Slow reading of “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School” by Venet (2024)

I have written about this, my current favourite book, repeatedly before, while I was reading it for the first time (blog post 1, 2, and 3), but here comes a slightly more deliberate summary for the purpose of a book club that will run from now until summer, with three meetings to discuss the three parts of the book (Part I: 12.3. 14:00-15:00, Part II: 23.4. 14:00-15:00, Part III: 21.5 14:00-15:00; let me know if you want to join us!).

Before we start, I want to acknowledge the The Broken Copier and Adrian Neibauer’s Newsletter, whose Bluesky posts about the book inspired me to order it in the first place. As I discovered yesterday when I decided that I wanted to write something similar, they also put together summaries and reflection questions for each chapter. Definitely worth checking out!

But here we go, in preparation for the first meeting:

Summary of Part I

Chapter 1: How we move through change matters

I often hear this quote, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them“, attributed to Albert Einstein, and it seems to be generally accepted that this is true. In this first chapter, Venet makes a similar point about processes. We cannot change the way we do things through the same processes that got us to do things that way in the first place: it does not work to tell people top-down to collaborate more, it needs collaboration to create more collaboration. We need to bring our very best strategies and skills to the table, to act already now in the ways that we want everybody to act when the change is completed. Venet asks us to imagine “What if the process of making change could not only bring about these needed shifts but actually be the shift in and of itself? What if we embrace the opportunities embedded in change to practice the skills and ways of being we want to see at the end?” It matters how we do change. The process is the point.

But if the process is the point, and if it is done with care, change might be slower than we would like to see it and might imagine it would happen through strong, top-down leadership. “How can I navigate the tension between the need for change and the importance of the process? I remember that while there is an urgency to change in schools, focusing on the process doesn’t mean permission to spin our wheels or get stuck in endless committee meetings. Instead, it’s about acknowledging that school change is social change. Equity work in schools isn’t the whole point, a more equitable and just society is.” And, Venet continues, “This is why a process focus gives me hope. I know that social change takes time, but if every stage of my change process is aligned with equity, justice, and healing, then I help to bring about more equity, justice, and healing even as I begin work that can never be finished. We may not find a single, clear answer to the contradictions of change, but by focusing on the process, we can find a path forward.”

She quotes the Talmud “it is not up to you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it“, which I find a very helpful — and hopeful — mindset. We need to walk the talk, and do it step by step by step, knowing that we also cannot — and do not have to — do it all on our own. All injustices are somehow connected, so by changing a little thing for better in our little corner somewhere, we are changing the whole for better, and in ways we might not be able to anticipate, like the proverbial butterfly on the Azores that causes a storm in the North Atlantic (which might be a German saying that doesn’t actually translate very well).

We also need to (learn to) accept that we are playing the long game and might not see results, or even impact, right away, or ever. “Socially, emotionally, and academically, so much of teaching is planting seeds that we may not see grow. Sometimes, we are lucky enough to run into a student years later and learn about our impact, but more often, we do what we can in the time we have and hope that we made a difference.” But: “By focusing on the process, the change starts immediately. Our students benefit immediately, as do we, when we dive right in rather than wait for all the stars to align. We can’t do it all, but we can find places to start. So let’s start with the process.”

What I think might be interesting to discuss about this chapter

(inspired by The Broken Copier’s post)

• How do you emotionally deal with the long time perspectives where you might not ever see the impact of your work?
• What makes it so difficult to hold the focus on the process in your daily work, how do you do it anyway?

Chapter 2: Why trauma makes change hard(er)

Trauma influences literally how the brain works: Trauma can impact how memories are created and stored, how much time is needed to process something, that events and actors are perceived as binary good or bad, threat or no threat. Transitions of any kind (even positive ones, like moving into your dream house) increase our stress levels. But some transitions are more stressful: unexpected or involuntary transitions are worse, and even worse still if they start an avalanche of other transitions (e.g. natural disaster requires relocation which means loss of job). Change is also especially stressful when it touches our personal or professional identity (and, as Venet points out, for teachers those two are often very closely connected to each other) — “When change begins to wiggle at a Jenga piece of our identity, we feel that the whole tower might fall.”

Most of us have experienced trauma (living through a global pandemic, but also living in the current geopolitical landscape, in our personal lives and history, …) and thus our brains have, to some degree, been altered as described above, but even for those of us who have not, they still live in a traumatized society and need to realize how the brains of people around them process the world. “If trauma can cause most change to feel unsafe, and if we value the well-being of educators and students, how do we navigate change?”

For one, we need to stop assuming that everybody shows up in every situation well, rested, and ready to constructively and critically do the work that is needed. We need to accept that this is not the case in most situations, and hence approach all situations in a trauma-informed way. We need to be aware that “…depending on our identities and past experiences, we may already be in a heightened state of­ sensitivity to danger, our stress responses on high alert every day. If we do not intentionally address people’s need for safety and care, we may create additional harm. Embarking on a change process means taking on the responsibility of approaching change with care.”

Approaching change with care can then mean being very careful with sudden, top-down changes, because trauma-affected people already feel like they do not have control over their lives, so it is even more important to give them the chance to experience agency, self-efficacy, self-determination. Also, we might need to accept slower time lines than we had been hoping for: “Living with trauma often means moving at the speed of our minds and bodies, not at the speed of those around us. We need more time to process, time to rest, and time to heal.”

