Some things for religious educators to consider when planning for in-person return
by CB Beal and Tina Lesley-Fox, June 2021
CB:
I was so excited to go back. A couple of the schools where I’ve been doing puberty education were back in person. Two schools invited me to come and do a short round of Awesomely Awkward Puberty Education with three groups of kids. Adults vaccinated, young people not; outdoors, masked, socially distanced.
The fourth/fifth graders, sixth/seventh graders, and the eighth/ninth graders all have known me for upwards of six years, or heard about me from their older siblings. Awesomely Awkward is based on OWL, but is nowhere as comprehensive. I have five hours with each group, in a three-year cycle. The core of my approach is that I ensure that I am a humorous, awkward truth-teller, always the most awkward in the space, and that what I call awkwardiddity drops immediately and turns into safe, good grown-up behavior when we’re talking about serious things. These young people know me as an adult who will make something that is very uncomfortable be joyful, and things that are very scary to talk about more safe.
I am willing to do such a limited amount of time of puberty education by only teaching at schools that have consistent populations that have come to know and trust each other. A new kid or two every year, but if I am going to enter a classroom to do only five hours of consent and puberty education rather than a more comprehensive number of hours (10 for the younger students and 40 for the two older student groups) I do so in environments where the only unknowns are me and how their bodies and identities are shifting and changing.
It was with so much delight that I went back! I was so excited! I’d missed them so much. The kids had been back together in person for a couple of weeks. They had been together online all year with occasional half-days outdoors and distanced. But this was their foray into being back together.
The teachers of the fourth/fifth graders related that they were very “young,” a common parental euphemism for “innocent.” I understand this to mean uneducated. They were. They were appropriately young and silly but more uncomfortable than previous years.
After meeting with them the first day I changed the curriculum. I slowed it down, made more hands-on activities, reproductive labeling activities, communication and boundary games, and less talking about “what would you do if“ type scenarios. I didn’t bring out the knitted genitals till the last day. As always, at the end of every class there was an anonymous question box. There were very few questions. As the classes went on, it became clear they simply didn’t know what to ask. My working hypothesis is that this group, which was mostly oldest children or only children, had spent a year not really overhearing things to wonder about.
When it came time to talk about reproduction, the developmentally appropriate introductory choice for them was Corey Silverberg’s book “What Makes a Baby” that I usually use with kindergarten to second grade. These kids listened with rapt attention and afterward told me in no uncertain terms that now, NOW, all those reproductive parts made sense.
The sixth/seventh and eighth/ninth graders were something else entirely. Many had grown three or five inches and had gone from breast buds to fully developed breasts, from no hair to shaving. What had been small child bodies had put on 50 pounds or more. I hadn’t seen any of them in two years and the changes were astonishing. But more, they moved in the space together in-person as if they had forgotten how. It was like they were each the new kid in the class. All their social interaction and social cues had been limited to online. They had a memory of the way things used to be 14 months earlier, but during puberty 14 months is a lifetime. They were all different. They also had different experiences of the pandemic — some had been playing sports all year, others hadn’t been near any other humans outside their family.
They were reactive. They were tucked deep inside themselves, which showed up as sullen or resistant or fearful. They acted angry. They acted silly. They were disruptive. But most of all they were uncooperative, and many were mean to each other. These were young people who were kind, who used to call each other on bad behavior. Now they were keeping silent and shrunk in the face of peers saying demeaning, contemptuous, or aggressive things. They had 14 months of isolation suddenly interrupted by people and behavior they could not control, and could not figure out how to get their needs met while being in community together.
It was confusing for me. These weren’t the kids I know, or more accurately, it wasn’t the behavior of the kids I know. And I knew that it wasn’t organic to the kids of either school. It was pandemic. It was a year of isolation, or isolation interrupted only with interaction that was competitive and sporty.
The second-to-last day was so difficult and full of resistance, meanness to one another, and outright refusal of my leadership that I drove away hollering in my car. I swore that I wouldn’t go back the next day. “That’s it! I quit. I don’t have to put up with this. The little [brats.] The [heck] with this.”
It was a massive overreaction.
I, it seemed, had also experienced 14 months of isolation that was suddenly interrupted by people and behavior I could not control. I pulled my car over during the 55-minute drive home and got out, breathing into the vast emptiness of a cow pasture to remind myself of my capacity to choose connection. It took physical space for me to remember how much work it is to connect.
Tina:
I interrupt this story to ask how you’re doing, good reader? Are you wondering if CB is ever going to get to the point? Are you ready to bail on this piece? I bet many of you are. And I would remind you that almost all of us have had attention spans significantly shortened during the pandemic. Almost all of us have lost our words when we’re speaking. We lose our place when we’re reading and have to go back and read again. For many of us who are used to being able to keep details of things in our heads, dates and times of meetings, to-do lists, etc., not being able to do this is disturbing. We have considerably less executive functioning skills than we once did. We get confused about things that used to feel familiar and comfortable. This is a normal, human response to living in a traumatic time. We can’t wish it away; we have to stay present, and patient.
This is also true for our young people.
