SPEAKING INTO THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN SILENCE : A Trauma -Informed Schooling WORKSHOP June, 2018 (3 days - CYGA ,Wangetti.)

The Cape York Girl Academy acknowledges the Yirrijandji (pronounced irrikandji) people, past, present and still to come, as the traditional owners and first custodians of this ancient land upon which we move, live and work at Wangetti. We also understand that with such an acknowledgement comes a responsibility to the spirit place of its ancestors. Thus each of us understands that we are never off Country. No matter where our birth country may be, the way we enter space, use space and the energy we leave behind affects the ongoing wellbeing of the land and our community.

?Girl Academy Professional Learning Workshops - Program June 2018

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Day 1: Monday, June 25

Theme: Speaking into the Great Australian Silence (a point of reference for teaching and learning)

When a Cobble Cobble (Barrungam Nation in South-West Qld) Aboriginal woman Megan Davis, constitutional lawyer, academic and Referendum Council member, read in public for the first time the Uluru Statement from the Heart, there was a deep stillness in the air. There was an acknowledgement that this was something profound, literally beyond the mere words it contained … On that day over 12 months ago, May 26, 2107, it was presented as a gift to the nation, an offer of a way through the impasse over real indigenous participation in the body politic that has troubled us almost since the first volley of fire upon the Gweagal (Dharawal Eora Nation) by Captain James Cook’s men on the shore of Kamay (Botany Bay).

It presupposed that what was on offer was a chance to make the nation complete. Then nothing but a perfunctory rejection followed by silence once again.

(The Long Road to Uluru: Walking together – Truth before Justice)

The past is never dead. It’s not even past (William Faulkner)

A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. (Ben Okri)

[Session 1:8.30 – 10.30am]

Preparing the Ground for Reflection & Interrogation of the spot we Stand Upon

(Get Ready – Sit Strongly: Step Back)         YELLOW

1.    Dadirri (Da-did –ee): the Uluru Statement from the Heart & all things in between. (Miriam–Rose Ungunmerr – Baumann, Ngangiwumirr Elder Daly River, NT; To Know Me.  ) 

To know me … is to breathe with me, is to listen deeply.

To listen deeply is to connect. It’s a sound – the sound of deep calling to deep…

Introduction: Circle Solutions                          Visual Exercise 1: Who am I? (Clippings exercise)

As an Educator? Person? Where is Country? What is my totem? What do I mean by this question when it is posed to non-Indigenous Australians? Is it a valid question? How do I enter – use – leave the space I occupy throughout a day – week – month –year -lifetime? How do I view time? What is my relationship between time, place and wellbeing?

•  Identify Country that lies beneath Cartesian mapping. What Country was I born upon? (Learning Map: Deconstruct – Reconstruct)
• There are two co-existing maps of Australia.

2.    Introduction to 8-Ways Pedagogy and ‘Learning Maps’ upon which we will record our journeys over the next few days.

•  Slowness is not just about stopping and thinking, it is about bringing permanence into the world … it is intimately attached to the rhythms of the body.
•  The 8-Ways pedagogy from the Wiradjuri nation is good pedagogy for everyone because it is a deeply reflective approach to knowledge based on observation, silence and physical immersion within the learning context (country) before interrogation.

3.    QUESTIONS to Consider and Questions that will frame our Journey: (Oral reading – Voice of an Aboriginal Community Worker, p109 Our Voices: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Work)

Research into self-worth and existential wellbeing suggests that it is the stories people hear and have about themselves that is a primary determiner of who they are and how they express and see themselves.

(White, 1995; Our Voices)

Interrogating Our Context:

• How did we get to this point in his – story? Who are these young people in front of us? What are their stories before and after birth? How did they get to this state of cognitive dysfunction & social and emotional disregulation in their lives?
•  What is the ‘Great Australian Silence’ (see WEH Stanner, After the Dreaming, Boyer Lectures 1968)? Why has Australia remained silent on Indigenous spirituality, culture and history? Why are they absent from constructions of our national narratives? How is the context of the students at the Girl Academy linked to this silence?
•  Why has a Makarrata  (truth & reconciliation about the colonial invasion manifesting peace after conflict) been denied and a long silence still persist in our education systems; even though it is a mandatory syllabus requirement, it nevertheless continues to sit like a museum piece within the national curriculum? What is the true ‘gap’ that needs to be bridged rather than ‘closed’?
•  Is there anything missing from our ‘base-line’ knowledge as educators in this country? How is this question possibly amplified at the Girl Academy, Wangetti? Have we as educators been complicit in this historical silence? (research Hannah Arendt’s concept of the Banality of Evil )

