Supporting Students' Ability To Process Conflict In Our World
By Sarah Said
Many of us as educators are still working through the healing process from this pandemic and processing what has happened in this world. We’ve been really given little time to breathe through and assess where we are in our schools and classrooms. What 2020 and beyond has brought to surface is the importance of being honest with our students and having crucial conversations about the world and what is happening in our world. We have learned from our medical and racial pandemic that We Can’t Be Silent Anymore, and in our schools we need to create safe spaces where students, staff and community can elevate their voices.
In this day and age, it is critical to have crucial conversations about tough topics as a way to help our students understand the world in our classrooms. Conflict is a difficult concept to deconstruct for adults and children. Allowing these conversations to happen in a structured and effective way can enable our schools to cultivate a philosophy where students can learn to build a better world for all in the future.
Preparing the Moment of The Discussion
Successful conversations for all students on topics that they don’t totally understand is driven by the teacher’s ability to seek and build student background knowledge. Learning For Justice’s Guide Let’s Talk: Facilitating Critical Conversations With Students, gives educators a road map for preparing for these conversations. The guide gives the advice of having appropriate room arrangements, preparing clear goals for the discussion, and defining terms and ideas in the conversation.
What is unique about this guide, is that it gives educators advice on preparing themselves for this through understanding their own identities and biases, but also anticipating the emotions they may feel during the conversation. This can lead to a conversation about war that allows students to learn about international conflict, but also can be powerful for all parties in giving them the chance of learning from each other the importance of peace in the world in a calm and safe way.
At the Moment of the Discussion
Settle Into The Discussion
War is a stressful topic. We can’t assume that we know the lens that our students see war from. As an educator who has taught in settings with large refugee populations, I have learned to understand how certain topics can be triggering for students if not handled with care. Being intentional with how we lead this conversation is vital to the climate of our class and how they may internalize the conversation.
Prior to the start of the conversation about war in our classrooms, we need to first look at the structure of our discussion through the lens of social emotional learning. I am currently a student of Breathe For Change which is an organization that provides teachers with Social Emotional Learning support through the lens of yoga and meditation. They offer free and paid training for teachers in this area. One of the key concepts that I have learned recently is the idea of “settling in” to an activity or conversation. Because the conversation about war can bring on past trauma or current anxieties, I would recommend starting off with belly breathing and setting an intention for the discussion. As a teacher, I would ask students to put one hand on their heart and one on their belly and inhale on the count of five and exhale on the count of seven three times as we set an intention for the conversation we are about to have. An example of an intention could be processing our emotions about war. As students work on “settling in” I would start to read the room by the way students are breathing, facial expressions and body language.
Read the Room
As I mentioned, reading the room may have you watching breathing, facial expressions and body language, but it’s also understanding students’ prior relationships with war. Years ago, I worked in a district with a large immigrant Middle Eastern population. At the time, we had students immigrating from Syria during the time of the war. A teacher in a fifth grade classroom who didn’t understand a student’s experiences handed the class student magazines with a picture of a girl in Syria during the war. The student saw the picture and had difficulty breathing to a point where staff was called in for a crisis call. Sitting with the teacher later as she was reflecting on the situation, she regretted giving the student the text. She thought the student would relate to it, instead it triggered her.
To avoid situations like this, framing the discussion is something that needs to be done after setting the intention. Transparency will help with easing into dialogue. Telling students that you understand that war may be a difficult topic and giving them strategies (for coping and self regulation) in order to have dialogue will allow students an outlet. In this, I would ask the class what their experience with war or knowledge of war is and this will give you background knowledge in reading the room as well.
If you need more understanding on supporting your students as you read the room, this guide from National Association of School Psychologists on discussing violence with students is helpful.
Start With Facts
Asking the students what they know about war is important. Before students can really think critically about war and conflict they need to have the facts of the conflict broken down for them. The school I currently serve at is a K-6 school that is an EL Education school that utilizes a structure of classroom and community crew. As the Ukrainian invasion started, we took time during our school wide crew, to explain the conflict to our students with facts of how it is happening in the world. This gave students more background knowledge before they can process emotions and feelings. We then broke it down by talking about in terms of the classroom- students in conflict over spaces and objects- what do we do to peacefully resolve these conflicts? This made it more approachable to our younger students.
Use the Lens of Your School Community To Break The Conflict Down For Students
From there, we used the lens of our school to continue the conversation. We have “Habits of Scholarship” in our school--Respect, Responsibility, Courage and Creativity. Our principal thought it was critical that students understand the conflict within the lens of our habits. Because of Covid mitigations, this discussion was over zoom. To be strategic about it, our principal had the idea to split up classrooms into breakout rooms to answer the question of “How do we understand the conflict in Ukraine through the lens of our Habits of Scholarship?” As we did this, the students were able to explain their feelings about the invasion as well as their anxieties. This way of breaking down conflict and framing it taught students about the war and allowed them to express their feelings safely.
Honor the Importance of World Peace and Unity School-wide
As a school, we thought it was important for students to not just learn about the war and conflict but talk about what we can do in the world to restore peace in our own settings. From this we developed the movement within our school of Peace Day.
For that week’s crew lesson, students explored the text Seeds of Compassion by His Holiness the Dahli Lama as they explored concepts of peace. Through this they created crafts with doves that gave their solutions to war that they would give world leaders. On that Friday, we honored peace with a student lead lesson in our community crew meeting and we wore shirts as a school that gave messages of peace.
Debrief Everything
I always say that a debrief is essential to tying up all learning in a bundle that students understand. Whether it is a text you are reading, a conversation or even watching CNN 10 regarding this current conflict, as educators we need to debrief because that is the doorway for students to complete their own processing and cognition of the situation they are assessing.
Debriefs can be done in closers with sentence stems, learning logs with follow up discussion or a teacher facilitated conversation about dissecting our understanding of what we have witnessed in learning.
These conversations are tough and at times they can be draining. As hard as this all is, it is our duty as educators to plant seeds of understanding and compassion to help students grow to become the world’s leaders. Take time to understand and check yourself as an educator and mentor, plan these conversations, read your students and inspire them to do good in the world.
To Further Your Learning:
Berger, Ron. Vilen, Anne. Woodfin, Libby. 2020 We Are Crew: A Teamwork Approach to School Culture