School safety… during a pandemic. Part IV.
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 FOUR
Barry,
It’s pretty amazing what a powerful force ‘attitude’ is.
Given that it can be invisible.
The subtle difference of intonation.
Or the angle of the curve of the edges of a smile.
And yet.
An attitude of caring, of acceptance, of love is contagious.
Tonight in our weekly #HipHopEd chat on Twitter, everyone was communicating in rhymes. Sharing whatever was on their mind. Much of which had to do with the effects of this pandemic. I’ll leave you with a quote from one of the members of the chat:
This is not a “new normal,” but a new portal/
To create the new normal and renew mortals/
- Glitched Huxtable @bushidogarvey
sam,
…Tonight. As I listen to VM Bhatt and Ry, sublime and read that quote from the weekly chat (who knew?) of #HipHopEd… I feel the reason why that certain (not every) “attitude” can have such power is that it’s carried on the shoulders of saints and the wings of angels. It never rides alone, it’s only ours as part of the greater whole, part of the grace and power of life. So…. Dearly Beloved, hear our prayer and renew us mortals in service of the Hop and the Hip and all above, below and in between. Amen.
A year later, the “attitude” discussed above is part of a broader more encompassing shift: one of orientation. What we mean by that is where we position ourselves and, most importantly, what we turn towards. Yes, towards caring, acceptance, and love, but also towards the source of care, acceptance, and love. Orientation accepts that we are a part of larger forces which are in play. Then the question is not what we need to do, but how we need to participate.
We’d love to know:
What sources and forces are you turning to in this moment?
What are your prayers and invocations?
For more questions about school safety — and a place to pose your own — visit ReimagineSchoolSafety.org
Join us again on 4/27 for the next installment of letters and tunes.