4. Two World Views: caught between the Dreaming and the         market place.                                             (ship to shore/shore to ship)

What happens when we think? Thought is conversation and it happens on two levels: one personal, and the other interpersonal. In thinking, we are in dialogue with ourselves. Thoughtlessness is then the absence of inner dialogue. This thoughtlessness, in turn, leads to the absence of judgement, which is a ‘moral collapse’. Thought is meaningful only when it is heard in public. Thought is always political.                                       ‘The Life of the Mind’ Hannah Arendt

Exercise 2 (Visual stimuli x 2) Harold Thomas (Gordon Bennett) / Heidelberg School

• In his moving apology to First Nations Australians, PM Rudd (2008) noted that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are ‘the oldest continuing culture in human history’ …he did not however, point out that their survival and longevity is due largely to their spiritual pact with the world called the ‘Dreaming’. 
•  What is the Dreaming? Where did the term originate? Research :(Altyerrenge is an Arrernte term from which the grossly inadequate translation the Dreaming/Dreamtime appears to have first been coined by Francis Gillen post- station master in Alice Springs in the 19th century; Tjukurpa … Anangu for grounded/originating from eternity, and has no direct translation in English and the coinage of the Dreaming is a mistranslation) (see fine essay ‘The Dreaming In Australian Aboriginal Culture’ by Eugene Stockton online) It represents an integrated worldview of the Physical , Human and Sacred.

5. The Secret Country: reconnection with Spirit Place – the missing Quadrant   that has cultivated our habitus.

Exercise3: 9 DOT Experiment & Interviews

* . * . *

* . * . *

* . * . *

“…inattention on such a scale cannot possibly be explained by an absent-mindedness. It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What might well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned into habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practiced on a national scale.”   After the Dreaming, Boyer Lecture, 1968  WEH Stanner, p. 189

•  What does culture represent? Is culture static or dynamic? Whose culture?
• What does it mean to think? What does it mean to Listen Deeply? Are the processes linked? What frames our thinking? (see work of Hannah Arendt /Emmanuel Levinas)
•  What is habitus? What does it mean to apply a critical lens? 

**** WEH Stanner and the Great Australian Silence (The Great Australian Silence p.182-193) We find ourselves at a watershed at the beginning of a new millennium in search of a wider critical narrative. Thinking opens our hearts and minds by breaking through the ‘habitus’ of received thought we have inherited from our institutionalised learning and cultural conditioning… deferring too quickly to political expediency, media, curriculum policy and Key Performance Indicators in our workplace that infiltrate our consciousness and give rise to expectations of the cult of pace, the quick response; and impatience with the slow and a deference to stereotype, shallowness and all too rapid closure.

•  Discuss the role of an educator in advocating for a fairer and more socially just Australia?

Short Paper: Deep Listening to the Spirit Place: Exiled from Country ( Dr.David Tacey, La Trobe University)

                 The other brings me more than I contain. E. Levinas

Closing Reflection: Maybe at this time in history we are challenged as educators to contemplate and at a deeply disturbing level, to ask of our First Nations peoples, What happened to you ? instead of  What’s wrong with you ? Maybe we need to re-engage with our single defining human quality, that of being able to think.

 

* To Step Back and Sit Strongly; and reflect upon our acquired thoughts,    beliefs and our human tendency to respond reactively/automatically through received reference points; (yellow)

 *To Listen Deeply for the gaps we may have inherited; (red)

 * To See more Clearly through a more DIALECTIC (to allow the co-existence of opposing realities into our narratives in search of a more authentic radical centre) and inclusive set of quadrants. (Black)

                                              (See Noel Pearson on his concept of the ‘Radical Centre’)

Conclude: View The Rabbits (John Marsden /Shaun Tan; 1998) – YouTube oral reading

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[Session2: 11.00-1.00pm]

A historical Context: “I am not the Problem.”

