The complete set of 198 Hints are available in paperback from the CYC-Net Press store.
Listen
A worker in an ‘inclusive’ classroom comments: "I've heard children ‘prompt’ others in a way that they've heard an adult model. Children offering each other reminders that ‘it's your turn,’ or even giving phonemic cues or touch cues for children who are working on specific sounds. Children are so helpful to each other."
The central ingredient in this anecdote is the adult model. Where teachers and programs are resistant to including 'different’ children, or where they are controlling or forbidding or blaming or irritable, the other children are not free to be generous and helpful.
Child and youth care programs are meant always to be inclusive, because we exist in order to be of service to youngsters who are not managing, who are difficult or struggling or awkward or developmentally backward. Unless we are very careful and self-aware, we can wreck this inclusivity: we can unwittingly set up amongst the kids hierarchies of compliance, ‘normality’ or achievement whereby we favour those who satisfy our expectations or our comfort zones. By so doing we lock our groups into judging the ‘different’, competing with the less successful, and ultimately targeting and excluding those who don’t gain our approval.
In our practice today we realise that this work is not about us – it is about the troubled and hurt young people who long for experiences of attachment and achievement and growth. It is we who set up the gates and fences and obstacles that keep these kids at arms length and deny them the acceptance and belonging which can turn their lives around. And it is our warmth and openness and generosity which sets the tone for the whole group – which in turn is encouraging and helpful for all of its members. Only in this way does the life space we create for our kids become what Bloom, fifty years ago, first called "the powerful environment".
Unlock the force.
Reference
Bloom, B.S. (1964). Stability and change in human characteristics.
New York, Wiley.
