Autumn, Hell, Spring again, Heaven… And again Autumn, from a counselor facing Inclusive Education
Raúl R. López Reyes
Even if I don’t know your path, I allow myself to share my experiences with you, my own journey in the form of a proposal, in case you also find yourself in the professional situation of “I want to do it, but I don’t know how,” and it could be useful to you.
Autumn and Hell, the harshness of no
Autumn is the time of letting go, like trees shed their leaves, and do not lose them for it. It is that moment of maturity for ceasing to do what no longer serves any evolutionary, transformative function.
Refusing to do what I see no sense or utility in doing. Refusing to do what goes against my conscience. Refusing to do what would cause suffering to the weakest… It was a gradual process of conscientious objection. A ‘no’ learned little by little at the edge of survival. A ‘no’ that implies negation for self-affirmation.
Together with the no, the YES of true action, of doing, clamored to sprout within me. But do what?, if I don’t know what to do if I stop doing what I was doing (in reality in my “non-doing”). And if I already have something in mind, it’s not about the impossible task of doing what I was doing and also the new thing. Time is what it is, and it’s time to live the necessary coherence.
The “Passage through Hell”
Change is inevitably a disruptive process. Stopping doing what you were doing requires a “Passage through Hell” of your own inertia and of not satisfying others’ expectations, not satisfying their desires, which you know leads you to the idea that you will then cease to be a good professional for the other. Hell is not wanting to let go of our ego, our image to which we desperately cling in the face of our feeling of emptiness.
“Passage” through the real hell of not knowing how to do it, and the imaginary of believing I would never know how. The imaginary hell of connecting with the fears of terrible negative consequences, of my imaginary ineptitude… And the more I hide and flee from this ghost, the more it devours me.
I remember one day a teenager came to me afraid of a ghost that was chasing her down the hallway of her house. I told her that what ghosts feared most was for their eyes to be seen, and I invited her to try doing it with determination one day when it happened and her mother was home… She told me that when she went back to look at it, it disappeared and never chased her again.
My fantasy was the fear of entering the classroom, if I was a psychologist and not a teacher; I was not a pedagogue and not even a psychopedagogue, how was I going to enter the classroom if I had no teaching training? What had they taught me so that I could give teaching guidance to teachers? I limited myself to copying and pasting what I found best, but which I had never experienced.
I thought my fear, my not knowing, was a personal ghost, a real ghost. Then they confessed to me that it was the predominant ghost in the entire collective, that degrees were one thing and professional competence for inclusion was another. I confess it was very difficult for me to turn towards my ghost, to leave my department to enter the classroom and look the students and teachers in the eye. But then they didn’t disappear… It was I, the disappeared one, who reappeared, and who began to see them as they really were.
The “Passage Through Purgatory”
There are no magic formulas that make you move from one position to another, from one system to another, in an instant. It is childish to think that one can go from hell to heaven directly without, we all know, passing through “purgatory”; a hard time where one drags their guts on the floor, a time of self-reflection, of necessary unlearning for new learning, and of repositioning. It is turning to look the ghost in the eye, it is opening one’s gaze inward.
Part of this transition space is, therefore, training in inclusive learning proposals or situations, and subsequently, not stopping there, in the mental, in the ‘I know, but it’s not up to me,’ and in telling others to do what I have never done, since that gives no assurance to others that it can actually be done. ‘If I don’t see it, I don’t believe it,’ they would say, and rightly so… ‘Don’t tell me fairy tales or utopias; if you say it can be done with thirty different students at the same time in the same classroom, I want to see it.’
The ‘passage through purgatory’ is a ‘passage’ of reflection, but also of learning through action, through your own action (not someone else’s). If there is no action, there is no change.
Taking action is making contact with the ground, with reality. It is making contact with the real difficulties that teachers face. It is feeling what it feels like in such a classroom (the ghost), when the classroom is the traditional one, full of chains that prevent movement and expression, such as one’s own sound and silence.
This immersion in the land, in the harshness of its conflicts and your own conflicts, is what I understand as the only path to real knowledge, and symbolically, the one that allows you the transformative process to emerge renewed. Thus arises the new counselor, the new counselor, one who now truly knows how to change, because they have changed themselves.
Obviously, this transition is not possible in solitude. It’s not about being alone. I understand that our advisory function is fundamentally not with students or families, but for teachers, and with and for your collective (2) and (3).