      (Take a Breath & Listen Deeply)                   RED

Paying attention to language and reframing Aboriginality as a ‘problem’ to Aboriginality as ‘resilient’, interrupts the dominant discourse. (Mick Dodson, 1994)

1.    VIEWS from a ROOM: Rosalie Kunoth- Monks [ Female Elder from Utopia, Ngarla – Eastern Arrernte First nation Person] , I am a cultured person…

(QA First Nations People, social inequality and culture; June 10, 2014). Kunoth-Monks’ response comes on the back of Peter Coleman, former editor of Quadrant, vilification of John Pilger’s documentary Utopia on the contemporary plight of First Nations people …Coleman sees the only solution to be assimilation; as all government efforts to solve the problem and assist Aboriginal people such as church missions,, government welfare , the intervention , apologies , billions of dollars and so on … have failed. 

2.    White Australia has A black history: What happened ? Is it still happening? How did we get to this point in time? Who are these sisters and brothers? What has happened to them? What do you know? Why wasn’t I told?

I do not care how much you know; I only want to know how much you care… to know. To know where we are going, we must know where we have been …and the spot we stand upon.

It was a satirical fact that we were not even considered people … so we must be part of the flora and fauna… but that’s not even true. The fact is that

WE DIDN’T EXIST AT ALL.

Artist Vernon Ah Kee, a member of Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji and Gugu Yimithir peoples.

Readings : The Importance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history for Social work and Teacher Graduates (2013), Dr Bindi Bennett Gamilaroi Woman, University of the Sunshine Coast + The Infantilisation of Indigenous Australians (2018) Sana Nakata + Power Point Presentation (slides 13-16; 21)

View: Lousy Little Sixpence (1983) [YOUTUBE part 1: 15mins]

• Refer to ‘The Bringing The Home Report’ (1997) of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. (YOUTUBE 32 mins)

(Australian Human Rights Commission, led by Sir Ronald Wilson). The report marked a pivotal moment in the recognition of Australia’s policy of ‘silent genocide’ towards its First Nations Peoples. The National Inquiry recommended that all professionals who work with Indigenous children, families and communities receive in-service training about the history and effects of forcible removal and that all undergraduates in relevant professions, as part of their core curriculum, education about the history and effects of forcible removal. Moreover this should be done in consultation and partnership with Indigenous communities and where possible it should be delivered by an Indigenous person with adequate reparation provided. (Our Voices; Bennett, p.12)

• ‘The Stolen Children : their stories’ (1998) edited Carmel Bird

(extracts from the ‘Bringing Them Home Report’ used in schools in NSW)

The Lousy Little Sixpence documents how non-Aboriginal Australia between the wars consistently broke up Aboriginal families to manufacture a black servant class… and a endless encroachment upon reserve land removed all rights to own land from First nations People. This is the genesis of what was to become known as ‘The Stolen Generations’, a form of ‘silent genocide’ aimed at removing ‘blackness’ that refused to die out from the Australian landscape and to satisfy the appetite for land by non-Aboriginal farmers. Teachers were inducted as the new reserve management regime. The documentary caused shock and disbelief when first screened. 6p refers to the amount of pocket money the indentured ‘child labour’ was to be given but never received wages managed by employees on behalf of the Aboriginal Protection Boards. These benefactors included teachers. This process of cultural genocide was formalised in what became known as “The Aborigines Act” (1911) which sent young girls to the cities as domestics and boys to rural areas to work on farms. Aboriginal children were also commonly removed from their families in the guise of being educated and civilised, although before this Aboriginal children had also been kidnapped and exploited. Simply being Aboriginal entitled the government to remove a child. (Sherwood, 2010; p.11 Our Voices)

Reflection: The cover of Carmel Bird’s text depicts a photograph of a Darwin Orphanage that appeared in Sydney and Melbourne newspapers in the 1930s. What do you see? How is it composed? What do you think the purpose of the photograph appearing in the newspaper to be? (image)

3. The importance of History- official Government Policy set against who is in front of us and what is the dialogue we are beginning to have with ourselves: We may well have to ask how our profession has interacted and been involved with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People and how it will shift from this point on, if at all.

