Placing Education at the Centre of a Flourishing Community
At Foothills School Division (FSD), our journey with workplace wellness and student wellbeing is a long-standing priority. In 2021 FSD embedded staff wellness into our 3-Year Education Plan, alongside student wellbeing. We recognized that when staff are well, students are set up for more success, and both of these are very important to system success.
We updated our vision statement in 2019 to read “Engagement, Support, and Success for Each Learner.” At that time we stipulated that ‘learners’ includes every individual employee in the system as well as our students. And in the fall of 2020, with pandemic health measures in place, we chose to gather organizational voice by making the Guarding Minds at Work survey (Guarding Minds @ Work, 2020) available to all staff to endeavor to support them in their wellness at work.
We brought our survey results to our Board of Trustees, our staff team, and our Staff Advisory Council, a group comprised of a member from each school and department who gather three times yearly as local champions of staff wellness. Discussions followed where we distilled and discussed action plans that could attenuate the challenges identified in the data.
Workload, balance, and structures that could improve conflict resolution in our system were identified as starting points. We revised policies and procedures; provided professional learning that made employee benefit plans more visible, accessible, and understood; and accessed the expertise of Dr. Astrid Kendrick at the University of Calgary. Dr. Kendrick facilitated book study of “Teacher Take Care” for our Staff Advisory team and this was replicated in many school sites across the Division.
Our work to address the challenges identified on the survey took place at a time when the world around us was spiraling into a global crisis. As we collectively navigated the time that followed, we recognized the disconnectedness, the need to come back together, and the power that positive professional relationships can bring to our work.
In response to the survey results, we tapped into the work of Amy Edmondson, and how learning organizations can thrive (Edmondson, 2018). We learned about systemness through the work of Peter Senge (Senge, 2006), and determined that our organizational purpose should shift, based partly on Otto Scharmer’s work about connecting to a positive emerging future (Scharmer, 2009).
We coined our new organizational purpose in 2022, “Placing Education at the Centre of Flourishing Community,” and with this as our guide, we began our work with our leadership team. Building off David Cooperrider’s strength-based change management approach, Appreciative Inquiry (Stavros, Cooperrider, Whitney, 2008). We set out, over the course of eight professional learning days throughout the 2022-2023 school year, to build what became our Guide to Success for a Flourishing Leadership Culture.
Our entire school and system leadership team engaged in this work, and we identified the following five core commitments to thrive together in our system and school leadership work:
- Systemness
- Healthy relationships
- Effective communication
- Effective collaboration
- Authentic curiosity
Our commitments rippled out in our organization; many schools adapted this work to their local context and a larger conversation began around flourishing. What does it mean to each of us? And how can we achieve this together? As leaders in the organization, we asked ourselves these same questions, especially in light of the increasing divisiveness that was occurring in the world around us. We were living in VUCA times, a term created by the US military in the 1980s, an acronym for an era in which there is much: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity.
While considering the current conditions of our society, we came across the work of Shane Parrish. Parrish poses an interesting question in relation to solving the problems that confound us. He suggests that inquiring about what would have to be true in order for a given problem to have never existed provides insight into how to solve the problem. His question resonated, and in thinking, discussing, and reflecting upon this we kept coming back to community as the solution to our problem.
The divisiveness, the erosion of trust, the angry presentation of many we interact with would not exist if we lived in community, built community, had community to rely upon. Community would have to be true, and our next step was ideated.
Before we began this work, we discussed and read about a definition of community. Psychology and philosophy informed this work. Martin Seligman’s PERMA framework contributed to our evolving understanding, as did Viktor Frankl’s important, profound and selfless reflections about meaning (Frankl, 2006; Seligman, 2011). We also looked at the literature around trauma-informed approaches, including Bessel Van der Kolk’s work, and determined that community includes meaning, connection, a shared concern, and welfare for one another in shared purpose (Van der Kolk, 2015).
Our emerging community paradigm is characterized by trust, connectedness, social support, interdependence, and interconnectedness: an environment where individuals belong and contribute to the wellbeing of others. The concepts of interdependence and interrelatedness are reminiscent and are becoming more integral to non-Indigenous peoples’ nascent understanding of Indigenous ways of knowing.
These ways of knowing are rooted in reciprocal relationships and recognize the ways that all humans, animals and plants interact with one another and their environment. Mi’kmaq Elder Alberta Marshall, Blackfoot Elder Dr. Leroy Little Bear, and Citizen member of the Potawatomi Nation, Robin Wall-Kimmerer, emphasize our responsibility to one another and to the world that sustains us – living in community (Marshall, n.d.; Little Bear, 2000; Wall-Kimmerer, 2013).
