School safety… during a pandemic. Part VI.
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 SIX
Beautiful points, Barry.
There’s no more or less sun — ever. It’s just our perception. The stories we tell ourselves about whether or not it’s there — often based on how light appears from where we stand at a given time. And the stories we tell ourselves about the values of lightness and darkness. It’s always troubled me that darkness gets such a bad rap in our society. That even Martin Luther King, Jr., who brought such sensitivity to language and the values attached to skin color, seemed to equate “darkness” to “hate” in the famous line: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
If in this moment of a pandemic we can see things at other times obscured by shadows or blinding light, what do we do with this new found visibility? Do we meticulously record it? Do we inhabit it? Or is it something too profound for any “action steps” — something that shifts our psyche and our understanding of our terrain?
The armed militias seem to have some collective will (that gives others a collective chill). Is that version of collective will allowed in our version/vision of collective humanity? Do we all have to come together? Or can there be small groups? What happens when those small groups chafe against each other?
I’ve been listening to David Plouffe’s recent book. He shares lessons from running Obama’s presidential campaigns. He keeps emphasizing that the most effective form of political organizing is “regular folks” talking to family, knocking on neighbors doors, posting on social media. Margaret Mead’s quote about “small groups of thoughtful committed citizens” being the only thing that changes the world must be true. Is this something we must do intentionally? Is it just a bunch of small groups of thoughtful committed citizens out here competing to change the world in our own image? Or does the meaningful change come when all the groups meet and have to figure out what it looks like? How does that work when some have guns? Maybe that’s what happens everyday on Planet Human…
“I would like us to do something unprecedented,” James Baldwin wrote in 1967, “to create ourselves without finding it necessary to create an enemy.”
sam,
Love this conversation.
As soon as I read “…when some have guns” I thought of one of our heroes, among the Gallery of Heroes on the wall above the windows in our old “sprint space” in the d.school; he’s up there with other wonderfully inspirational beings, to whom we have been turning: Gandhi. Who stood up to guns.
Then I also thought of an unforgettable scene in Bridge of Spies with Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance whose character tells the story of the Standing Man. It’s about a man his father pointed out to him when he was young, “Watch this man,” he said. He was an unremarkable man, but when their village was overrun, everyone beaten by partisans and border guards and he himself is beaten, he simply stands back up. When they beat him even more severely, he gets back up again, and again. It seemed that for this reason, they stopped the beatings.
Yes and…
Aren’t we trying to do what we can to inspire and gather those ideals, those idealists, those bystanders who, given the chance to hear the call, might join in?
We try, as we are trying now, to imagine for ourselves what is truly needed, to marshal those resources in us and in others to strategic purpose. Safety is only the welcome mat at the threshold of more wide-spread social transformation. Yes, intentional; yes, “just small groups;” yes, groups of thoughtful committed citizens; and yes, the most difficult: figuring it out together.
…And…
Isn’t where it begins, always, with the individual call and an obeying of that call? A call in the service of an unknowable higher ground.
My father was a version of that Standing Man, my grandfather as well, and probably, I suspect, your father and grandfather. All the gifts we have to give we have been given.
So I agree with Margaret Mead…
I believe that everyday, everywhere, there are moments of exchange that, while seemingly insignificant, alter the quality of life. They’re offered by folks whom we have never heard of, like my father. I don’t think their true effect can ever be fully appreciated, but all of us have been both the recipients of, as well as the contributors to, a moment where life has been elevated. We know these moments. We remember them. Of course, we also know the opposite, life being diminished by stupidity and casual cruelty. Some of that is going around now too.
But I don’t think this diminishes the power of those who in their own ways of being in life enrich the lives of others. Their stories aren’t revealed on the grand stage of history, but we’re hearing them. Their contributions are more quiet and would largely be unnoticed if we didn’t feel the benefit of them, reminded of our own humanity. We are touched by them even from afar. Typically, it’s those selflessly helping others in need, health care workers come to mind, but there are many others like my niece who on top of her own job is using her refrigerated truck to deliver food to those workers at the hospitals. Can this be our buried aspiration which needs to be called up? Is this our true purpose which needs to be activated?
If we are no longer mute in the face of injustices, aren’t those moments a way in which the silence is broken?
I heard once: a single drop of those moments can change the color of an ocean.
There is still and will always be great power in resonance. You play any stringed instrument and other stringed instruments nearby will begin to be played… harmoniously. This “harmonizing” happens among all living things, our species is just not very attuned to it. So perhaps our work is to see we are instruments and allow ourselves to be tuned and played in ways that resonate and harmonize with what’s needed. What is the difference between those with guns and those who strive to be in tune with a greater purpose? We return to “attitude” and “orientation.” It is the difference between those who are against and those who are for what might harmonize us all.
What do you think:
How does social transformation begin? What must follow those beginnings? Where do you see yourself in the process?
For more questions about school safety — and a place to pose your own — visit ReimagineSchoolSafety.org