Power Point: Stages of Invasion and Paternalism

Stage 1:Colonisation/Dispossession (1770/1788-?) and Protectionism (1840-1950s) When the British came to this continent Aboriginal people were treated like flora and fauna for the most part because they did not exist beyond the tag of noble savages who had no ordered understanding or connection to the continent’s land; rather they were often viewed as vermin, like roos and emus, that had to be cleared so the land could be fenced and controlled with civilised settlement. There are records of so called abo hunts occurring into the early 1940s.

(image)

Unwritten (unbecoming), 2011 Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

What all Vernon Ah Kee's archival photographs share, including those of his relatives, is a frontal orientation and a gaze that he describes as ‘a mindset of no pride and no courage’.3 That gaze, seen again and again throughout the series, is perhaps the result of living under the conditions of settler colonialism, a condition summed up by a phrase attributed to the Native American Chief Seattle that Ah Kee has used in other works: ‘the end of living and the beginning of survival.’

 unwritten (becoming), (2011)

 Vernon Ah Kee ,Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yindndji & Gugu Yimithirr artist

Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen are considered to be the ‘founding fathers’ of Australian Anthropology because they were the first to adopt a ‘scientific’ anthropological approach to Aboriginal people (Our Voices; Charlesworth 2005). They appropriated Darwinism into a form of Social Darwinism to suggest that Aboriginal people were not only inferior but culturally, intellectually and biologically unable to progress. They were viewed as a dying race that had to be protected from themselves and incapable of looking after their children. The government- formed settlements and Church-run missions designed to facilitate the removal either forcibly through encouragement or by coercion of Aboriginal people away from their lands. Thus inherent in this policy was a view that the First Australians needed to be segregated and protected while they died out. Education was mostly denied to the First Australians during this period. (See 1915 NSW Protection Act)

Stage 2: Assimilation (1937- 1970s?) Assimilation was adopted as the official policy at the 1937 ‘Native Welfare Ministers Conference’. At this point Indigenous Australians were formerly shut out of our imagination, if ever they were part of it. This occurred between the two wars on foreign soil under a foreign flag (1901 design was only officially adopted by the Flag Act,1953) that were to later form the cornerstone of the nation’s defining moments and national identity which has never included the First Australians in its mythos (narrative) or  logos (legal constitution)… the two key ingredients of an ethos ( How are we to live and act towards the other and the natural world).

This Native Welfare policy was in many ways a response to the ‘lingering black problem’ in Australian life. It assumed that Aboriginal culture and values, beliefs and worldviews were of little to no value in the new Australia, and therefore their culture and identity should be ‘assimilated’ into the dominant Western European culture. ‘Whiteness’ was seen as a more valuable signifier of racial superiority, hence a program of regulated reproduction to breed out the colour of Aboriginal people commenced. (Our Voices; McGregor, 2002) see Talking to My Country

Stage 3:Self-determination & self -management (1970s-…) Positive Changes and developments were experienced with the 1967 Constitutional Referendum which recognised Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the census and took control away from the states; constitutionally giving the Federal government power to make special laws for First Nations people. This is what allowed Native Title to be passed after the legal fiction of terra nullius was removed with the 1992 Mabo High Court ruling and subsequent Native Title Act (1993).

Some voices would argue that self-determination heralded a period of welfare dependency… Up from the Mission. (Noel Pearson; 2009)

Q. Where do your thoughts take you on this perspective on Up from the Mission? Think about this… take time and care to interrogate formulaic responses that come too quickly, for when we allow the wind of thought to break open frozen thoughts, we are made aware and alive to new insights and perplexities.

(Move into your own silent space for 5mins before coming together again to end this session)

[Session 3: 2-3.00pm]

Where are we Now : towards a more inclusive national narrative and two way education system?

(See More Clearly together a way forward)                      BLACK

1.   Culture of Links – Positive Developments that need to be embedded into the culture of every school for the benefit of every student… so that each person we have cared for never again:

·     Forgets who they are and the two worlds they occupy as Australians;

·     Always value Respect & Education;

·     Stay strong through a culture of links; no culture is complete in itself in the contemporary world.

A Cultural Through Line towards a Moment of Truth: Deepening our Spiritual and Cultural Well in the process of Becoming, beyond Habitus.

 

 The future is a shadow …the more we share ideas in the present the closer we get.