These worldviews and ways of knowing and living have existed for thousands of years, and non-Indigenous people are beginning to see the value in restoring the balance and harmony in our world through embracing them. Indigenous teachings describe a world where there is collective responsibility, mutual respect, and care for one another and all that the earth provides to sustain us. This conscious living in respect and reciprocity highlights interconnectedness. Living well requires recognizing and respecting these principles, and it is through this collectivity that we can support ourselves.
Such wisdom must inform and shape our evolving understanding and conception of community; We can learn from the longstanding Indigenous wisdom and teachings to help us reunite our communities. Our aim is thus to develop connectedness and interrelationship both within and outside our organizational community, defining reciprocity from micro to macro levels.
Perhaps ironically, we recognized that this is work that schools do intuitively, every day, in working with and supporting students, staff, and families. Schools create community by creating a place for all, a place where each individual can find belonging, share in mutual respect for others, and provide opportunities for each learner to engage, be supported, and succeed alongside one another.
Individual success is school success, from self to community and back again.
Our concept and vision of community thus needs to be mapped out further from the school and into the community we serve – sounds redundant, or obvious, or both. But truly it is not, it is our work.
We have begun engaging with our parent community and staff to define what community means to us collectively. So far, initial and limited feedback supports our proposed definition and emphasizes the importance of belonging. We are also identifying conditions necessary for our FSD learning community to thrive, which align with our 2023 Guide to Success. These conditions highlight interrelationship, interconnectedness, and reciprocity.
Next, we will finalize the community definition, emphasize belonging, and develop a flourishing communities framework based on feedback. This framework will be integrated into our policy, administrative procedures, and education plan to foster positive interactions and community building. We aim to create a thriving Foothills community.
With a goal of flourishing in mind, we have also just concluded a second round of the Guarding Minds at Work survey—four years after the first (Guarding Minds @ Work, 2020). It is perhaps not surprising that many of the same themes identified in the first survey persist and are more urgent than they were in 2020. Burnout, balance, and workload are a challenge for our team. Loneliness at work is also identified as a question to which we need to dedicate time and resources.
We have our work cut out for us and will begin the conversations necessary to understanding and actioning our team’s voice in January of 2025. As difficult as it is to see that our team continues to struggle in many ways, it is also indicative of developing community as a possible support and antidote to our shared wonders and concerns. There is some room for convergence between our development of community and actioning the survey, that is at least our hope.
We do not necessarily have agency to influence and shape the forces at large in our greater society; but we do believe that we have agency and opportunity to influence change locally. We are steadfast in our commitment and work to make our FSD community a place where each member has the opportunity to flourish. It is woven into our 5-year Education Plan (2024-2029) that, as with workplace wellness, and student wellbeing, we also recognize that this is shared work, and we look forward to continuing this work moving forward. It is, in our humble estimate, a responsibility that we hold.
Because if we are to imagine a world without community surrounding and within our public schools, it is not a place we want to be. And so, we will build community moving forward. If we do not, who will?
Photo: Courtesy Foothills School Division (The image is from Oilfields High School in Diamond Valley, AB. It is a student created mural from two years ago.)
References
Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. United Kingdom: Wiley.
Frankl, V. (2006). Man’s Search for Meaning. United States: Beacon Press.
Guarding Minds @ Work. (2020). Guarding minds at work: A workplace guide to psychological health and safety. https://www.guardingmindsatwork.ca/
Little Bear, L. (2000). Jagged worldviews colliding. In M. Battiste (Ed.), Reclaiming indigenous voice and vision, 77-85. UBC Press. https://www.law.utoronto.ca/sites/default/files/documents/hewitt-leroy_little_bear_on_jagged_worldviews.pdf
Scharmer, O. (2016). Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges. United Kingdom: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Scott, R. N. S., Brasok, C., Cichosz Rosney, M., Doney, L., Fulwiler Volk, D., Gagné, J., Hunter, M., McDonald, K., Macpherson, K., Dumas Neufeld, L., Pacheco Melo, S., & Sunada, J. (2022). Teacher, take care: A guide to well-being and workplace wellness for educators. Portage & Main Press.
Seligman, M. (2011). Flourish. United Sates: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
Senge, P. M. (2006). The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization. United Kingdom: Crown.
Stavros, J. M., Cooperrider, D. L., Whitney, D. K. (2008). The Appreciative Inquiry Handbook: For Leaders of Change. United States: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Tepi’ketuek. (n.d.). Albert Marshall. Tepi’ketuek, Mi’kmaw Archives. https://mikmawarchives.ca/authors/albert-marshall.
Van der Kolk, B. (2015). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma. United States: Penguin.
Wall Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Canada: Milkweed Editions.