Chapter 6. Relationships
Nurturing Ethos; An Environment for Positive Ethos; Protocols for Ethos; Relationships as the Seed of our Personality; Awareness of Parent, Adult, Child type relationships; Attachment Issues; Relationships in Groups; Group Dynamics; Modelling Mediation Conversations; Maturity and Conversations of Value; Issues of Gender ; Sexual and Romantic Love; Friendship and Close Relationships. Summary
In this chapter we look at the importance of relationships and their connection with a 21st Century approach to education.
In Chapter Three we looked at the core conditions for creating an ethos of aspiration. We will now consider in more depth, the factors which combine to influence an institutional ethos, i.e. environment, protocols and relationships.
We will examine how relationships are a key factor in building out our personalities and we will consider how the experience of relationship is important for self-awareness and for building our sense of our own personal value.
Then we will consider how experiential aspects of relationship provide a basis of mature discernment about choice, and personal responsibility.
To summarise:
This chapter tries to deal with the complexity of relationships and the way educational institutions may influence them.
We note that the physical environment has impact on ethos. The protocols and procedures could enable a mutual respect for individuals. Formal and informal leaders can further set a tone of respect.
Early relationships impact on all of us, and our psychological ' inner child' will continue to influence how we deal with others. Hierarchy and strong authority influences may limit our growth in becoming more adult. Group experiences allow us to have freedom to be in new ways or can be more filled with anxiety. Peer to peer relationships and conversations may enable us to feel more value and act more independently.
To provide leadership in matters of relationships, we need to return to the understanding of the previous chapter on considering what 'our soul' wants. In looking again at these basic needs in our deeper selves, we can understand more fully about our need for relationships.
In this we understand the need in us all, to be able to be accepted by our peers, and family and those around us. To be able to be heard and be ourselves and to get to know our deeper sides. We are dependent on those around us to ‘reflect back’ what they see and feel about us. When they do this, they give us a stronger sense of our identity, and confirms our sense of self and acceptance.
We need to give factual information which provides a consideration of consequences of actions. The stress is on implications for safety and well-being, and of respect. With a deeper awareness of gender and its different aspects and characteristics, so does the notion of our disposition for our sexuality. Individual choice and responsibility should flow from peer discussions and awareness.
Space must be made and respect for the inner intimacy associated with our appreciation of our personality through our own characteristics of gender. It should not be presumed we should awaken interests or put pressure on young people to feel they need to conform to a template, as we all are different and continue to be different at all stages of life.
While sex remains a difficult subject to talk about, its influence is all around us. The disposition and need for intimacy and physical and mental aspirations are significant. It has influence and characteristics in all relationships at all ages and for all of us.
To feel there is one way to educate young people on this matter, is foolish. We must provide the safety net of facts, and the opportunities, to form relationships, to deal with tensions, and to have the necessary tools to make choices built on understanding of consequences, and personal responsibility.
In concluding this chapter on relationships, it is useful to reiterate that our relationships with others have a marked impact on our well-being. How we are seen, and hence accepted, is the strong influence of who we believe we are.
Take some time to see how we can impact on others. Our relationship with the others can be changed, if we seek to see more than our imagined dimensional role of that person. It may be enquiring of a salesperson in a shop about their day, or a fellow passenger on a train, and in school asking a young person, how they are. Listening and curiosity about how it feels to be another person, will directly impact on them.
In schools and in family life, it should always be the adult who draws breathe and thinks again about seeing those around them in two or three dimensions, and always looking for the seeds of potential in personality.
There is great dignity in the way we can and should regard each other, and this is the root of nurturing good relationships.
Chapter 7: Health, and Well Being Return to Part 2 Developing a 21st century Approach to Education