Scraps, Scripts, Scaffolds and Songlines: Why “meaning” matters in our questions

Scraps, Scripts, Scaffolds and Songlines: Why “meaning” matters in our questions.

(From Chris Straker’s Keynote address at the NRJS2017 in Ottawa)

I have had the pleasure over the past two weeks, without travelling very far, to have had a global experience with a variety of restorative practitioners. In fact, it turns out that upon reflection that I was engaged in some form of a “walkabout”. I did embark with a goal of seeing to what extent systemic efforts were materializing around the world and also to interrogate the types of questions and scripts were being utilized. The latter I wanted to put up against I what I know and also seen as furthering the development of narratives that support responsibility taking and reparative and healing processes.

This began with a conference held in Kitchener Waterloo sponsored by the Community Justice agency for a focus on the work of the “Strides” program (supporting women in and outside of prisons) and ended with the National Restorative Justice Symposium (NRJS2017) in Ottawa. Imagine the two conferences as like book-ends with many volumes lined up along the virtual shelf.

Not as an aside, the walkabout was centered by an Indigenous walk offered by Jamie Koebel at the Ottawa conference as a pre-conference event.

(This is the “Lost Child” Inukshuk with my good friend Gayle Desmeules)

 This was important for numerous reasons but most significantly for myself it echoed my recent immersion into FN/M/I history and writing. This provided an important context for my reflections which I will return to.

I want to channel some of the folks and conversations that I had which are the basis for my own thoughts.

Scraps

The scraps I have are a series notes and pictures of slides and remembered conversations. Here are some of the key points and the authors.

·       Chris Cowie (CJI):

§ the efforts to expand and create a regional restorative zone

§ the layered narratives in restorative conversations

·       Chris Straker and his keynote address at the NRJS2017 gathering where he highlighted

§  the importance of language,

§ actions,

§ grassroots efforts

§ and the role of narrative stories as the constituent elements of communities striving to be restorative and be restored

·       Evening and dinner time discussions with Ali Gohar when he arrived for the UN panel on Restorative Justice

§ We talked about the practices of traditional communities using their existing ways (the loya jirga) to solve problems of conflict and harms. He highlighted how throughout the mid-east and African countries there are similar models.

§ We talked about the need to discuss with elders and leaders their values which resonate with restorative values. His writings have reflected the gaps in traditional practices which are not consistent with a human rights perspective.

·       Jennifer Llewelyn and her peers, Jennifer Furlong and Heather McNeil, presentation on a principle based approach to restorative justice in Nova Scotia. 

§ What stood out in their presentation were items that addressed context in understanding the nature of harm related issues,

§ the need to craft questions based on the principles and context

§ and to get to what “matters” for people.

There were also a host of others along the way. There were the other divas of what I identify as a distinctive Canadian way of thinking about restorative practices, Brenda Morrison and Dorothy Vaandering. There were a number of enlightening (and humourous) encounters with a group of young practitioners: Kirsten, Michael, Dave and Jeff.

And of course, my good friend Gayle Desmeules, who extends the discussions to ground practice so that we can see clearly the indigenous ways of life, values and traditions and Margot Van Sluytman (Sawbonna) who reminds us that one needs “to be seen” in order for any form of justice to occur.

Scripts

In my own work as a restorative practitioner and trainer I am grounded through over 40 years as a youth worker, as a practitioner, clinician, community developer and educator. With this as a frame of reference I know that the experience of restorative conversations needs to begin prior to the actual conversation in whatever form it may take whether it is in a circle or a conference. I often explain this as “getting” to circle. What is required is what the folks at Roca refer to as “relentless outreach”. Much work has to go into engagement and relationship prior to more substantive conversations of harm, whether for a harm doer or someone who has been harmed.

There are many great examples of mature conversations and reflections e.g John Baillie’s recent post, “A Better Man” documentary, Jacon Dunne’s Tedx, the play, “The Conversation”. These are beacons which can guide our efforts. However, these are adult conversations. Young people do not start here. Their process is a journey which needs to be guided and facilitated.

In fact, the young people I have worked with and teach about have lives that are framed by any of or combination of,

·       disrupted attachment,

·       experiences of trauma, individual and intergenerational

·       systemic exclusion, marginalization and pushout

·       adverse childhood events

·       Compromised neurodevelopment

Each one of these experiences alone can render a young person “adult wary” and disrupt the accepted fact that we are “hardwired to connect”. It often robs young people of their voices.

Scripts are neither possible nor helpful in the types of reaching out which only begins the first stages of relationship development. One cannot script the conversation and subsequent development of the discussions that arise since this a “dance” between two people. Part of this dance is not only framed in words and language. It is grounded in actions and activities that are connected to where a young person is at. This is where principles and values will guide practitioners. They will outline the shape and contours of the relationship. They cannot specify the actual “look’ of the conversations and relationship.

What matters

Scripts can be restrictive if using a conventional definition and as taught by some organizations. They tend to psychologize and individualize events in a way that leave out important elements. The core questions ask about thoughts, impacts, feelings and needs. All very important but also leaving out other key elements. They do not necessarily bring out the context of events. They do not explicitly bring out the surrounding and contributing factors.

Focused questions, although open-ended, may short cut the route to meaning and what “matters”, while short changing a fuller understanding of the context of events. Conversations do not follow a scripted pathway, but can unfold with guiding questions that have been crafted. Therein lies the difference.

Scripts can be handed out and picked up. Questions crafted need to be linked to the context of events and the actions of people that bring to the surface what the meaning of actions and their impacts.

Having studied with Kay Pranis, one of the more significant learnings was the art required to craft questions for restorative conversations that allows participants to engage in a restorative dialogue.