All we have and are, collapses into this present moment (Yolngu Elder)…we seem sometimes to prefer a negative peace which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace which is the presence of justice. (Letter from Birmingham Jail to Moderates1963;M L King)

 

KEY 20th century Moments of Truth: the key word in indigenous cultures is together; in my non-Aboriginal culture, apartness.

 

Where there is no vision, people perish. (Proverbs 29:18)

Talking to my ‘Country’: a 12 Point Plan

1.First Day of Mourning March from Town Hall to Australian Hall (Fred Patten, William Ferguson (APA), Doug Nicholls &William Cooper (AAL))____________________________________________

2.Yirrkala Bark Petition addressing theft of Yolngu Land without consultation for the mining of Bauxite (Two Petitions presented; one in a significant shift of protocol presented in traditional forms of advocacy combining art with text typed paper.____________________________________________

3. Freedom Rides through Rural Townships of NSW inspired by the American Civil Rights movement and led by Charles Perkins (first Aboriginal person awarded a tertiary degree, Sydney University) and Chicka Dixon.

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4. The Vesteys’ cattle station, Wave Hill Walk –Off in the Northern Territory by Aboriginal pastoral workers seeking equal pay, led by Vincent Lingiari, a Gurindji leader. The disaffection was deeper than wages and working conditions it was about relationships between Indigenous Australians, the Land and the wider non-Indigenous community. _________________________________________________________________________________

5. The Constitutional Referendum and Faith Bandler (born 1920 Tumbulgum, Northern NSW). Faith Bandler, of South Sea Islander and Scottish parentage, helped change Australia’s views on human rights and social justice, up until her death in 2015. Referendum passed with a “YES” vote of almost 91%.

6. The Australian Pan Aboriginal Flag was designed by which Luritja artist and in what year?_________________________________________________________

? Where and when was it unveiled and flown for the first time? ______________________________________________________

? When was it adopted as one of Australia’s official Flags?________

7. John Koowarta , a Wik Elder is one of several Indigenous people who took action through the Racial Discrimination Act (1975) and the denial of rights to land by the Queensland government. The Koowarta case vs. Bjelke –Peterson laid the ground for the recognition of native title in pastoral leases and the later Mabo decision. Noel Pearson formed a strong spiritual bond with John Koowarta. When id this case take place?

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8. The Barunga Statement, although never achieved, was an important step towards a deeper understanding by the Australian public of why a treaty is important.  The Jawoyn community in Barunga, NT,invited people from across the nation to their annual Barunga Sport and Cultural festival , including the then PM, Bob Hawke. At the festival Galarrwuy Yunupingu and Wenten Rubuntja presented the PM with the Barunga Statement and Hawke in his speech at the Festival, agreed to the request for a treaty-making process expressed in the Barunga Statement._____________________________________________________________

9. The Mabo High Court Decision and the end of the legal fiction of terra nullius; and the subsequent Native Title Act._____________________________________

? When and what was the Wik Decision? _____________________________________________________________

10. The National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Children from their Families; and the subsequent Bringing Them Home Report marked a pivotal turning point in the truth telling of this country’s history.______________________________________________________________

11. National Apology by PM Kevin Rudd._________________________________

12. Uluru Statement from the Heart was a proposal widely welcomed and a sequenced reform known as ‘VOICE TREATY TRUTH’ (Megan Davis, Referendum Council co-chair; Walking together, Truth before justice) but as history’s victor, the Commonwealth has yet to give a true indication that whitefella dreaming has changed, that it is willing to concede something more than a warm inner glow of comforting words and good feelings. (Mark McKenna, leading non-Aboriginal Historian, Sydney University. Quarterly Essay; Moment of Truth: History and Australia’s Future (issue 69; 2018))

See Noel Pearson’s proposal ‘Declaration of Australia and Australian People’, the subsequent humble response of indigenous groups after what was seen as paternalistic and egregious act by the Commonwealth to walk away from the Statement without dialogue.____________________________

2.   The Value of Deep Listening – the Aboriginal Gift to the Nation

(YOUTUBE ; Ted x Sydney 16 June, 2017 ) Emeritus Professor Judy Atkinson , a Jiman and Bundjalung descendent as well as having Celtic-German heritage… has used Dadirri  as her culturally appropriate methodology to explore and generate intergenerational healing and recovery from trauma in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. This is documented in her text Trauma Trails: Recreating Song Lines –The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma on Indigenous Australia. (2002) [16min]

1. Listen deeply as you view Judy Atkinson’s presentation.
2.  What impressions stay with you? Do they open the wind of thought … maybe unsettle with perplexity? How did we get here?
3. What new questions arise?

