If you missed my Education Upended conversation last week with School Crisis Recovery and Renewal (SCRR) Project Director Leora Wolf-Prusan you can watch it here on YouTube! This conversation was on FIRE! We discussed not only what it means for schools to experience and recover from a crisis but also what it means to go through the process of RENEWAL. How do school communities make meaning of what happened so they can go beyond coping and begin healing? How do school leaders set up systems that support grieving and the renewal process? SCRR has so many excellent resources for educators, like the 10 Pillars of Recovery and Renewal or the Trauma-Informed COVID-19 Leadership Practice Guide for Recovery and Renewal, and don't miss their upcoming Spring 2022 Network of Practice, May 12th "Moving what matters and making what matters move: how are we recovering and renewing?" All of this is at NO-COST!
Last but not least, Register for Part 2 Tuesday, May 17th 9-10:30 PST HERE and join guests Oriana Ides and Brianna Young from the School Crisis Recovery and Renewal (SCRR) team. We will discuss School Crisis Recovery and Renewal from an educator perspective with a focus on supporting educators through crisis, providing opportunities for meaning-making, and creating healing-centered spaces for all.
Our project’s aim is to be collaborative and constructivist—we hope that by the end of this project, we as a nation will have a more rich, complex, and resourced understanding of school crisis that 1) includes recovery and renewal and 2) is steered by educators, students, and community members.
That said, we start with the following frame of school crisis, recovery and renewal, and know that it will grow, expand and deepen with your partnership, voices, and experiences.
The 4 Rs of School Mental Health Crises
The framework we use to launch this project is adapted from the National Child Traumatic Stress Network’s (NCTSN) The 3R’s of School Crises and Disasters: Readiness, Response, and Recovery. We add a fourth “R”: renewal. “Renewal” is the term we use to identify the component of school mental health crisis that is often the most instrumental and least developed: this phase includes healing, meaning-making, and new navigation of school identity after an overwhelming event.
Crisis leaders need to understand the physical and psychological disruptions that are a common consequence of trauma. Trauma interrupts our ability to maintain a coherent narrative that explains our world and our place within it. We as humans need a worldview of ourselves and each other that makes sense to us. This sense-making narrative helps us interpret the past, negotiate the present, and move comfortably into the future. One of the functions of a crisis is that it interrupts our regular story: trauma can pause our bodies and brains at the moment of harm. We need crisis leaders to help us create meaning from our trauma experiences, which then helps our bodies and brains integrate the crisis into our larger story. Storytelling and reflection are essential to our collective crisis healing.
Don't miss this riveting conversation!
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