Asking “what happened” does not necessarily bring out the context of events. It does not ask about what lead up to the event or what was mattering to the person at the time when asking the person who caused the harm.

A poignant illustration was given by Chris Cowie when he described an intense neighbourhood conflict, with clear racist overtones, between an adult and a young child who came into his yard to retrieve a ball. When conversations ensued with the adult who had been blatantly racist it was revealed that he found what had most meaning for himself was that he was behaving in the way that he had been treated when he first came to Canada.

This is where the importance of meaning arises as a key aspect. It is not only the “hardest thing” as one question directs those harmed to answer, but it is the meaning of events. And what is telling is that previous experiences frame our conduct in the here and now.

It is “meaning”

So, this is the aside, but a more critical point. Charles Taylor is an esteemed Canadian philosopher. He was one of the key framers of the NDP ‘back in the day’, a critical voice in the issues of identity in Quebec, but most importantly for these reflections, a philosopher of “meaning” and identity in the modern “secular age”. He challenges our current ideas about what is to be a person and asserts that it is our desire to find and have “meaning” in our lives that is the cardinal and distinguishing characteristic of what it is to be human.

From an article that summarizes his thinking.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/charles-taylor-philosopher_us_57fd00dde4b068ecb5e1c971

“As Taylor wrote in 1994, “We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others ― our parents, for instance ―and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.”

“Language, for Taylor, is constitutive of human being; we are language animals. Taylor expands on the famous Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, showing how basic language and culture are the ways in which we know other human beings and indeed the material world. This is one reason why cross-cultural understanding requires mutual learning, not just translation. It is also among the reasons why interpretation is basic to the human sciences.”

“But here it is crucial to understand cultures as something more than themselves catalogs of rules or formal structures. Starting with language, they are webs of meaning that people do not merely decode but inhabit and enact.”

This then becomes a layered set of internal discourses which become our public narratives which have encounters with other people’s narratives.

The story of me encounters the story of you that can become the story of us!

His thinking takes us back to the principles illuminated by the folks from Nova Scotia. It is context, meaning and what matters. Whatever questions that are asked need to allow these to come to the surface.

Scaffolding

This is a term developed by the cognitive psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, who followed in the footsteps of Piaget. The role of adults as it relates to child development is to construct scaffolding, at the zone of proximal development (up close and personal so to speak) that facilitates child development. The scaffolds consist of words, actions, and activities. One would assume the relationship is an important ingredient. From a restorative perspective one would say that it is actually foundational. In fact, with this combination of building images a house of restorative development is imagined.

This is, what I believe is relevant, for restorative conversations, circles and conferences. Questions, conversations and activities with need to be crafted in ways that facilitate the surfacing and expression of what matters to people. It needs to allow the expression of the meaning of events. It needs to allow difficult conversations that may have sharply distinct and different points of view that, in their intersection, move towards creating a larger narrative that can contain separate meanings. This applies equally to children, youth, and adults.

As a community developer it is also a model for engagement with communities. Starting with and  where people are at, erecting the scaffold next to the zone of development, outlines a starting point that builds on strengths, assets and perceptions.

Songlines

Bruce Chatwin popularized this term in his book of the very same name “Songlines”. The notion arises from the stories of creation form the Aboriginals of Australia. From Wikipedia

“A songline, also called dreaming track, is one of the paths across the land (or sometimes the sky)[1] which mark the route followed by localised "creator-beings" during the “Dreaming”. The paths of the songlines are recorded in traditional songs, stories, dance, and painting. A knowledgeable person is able to navigate across the land by repeating the words of the song, which describe the location of landmarks, waterholes, and other natural phenomena. By singing the songs in the appropriate sequence, indigenous people could navigate vast distances, often travelling through the deserts of Australia's interior. The continent of Australia contains an extensive system of songlines, some of which are of a few kilometres, whilst others traverse hundreds of kilometres through lands of many different indigenous peoples — peoples who may speak markedly different languages and have different cultural traditions.”

My hopeful thoughts are that the various initiatives that I encountered in my unintended walkabout form a number and variety of “songlines”, restoratively speaking. They were located geographically in different parts of the world but shared similar principles. They contained variety and difference, but were clearly understandable as restorative ventures.

One of the principles that was echoed, in different ways, was the fact that what was restorative had to do with “people”, not institutionalized programs and scripts. Efforts that have the capacity to embrace and be inclusive work towards appreciating context, while engaging with the perceptions and lived experiences of participants. That is where the meaning of events is generated and co-created.

The life world and the systems world have a curious dance that has yet to find the same sheets of music and rhythms. The systems world seems to intrude and overwhelm.

Caveat for the Future

This walkabout took place on lands that were built upon by colonial settler empires. The Indigenous walk through Ottawa showed very clearly the contrast between the built and the original land. This is where the understanding of context needs an even deeper acknowledgement. It is not only the recognition of the history of harms, in fact cultural genocide, against Indigenous peoples, but also the recognition of the harms, through racist governmental actions and policies directed toward Afro-Canadians and other POC.

As we know “hurt people hurt people”. This individualizes the conversation and frames our understanding of events. However, when the scaffold is erected it needs to be placed up against the wide expanse of the historical and current underpinnings of a white Eurocentric culture and its impacts on people who do not carry this privilege. I do not yet think we have a quotable quote which captures the impacts of intercultural trauma or the effects of pushout, marginalization and exclusion. There is no pithy caption that can capture the complexity of such contexts.

The questions crafted need to allow for the depth of experience that underpins what is seen on the surface. The web of meaning is not a tangle, but stretched before us. If the meaning is fully understood, recognized and appreciated, then the various separate regional, city and province wide initiatives present the opportunity to be connected, and eventually become global phenomenon.