Teaching and Therapeutic Community: Restoration, Authenticity, Sanctuary

1. Teaching and Therapeutic Community: Restoration, Authenticity, Sanctuary Naya Arbiter June 2007 EFTC Ljubljana, Slovenia

2. Three Organizational Models Teaching and Therapeutic Community: Social and Policy Change Therapeutic Community: Whole Person Education Drug Program: Symptom Orientation “Drug Rehab” Habilitation

3. Teaching and Therapeutic Community • Practitioners / Faculty rather than staff • Students rather than clients/participants • Experience Trained and Academically Trained-rather than professional and paraprofessional • Reciprocity Partnerships- with exercises • Teaching Circles- Curriculum Circles • Taught groups prior to participation • Curriculum Competency student/apprentice/entry level/masters • Performance and compensation tied to retention and curriculum competency • Clinical skills of “catching people doing right”

4. Nothing and no-one is secondary….. Nothing is Secondary in a Totality

5. Community Is….. Honor Humanity Hope HOME Humor

6. Why Community? • Community is the matrix for human values • We become “human” in the context of community • We learn from others • We learn that our behavior affects others • We understand how others feel • We learn reciprocity in relationships • We learn to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” (Golden Rule). • Technology and wealth does not address these needs.

7. Sanctuary • How do you make it safe enough for your students to take the risk to change? • How can you expand your definition of and ability to create sanctuary?

8. “Home is the place where when you go there, they always take you in….it’s something that you shouldn’t have to deserve.” Robert Frost SANCTUARY Sanctuary at its best helps people come home to their heart (be at home with themselves).

9. Sanctuary Vocabulary • If there is real sanctuary, then it becomes safe enough to express weakness, insecurity, and fear without ridicule. • When there is real sanctuary, strength can grow out of weakness. • Real sanctuary decreases internal fear, and increases internal safety. • American society has a limited vocabulary for sanctuary. • Sanctuary increases mutual respect.

10. “Entre naciones asi como individuos,el respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz.” Benito Juarez “Between nations, as with individuals, respect for others rights is peace.”

11. Curriculum

12. Curriculum • Four Domains/Lodges/Medicine wheel; balance in a circle • Each Lodge three or more books • Each curriculum approximately 25 four hour lesson plans • Each lesson plan interactive exercises relate to a number of DeLeon Elements • Defined Teaching methods; all learning styles: experiential, DVD's Games, presentations, roles, framing and closing each session, personal assignments etc.

13. Self Help Restorative Paradigms • Research • History of movement • group process as community building • Similarities between Oxford Group Movement/ 12-step /encounters groups • History of movement • Recovery as a personal paradigm shift

14. Along with many other innovations, Synanon initiated the first prison TC at the Nevada State Penitentiary in 1961.

15. ORIGINS • Beginnings – family of origin • Bonding, social atoms, friendships • Chronology work: family, violence, affection, successes, trauma etc. • Alice Miller; Moreno; etc. • Identification of messages received, introjected, and antidotes

16. Alice Miller’s Paradigm • To be hurt as a small child without anyone recognizing the situation as such • To fail to react to the resulting suffering with anger • To show gratitude for what are supposed to be good intentions • To forget everything • To discharge the stored up anger onto others in adulthood or to direct it against oneself

17. TCs & Moral Development • TC is an “intentional community”---it happens by design, not accident or tradition. • When properly implemented the TC creates all of the conditions necessary for the moral growth of participants. • The measurement of this can be seen both in reduced criminal behaviors and increased pro-social behaviors.

18. From grasping to giving... • Another way to look at the stages are that as people grow, they move from be self-centered to being oriented towards others • From “takers” to “givers” • From being completely absorbed and dominated by their “feelings” to being oriented towards the well-being of others and towards making a contribution to others. • They become “more human.”

19. Conditions for Moral Growth • Credible role models (to participant). • Teachers that teach ONE level above current understanding. • Conflict: realizing that the level you are at isn’t working (creating the “need to know”). • Many roles to play, which help one’s ability to role-reverse. • Sustained responsibility for the welfare of another.

20. Emotional Literacy • Interpersonal Intelligence: The ability to understand other people--what motivates them, how they work, how to work cooperatively with them. • Intrapersonal Intelligence: The capacity to access one’s own feelings and the ability to discriminate among them and draw upon them to guide behavior.

21. Who are the men in the Amity TC? • Reported 321 lifetime offenses, had been arrested average of 27 times, and incarcerated an average of 17 times. • Spent an average of 4 months in reform school, 16.9 months in jail, and 75.4 months incarcerated. • The average Amity participant had spent over half of his adult life in prison. Amity Foundation of California

23. Three Organizational Models Teaching and Therapeutic Community: Social and Policy Change Therapeutic Community: Whole Person Education Drug Program: Symptom Orientation “Drug Rehab” Habilitation

24. Dear Teacher... I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness: Gas chambers designed by learned engineers, Children poisoned by educated physicians, Infants killed by trained nurses, Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates. So I am suspicious of education. My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmans . Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human. Chaim Ginot, from “Can it Happen Again: Chronicles of the Holocaust”