The necessary training process, I understand it as progressive, multiple, interdisciplinary, and dangerously continuous, and… Because then you discover that you are (4, 5, 6)prepared much earlier than one thinks, although there are always colleagues who, like I did, cling to “I’m not ready yet,” as the necessary personal anesthesia to their non-conscious pain from their not yet recognized addiction to “inaction.” The border, and the time on the threshold, is set by each person.
After the training, my intervention path for the necessary transformations in the classroom microsystem was to enter the classroom to “do”, but obviously not alone, it is a joint effort with the teaching staff who voluntarily want to do it; and once done, evaluate it with this teaching staff, students, and families, to change whatever needs improvement.
So the key for me has been to show it jointly, the tutor, the female tutor, and I (because it is important that they hear it from a peer), through images or videos, to the rest of the teaching staff who want to hear it. To offer it to those who request it, then, to try it with you too.
I said at the beginning that it is not about doing this and what I was doing before, psychopedagogical assessments, assessments, assessments…If inclusive education is possible, and you demonstrate it with your joint action in the classroom, there is no need to classify,there is no need to decree other segregated forms of schooling, because the inclusive measures adopted are providing adequate responses to the students, to all students, which makes it pointless to segregate them into another environment.
Another matter is, as we already know, the rest of the medical and specialized support and treatments that they might additionally need, currently, for the moment, through services external to the educational centers, and which are necessary to be assumed by the educational administration in extracurricular hours. I am thinking of Physiotherapy, speech therapy, social educators, and the training that families desire and not what we desire (paternally, looking down from above again), that they should have… Families could also tell us what training they would want us to have. It would be good not only to hear families, but to listen to them.
It was the implementation and development of the Systemic Guidance Model for Inclusive Education, which was initially formed with my colleagues from the Team, Teresa and Mª Ángeles, and later in ad hoc professional groups with Mercedes, Lola, Paca, Antonio, Basi, Maite, Alejandra, Alejandro, and so many others… under the umbrella of the Provincial Technical Team for Educational and Professional Guidance in Huelva.
My first time and the sky
I remember my first time entering the classroom, it was after I had spoken toa teacher who asked me to assess at least three students in his class(since I knew I had to do a lot of assessments at the Center), (?!), with possible learning difficulties DIAs (I confess that for me DIAs do not exist, but rather teaching difficulties for the DIEs teacher).
I told him that this would take me many hours of observation in the classroom, interviews with him as a tutor and with his families, administering standardized and non-standardized tests, analyzing, thinking, deciding, and writing the relevant reports, and repeating the feedback interviews with him as a tutor and with the families… All of this to offer him guidance that he would consider utopian and impossible to implement in a classroom, as he had many other “cases” of diversity. In conclusion, wasted time that fuels mutual feelings of helplessness, but which is part of the theater of, “we pretend to be doing what we have to do,” something I was already refusing to do.
In exchange, I offered to change that time he asked me to spend (about 16 hours, which, in my opinion, I was investing poorly, wasting it), by spending an hour with him in his classroom with his students, for 16 weeks… It was the beginning of a transformation process, first for his classroom and then for the Center.
We then access a real heaven, which represents the satisfaction of the step-by-step achievements, where the infernal, threatening flames of professional and personal “burn-out” no longer burn; a heaven where we continue to coexist with conflicts, because I do not believe in a heaven where conflicts no longer exist; conflicts are life, and I cannot conceive of a dead heaven, but I do believe ina sky through which the multicolor wings of butterflies fly.
When a teacher asks an educational counselor: “take a look at this boy” (and shows him to you with all their affection, care, and concern), “take a look at this girl” (and shows her to you), “and now take a look at this other one and this other one and this other one…” It is a pointing outward, a showing so that they “change” that boy or girl, that him, her, those them…
Showing the other, the students, hides the “I”, because in reality it is not a “look at me”, but a “look at him/her”.
Taken to the extreme, there is initially only an appearance of willingness to act, to change. It would be a “look at him/her”, so that others (specialists) can see him/her and be seen, so that he/she remains for the maximum possible time in a place different from my classroom (segregation), because behind the belief of “I don’t know what to do”, lies “I cannot see him/her”, because seeing him/her is like a mirror, reflecting my supposed lack of abilities towards him/her, my supposed own disability (!). My fear, fear, says Nick Vuyicic, is the greatest disability. In the most intimate sense, it is not “look at me”, it is “look at him/her so you don’t see what I haven’t yet accepted to be seen, what I haven’t yet accepted to see in myself.”
