of fear, anxiety, and pain of the past few weeks…” Quite simply, “they look for signs of love” and find them in all kinds of circumstances—even in the face of fear, hate, and violence.
In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell illustrates the crucial role of our attention in multiple ways: “… if we allow that what we see forms the basis of how we act, then the importance of directing our attention becomes all too clear.” We need to look for those signs of joy, of life, and of love, and recognize that paying attention to them can change what our world becomes.
We’d love to read your responses to some of the questions in the letters above:
Fear and joy… what do they look like now? What is the fear-based approach in this moment? What is the care-based approach? And what of joy? Is there any room for that — or is it offensive to even introduce the word in this moment?
For more questions about school safety — and a place to pose your own — visit ReimagineSchoolSafety.org
Join us again on 4/19 for the next installment of letters and tunes.