CB:
I got back in my car, contacted the teacher, and we completely retooled what I did that last day. We talked about something relative to gender that they’d already talked about once. They’d talked about that online a couple of weeks before, so we were able to practice being together, listening, sharing ideas and thoughts without also bearing the weight of talking about new content. They were able to share a bit more deeply, and a bit more in-depth, but by retooling my expectations to match the development of their community, they were able to remain present. I replaced my frustration with caring for how complex it is to be a teenager in the best of circumstances, never mind sitting outdoors in a giant circle after a year of isolation, talking about the most intimate parts of being human.
That day as I drove away I felt good. There had been moments of connection and care. They’d practiced skills of being in community and I honored the reality that they had not given consent to talk about private and personal sexual issues. It didn’t matter that I’d taught this same three-year cycle for six years, that it was a regular part of school. What mattered was that the context for these young people was different, and I’d failed to notice until it was almost too late.
We are all in a place of relearning how to be together in person.
We are called to attend to learning how to be in community and how to show up for each other. We are in that place while also trying to figure out what we need as individuals to feel safe and ok. And for many of us, this also includes still being in a place of fear and trauma from the last year.
Tina has observed in online meetings with youth who were once very connected with each other that they don’t know how to talk together. Even when doing something fun like playing games, kids are not reaching out to each other like they did in before times. It is like they have forgotten how to care for themselves, the community, and each other. Kids who used to be good at small talk or asking questions to get the group connected have misplaced these social skills. They often sit muted with their videos off, waiting for something to happen. When they do speak they are awkward and uncomfortable. Check-ins often sound like “um, nothing is different, I don’t have anything to share.”
This next part of this essay is brought to you by the letter C.
In order to be together in a healthy Community we need Consistency, Connection, Caring, Covenant, and Consent. Oftentimes in religious education we get caught up in another C, Content. When trauma and grief are in the room, content needs to take a backseat to the other Cs. Our focus needs to be on community, consistency, connection, covenant, caring, and consent. As CB realized in the story above, content can not be absorbed without attention to the first six Cs.
CB’s students had an established, long-term connection with each other. Even though this existed, the interruption of pandemic interrupted their connection and community. Our OWL classes, whether made up of young people who have known one another for 9 years or young people who have just met, will need extra time to establish trust. By extra time we don’t just mean we need an extra few classes of group games and icebreakers. We mean we need to take the time to really establish a connected community. Weeks or months spent in collaborative engagement doing things everyone knows how to do, reacquainting ourselves with the trust and social skills necessary to be connected in caring community. These might include, when safe and possible: games, spending time in nature, low-stakes discussions, working on preparing a worship, movies and chatting, singing, dancing, art, improv — whatever a particular group of young people has appreciated and might continue to appreciate doing. Ask them, they’ll have ideas. And also, they may be struggling with telling an adult what they want, so spaciousness, time, patience.
Now is the time for us to give space and grace to people as they figure out how to self-regulate in seemingly new spaces. Now is the time for us as adults to talk about how things are hard for all of us. We need to teach/re-teach social skills and coping techniques, including to ourselves. We are not ready to jump into big thinking and learning. None of us are. Instead, this is the time for us to focus on community and caring for ourselves and each other.
We may experience a push to get back to “normal” and to do the things we used to do. To jump right back into the content and curriculum and get back to business. This is a consumer mindframe, not a community mindframe.This mindframe prioritizes doing over being, knowledge over wisdom, and production over care. This is a time to prioritize community over capitalism and consumerism.
We want to suggest that “How soon can we get Our Whole Lives going?” is the wrong question.
The right questions might include,
“How have their relationships been interrupted and injured?”
“How has our community experienced trauma? How can we heal and reconnect?”
“How can we build or rebuild a sense of trust, offer young people options to consent to what happens in their classrooms, and care for them (while not freaking out and hollering ‘I quit’ on the way home)?”
“How can we provide grounded consistency, care, and opportunities for small risks, as we all reorient ourselves within in-person community?”
These questions are trauma-sensitive, carefully reflecting on the wholeness of humans and our gentle fragility. We can offer both a container and spaciousness for everyone to heal and grow. We need to make small, meaningful moves.
We all need to learn how to be people in community again. All of us. We cannot expect our young people to move immediately into learning about uncomfortable things before we help them process the discomfort of the last year. (In the best of times the start of Our Whole Lives is often uncomfortable for youth.) In fact, we cannot expect adults who are leading our children and youth to restart quickly either. They too need time with their peers to process this past year. This doesn’t mean religious education classes become therapy groups. It means we adults need to take the time to make sure we are our most stable, loving selves, holding space so the young people can reorient.
Now is the time when we get to reimagine what being together looks like and what is truly important. The learning and thinking ARE important and we will get there. And we want to get there with classrooms and communities that are fully able to be present and to consent to the complex discussions in Our Whole Lives. We must lead with the OWL values of inclusivity and responsibility. We adults need to not simply make sure that students are physically included in the room. We are responsible to ensure that they are able to be emotionally and mentally present and whole with one another.
Please note: we do not speak for the Our Whole Lives offices of the UUA or UCC. These are our independent reflections on this subject, which we offer for your consideration.