The usual practice in guidance based on the traditional medical model (because other medical models and views of “illness” also exist) is to make people believe that the subject of diagnosis and treatment is the different student and their different community to which they belong: Roma, foreigners, marginalized areas… Because it is they who are attributed the need, the problem, the deficit, because it is they who fail, who do not pay attention, and who do not adapt to the system; it seems obvious.
In contrast, the systemic educational guidance model focuses the intervention on the “learning situations” presented to students, to see if they respond to the needs of the multiple diversities that truly converge in the group or classroom… Because it is the system that must adapt to the person and not, surprisingly, the person to the system (!!).
It is a model that is much more difficult to implement, because in addition to inertia, it is (initially) much “harder” on a personal level, as it places the focus of attention and intervention not on the other, but on the “self” of the teacher, on oneself.
Faced with the appearance of what is supposedly easier, the downside of “look at him/her” is that no answer obtained “by me” will truly serve me; the upside of “look at me” (faced with that reality that is in front of me and that I no longer confront but am now open to connecting with) is that it allows me to find the answer, to rediscover the knowledge, which is not outside (in the counselor) either, but within me; there is no shadow without light. The solution is therefore no longer labeling for subsequent pigeonholing, nor is help found in a supposed good recipe, methodology, or “successful educational action,” but in myself, not because of what I know or don’t know, but because of what I feel, that the other IS and I AM.
In the awareness of what exists, and of what I myself am inevitably reproducing or changing, it is when the necessary personal and then collective creation processes occur (or is it the other way around?), which give rise to the necessary transformations…
The system is one, everything is connected, there are no separate parts, so everything happens equally and at the same time within the counselor themselves and in their actions.
… And Autumn again
And again, autumn, because there is no place of arrival, but paths, and although we forget it, in our essence, in our minds and in our bodies, we are subject to the cycles of nature. We do not stop being curious, which is the need to learn what we thought we knew and do not know, and, therefore, to face again (it will never be easy) the need to let go and let ourselves go with confidence.
In our role (leaf), in the incessant cycle of teaching-learning, in which we are all immersed, José Mª Toro tells us as beautifully and simply as he is: “Leaves do not fall, they detach themselves in a supreme gesture of generosity and profound wisdom: the leaf that does not cling to the branch and throws itself into the void of the air knows of the deep pulse of a life that is always in motion and in an attitude of renewal”. (7)
For the construction of the internal and external architecture of Inclusive Education, the most important thing is not to have the resources, nor to be well-trained in the methodological strategies that facilitate it, what is really necessary is the conviction that it cannot be otherwise, not because segregation goes against Human Rights (*), but because not ceasing to be with him, with her, is what your soul dictates… It is not about having, it is not about knowing, it is about feeling.
Antoine De Saint-Exupéry says that “if you want to build a ship, don’t start by gathering wood, cutting planks, or assigning tasks, but rather first evoke in people the longing for the vast and free sea”.
Notes
- The true hell in which we find ourselves immersed is the one described by Alejandro Calleja Lucas in the entry for Proyecto Madres, “I live, I coexist, I survive”. https://bit.ly/3CfAf71
- Essential debate promoted by counselor María José G. Corell (from whom I always learn), on conscientious objection, and in her interesting answers to the comments inhttps://bit.ly/3VcF3Tt
- It was very important for me to hear in 2014 fromGerardo Echeita and especially to Ignacio Calderón.
- I began my personal and professional training and transformation with Isabel López, and through Relational Psychomotricity with Ana Calles, André Lapierre, and Bernard Aucouturier; then with the psychoanalyst Mª Luisa Morales and with Gestalt Psychotherapy, with Ángeles Martín, Pepa, Maribel, and Juan Carlos, brief moments with Claudio Naranjo, and currently with Fermin Gonzalez Cuellar and others. I feel truly fortunate and grateful. And of course with the work of only one day a week, in the Ceip La RábidaEl Campillo (Huelva), a single-line public school, with Early Childhood, Primary, and 1st and 2nd year of Secondary education, as a Learning Community center, communities promoted by Ramón Flecha and about which we can learn more at: http://utopiadream.info/ca/presentacion/definicion/
- Jose Blas Garcia Pérez, Coral Elizondo, Antonio Márquez, María Eugenia Pérez, and so many others in #Revolucioninclusiva and at: http://www.jblasgarcia.com/2017/04/revolucion-inclusiva.html
- Change through self-knowledge. Claudio Naranjo. (2014/09/11). Systemic educational guidance. https://bit.ly/3Eoujv7
- The leaves don’t fall, they let go.