One important warning that Venet writes about is of the danger of saviourism, i.e. “helping” people in ways they haven’t asked for and might not even want is disempowering them even further. “Saviorism is a stance in which we detour right around the important work of understanding someone else’s hopes, dreams, and needs. Instead, we leap into solutions, often in ways that enrich our own self-perception rather than meet the actual need. […] It leaves the person on the receiving end no role other than being rescued and being grateful for it. For trauma-affected people, this is yet another diminishing of our agency and devaluing of our strengths.”

What I think might be interesting to discuss about this chapter

Inspired by Adrian Neibauer’s prompts:

• What experiences with trauma responses do you have, in yourself and others?
• How do you handle mandated top-down changes while retaining a sense of self-determination / agency / self-efficacy?

Chapter 3: Change opportunities

The main point for me in this chapter is that there are opportunities to live the change that we want to see in the world everywhere. “Even though change in schools might create loss, conflict, or disruption, we don’t have to approach it with fear. We can see it as an opportunity to practice how we want to be and who we want to be. How we move matters.” Seeing everything around us as “an opportunity to practice how we want to be and who we want to be” is so empowering. “When the process is the point of school change, we can begin to live out our values, hopes, and goals now, the minute we begin.”

That means we can, for example, choose to meet the world with care and empathy, and practice what that means every day. And we can choose to reframe how we think about progress. Rather than working with SMART goals (where goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound) that are in most cases not actually Achievable, because we cannot describe a desired but emergent outcome of a change process in Specific and Measurable ways, nor can we predict an accurate Time line (both because we are working with extremely complex systems, and because trauma makes also our own work capacity unpredictable). I found Venet’s image here very helpful: “in moments of great uncertainty, SMART goals won’t help us surf through waves of unrest” — surfing evokes this image of wave fields that are, for the most part, regular and predictable, but never entirely. We need to pay close attention to everything around us and react quickly, and literally just go with the flow sometimes. That does not work if we feel bound to SMART goals, so we are setting us up for failure by the way we set those goals.

Instead, we can choose to see “The school change process [as] an opportunity to practice what happens when we try to meet the moment rather than trying to control it.” Rather than assuming that change processes can be planned as just one linear process, Venet refers to action research cycles. In our own work, we use Kolb’s experiential learning cycle to talk with teachers about student’s and their own learning, and Hamshire et al. (2024) also recommend approaching wicked problems in higher education with a long view of a learning cycle. So maybe this isn’t even controversial in itself, but at the same time, there is still a mindset shift that is required to accept that a SMART goal is probably not going to get us where we want to be.

And that mindset shift should also include how we approach the work itself. “What if we built systems that celebrated our need to pause, rest, and take breaks, rather than viewing these as impediments to a “timely” process? What if we found a way to capture the explosions of inspiration and innovation and use them as fuel for change?” (and I am really taking this to heart — I took the featured image on my lunch break walk with cold dip!) We are not only proving the concrete situation, but we are also gaining experience and strength for other situations. “School change provides us the opportunity to practice different ways of decision-making and sharing power“.

What I think might be interesting to discuss about this chapter

• How do you deal with (SMART) goals not being met?
• How can you adapt plans on the fly, or planning readjustment of plans into the original plan, without that making you feel like a failure?

Chapter 4: Dreaming a vision for schools

Chapter 4 then focusses on creating a vision rather than a goal: “A vision helps us navigate through that chaos because we’re clear about the journey ahead while remaining flexible about what the stops look like along the way.”

To create a vision, we need to dream, and dream big. We need to think about the “what if…?”s and let go of the “what-abouts”, which “often hold back our dreaming and instead keep us tinkering with our current system.” The suggestion for getting rid of what-abouts is to write everything you would like to be gone from reality to make it a better place on a piece of paper, crunch it up, burn it, and then start dreaming.

For dreaming, Venet suggests four different approaches:

• • Change the context into a different, fictional world. What could the future look like there, without the constraints of our own world?

• Dream near and far into the future — five minutes, five generations — and then look back from there and investigate how you might have gotten there
• In a lot of detail, tell the story of what life in the dream would be like
• Imagine: if I could wave a magic wand and change everything I wanted to change, what would things then be like?

But let’s tie this back to the process! Here, Venet suggests using this template:

“If the vision I dream of is ______ then the process needs to be ________. This means _______.”

At the end of this first part of the book, we are left standing in the “tragic gap” between the vision we just dreamt up and reality. We will move on to the next parts of the book over the next months (and having read it already, I know that we will discover ways to close the gap. Soon!). But for now, we need to accept the gap and sit with it.

What I think might be interesting to discuss about this chapter

(And these are heavily inspired by what Adrian Neibauer writes about this chapter “Dreaming isn’t merely imagining. Dreaming is an act of resistance to the status quo“, and the suggested prompts in his post)

• How can you dream more as an act of resistance?
• How do you see goal-setting fitting into larger visions-dreaming?
• If you could wave a magic wand and be your best-loved self, what would you then think and do differently from what you think and do today?

Venet, A. S. (2024). Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School. Taylor & Francis. (online access for LU!)