Dear readers of the What’s New,
Pacific Buddhist Academy teachers and employees returned early from their summers for a professional development training in facilitating Community Conferences led by expert facilitators Dr. Lauren Abramson and Lauren Trout, the third in a series of Restorative Practices workshops for PBA educators made possible by generous grant funding from the Kosasa Foundation.
As Dr. Abramson explained, “Indigenous cultures have developed ways to deal with harm and conflict by […] bringing together everyone affected by a situation to sit in a circle and work through it with the guidance of an elder.” The Community Conferencing process finds its origins in these indigenous practices. Through extensive work with Australians David Moore and John McDonald, who consulted extensively with Maori colleagues in Aotearoa, Abramson and other practitioners refined the Community Conferencing process in Baltimore, Maryland, where it has been used since 1995.
“We feel that what has taken place in Baltimore is also a lesson for the country,” Abramson said. “That safe, fair and effective community-based justice is attainable for human beings of all ages, all ethnicities, at all socio-economic levels, provided they given an appropriate structure to handle situations themselves.”
Though Community Conferencing is a robust enough social technology that it can be used in juvenile justice and human services settings, PBA educators were trained in a continuum of restorative practices over the past year that will inform our efforts at community building and resolving conflicts.
“We had our first trainings in the theory of restorative practices last winter,” said PBA Japanese sensei Loren Otake. “And we immediately began using Talking Circles as a core practice of our advisory sessions each Wednesday.”
“The Talking Circles really helped us refocus on giving our students voice again,” said science teacher Van Velasco. “I mean, so much of the pandemic learning environment involved teachers teaching to students who had muted mics and shut off cameras. During advisories, at the least, students joined us to share, in their own voices and with their faces on camera, what they were experiencing from home and at school.”
Though at PBA we have not witnessed or experienced behaviors requiring the intervention of the juvenile justice system, all young people are prone to mistakes, and conflict is a universal element of the human experience. It is our intent, as a community of educators, to equip our students and educators with the skills and social technologies to build and maintain community and to find solutions to conflicts using their emotional intelligence, empathy for others and belief in the value of the social harmony and repairing harm when it occurs.
It is my hope that the partnership we established with Dr. Lauren Abramson and Lauren Trout will endure through the coming year and beyond as we continue using the methods of restorative practice at PBA. I want to thank the Kosasa Foundation and the incredible team of educators at PBA for engaging in this professional learning opportunity.
Warmly,
Josh Hernandez Morse
Head of School