Finish the day as we began in a bowl of silence… as we add any final pieces of information /detail to our evolving Learning Maps.

 

Where are we now…Girl Academy  Wangetti  

(Intellectual Property of Kon Kalos ; June, 2018)

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Day 2/3: Professional Development on the work of Dr Judith Howard and the Behavioural Management of students who have experienced complex trauma.                                               26-27/06/2108

 A student that cannot do relationships will have difficulty learning.

   Judith Howard School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education ( QUT)

Deliberately Defiant or Distressed ? : Towards an Understanding of Disorganised Attachment.

Prelude/Background: Carl Jung said , Learn your theories well but let them go when confronted with the miracle of another human being. What he meant by this is do not be too quick to impose your professional and cultural observations onto what is happening in another person, for too often we are responding to an ill-defined context. With the rise of brain imaging and neurobiology, Ian McGilchrist, a British Psychiatrist, argues in his extensive work, The Master and His Emissary; the divided brain and the reshaping of Western civilisation, that the brain hemispheres are asymmetrical in size and power as well as shape and function, and that the hemisphere responsible for narrow, exploitive self-deference increasingly out –yells that which sees the bigger, more complex , more connected picture of who or what they are confronted with. Although we have one interdependent brain, McGilchrist goes further to more explicitly state, the left brain manipulates the world, while the right brain understands it. Simplifying v. complicating; separating v. connecting ; solving v. enriching.

Judy Atkinson, a Jiman and Bundjalung women from Southern Cross University, in her extensive study around transgenerational trauma, Trauma Trails : Recreating Trails (2002) defines the term ‘dysfunctional’ as denoting people as individuals or groups , who are functioning with difficulty and pain. They have grown up in situations where pent up rage, aided by alcohol consumption  and various other self-medicating opiates and stimulants in response to trauma. She stresses that observation and understanding of the social, emotional and psycho-cognitive landscape needs to preface any systematic or consistent approach to behaviour and student emotional dysregulation. Atkinson further recognises that previous generations in Australia’s indigenous communities …underwent the experience of the first two periods of colonisation : frontier violence, including dispossession, then structural violence of enforced welfare dependency , restrictive legislation and child removal. These older generations have acted out their own rage and terror within families and communities (What lies behind the surface of the recent report by the Cairns Post (25 May, 2018) of disruption to commercial businesses in the suburb of Earlville by an itinerant drunken Aboriginal presence along with vandalism and antisocial behaviour towards passers-by), because, as members of disempowered and oppressed minority, they have been denied normal outlets.

Moreover, as educators of children that have been born into this context we may need to more seriously understand the nature of the transference of this trauma onto the cognitive development and emotional neurobiology of our students. Trauma theory , which focuses on the neurological impact of destructive repetition of violence is a seminal tool in understanding dysregulated behaviour in any teaching context. The sudden spiking of cortisol or adrenalin levels can be mistaken as random ‘bad behaviour’ or a failure of a student to respond to ‘standardised systems’ or ‘normalised’ PBIS consequences.

In Unclaimed Experience : Trauma , Narrative and History, Cathy Caruth defines ‘complex trauma’ as : … the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks , nightmares and other repetitive phenomena. Traumatic experience […] suggests a certain paradox: that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it…

As educators, I believe we have to work in ways that our places of learning become spirit places. Such places develop via slow observation embedded through consistent and relational pedagogies. They lead us as educators towards a gradual and peaceful understanding of the needs of each of our students through dialogue. Such places also need to be culturally safe; as we must take care not to compartmentalise students through systemic reactions that push them into becoming models of ill-defined problems. Reactive responses to behaviour can, in cases of traumatised students, unconsciously reinforce existing neural pathways that are linked to disorganised attachment issues escalating the very impulsive behaviours we wish to help the student regulate.

 Trauma Workshop: [dr. Judith Howard]

This will form a preliminary introduction to CALM SCHOOLS: moving towards peaceful and culturally safe learning environments through the firing of new neural pathways in our students.

[Part 1] the neurobiology of the mind

The mind is a subtle thing and science does not exactly know what it is. What we do know is that it is not a physical thing entirely; it is not the intellect, and yet it is a powerful force and informs the great I know which often is the catalyst for our actions. What we do know though is that ‘thought’ takes less than a microsecond.

Pause: Does a thought come before a feeling? OR Does a feeling come before a thought? OR ????????

We do know that the intellect analyses thought and has the power of stopping reactive behaviour or responses that are inappropriate to the context. (sudden violent ruptures/excessive apathy)

The neuroscience of human psychology also argues that for thought to lead to action of any kind it needs to first engage with the individual or group will; and that the energy of willingness is very powerful to the degree that it can also become very self-serving and solipsistic. What has been identified with people who have experienced severe complex trauma or habituated addiction is that thought directly engages the will by - passing the intellect. Trauma has to be overridden before a person or group of people can bring about impulse control.

Program Units: [part 1- week 1: day 2]

 

Understanding the framework/terrain

1.1   Why this, Why NOW ? (intro. Dr. Judith Howard)

1.2   Theory: Early Attachment and Development

1.3   Theory in Practice ( What distinguishes complex trauma ?)

1.4   Strange Situation (Disorganised Attachment)

1.5   Teacher Comments

1.6   Developing the Nervous System (concept of neural pruning/self-regulation)

Program units: [part 2 – week2: day 3]

2.1 Case Studies of Student Behaviour

2.2 Impact on the brain [The Brain Stem (parasympathetic nervous system PNS; sympathetic nervous system SNS) ; The Limbic System (Amygdala & Hippocampus = Crocodile mind) : the Prefrontal Cortex]

 

2.3 Article on Impact of Neglect on the Brain

2.4 Quiz

 

2.5 Behaviours Article ( Different types of Behavioural responses to  Complex Trauma :  not a one size fits all approach)

2.6 When Should you respond ( When a student hits a ‘critical mass’ : what is required? How do we respond as a community of carers?)

2.7 Beliefs about Behaviour (Case Studies)

2.8 Try a different lens (Lens of neuroscience ???)

2.9 Managing Behaviour – including purposeful processes to make students feel safe within the school environment.

 Pause : What do you have in place at your school ? What could be added , changed or removed to better align with the present needs of your students in the classroom, general areas of boarding & the school environment in general?

Summary: (Teaching Students who have Suffered Complex Trauma)

Q1. What are one or two things you have absorbed that have expanded your understanding of the impact of trauma on behaviour?

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Q2. What is one thing you are still grappling with, or needs more contemplation?

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Q3. Where to now with trauma-aware schooling for you and your community

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For those of us who are committed to change and transformation, we must never allow our roles to be reduced to a salary or a duty statement. It must always be viewed as a conviction for righting wrongs and the creation of a more just, equitable and civil society (BM)

 

“ Thinking with a Good Heart enables Good Reason” (Professor Bob Morgan, a Gamillaroi man; International Engagement Officer at the Wollotuka Institute ,University of Newcastle)            

The Cape York Girl Academy acknowledges the Yirrijandji (pronounced irrikandji) people, past, present and still to come, as the traditional owners and first custodians of this ancient land upon which we move, live and work at Wangetti. We also understand that with such an acknowledgement comes a responsibility to the spirit place of its ancestors. Thus each of us understands that we are never off Country. No matter where our birth country may be, the way we enter space, use space and the energy we leave behind affects the ongoing wellbeing of the land and our community.

CYGA acknowledges the traditional custodians of Country within Australia. Land taken without consent or treaty. We pay respects to Elders both past and present. We work for reconciliation, recognition and a voice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in our nation.

 

We also acknowledge that we are on First Nations People's Country and that Country holds the knowledge and strength of the ancestors which still resides within, growing its people strong. We recognise that the Ancestors are still here – in the trees, in the wind, in the earth and in the hearts of the traditional custodians and they will always be here, as will be the oldest living culture on earth, as the heritage of all Australians.

Kon Kalos Academic, Research and Education Unit James Cook University (Cairns, 2018)