Newt Bailey, a Nonviolent Communication Trainer, came to share his knowledge and communication skills with our class on Monday, February 22nd. Newt works with incarcerated individuals, parolees and youth who have been expelled from schools. I asked him to do a workshop with my students because I believe that giving my students tools to deal with the emotional and behavioral issues that inevitably arise, will help them be more empathetic and find creative ways of dealing with difficult situations.
Some of the CCA students were a little doubtful that the ideas in Life Enriching Education (written by Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of Nonviolent Communication) could work. For example, one idea is that if there is no RELATIONSHIP there is no learning, so in order to have cooperative learning, an authentic relationship must come first. This approach emphasizes consensus building and agreement between teachers and students. However, Newt demonstrated how he works with NVC himself and all of the students appreciated the training in the end.
On last Wednesday during pouring rain, we were down from 38 students to 25 and the CCA students were feeling badly that so many youth did not show up. However, this is part of the difficulty of running a free after school program. Also, although the new facility of Peralta Hacienda appears to be finished, the City of Oakland won't give PHHP the keys until a use agreement has been drawn up (which was never mentioned during the many years that this project was worked on). So, depending on how that goes, we may end up holding our class outside and in the Hacienda house for the rest of the semester.
We got a little paint on the floor, on a rug and on a wall. All of it came off, but being constantly on our guard in a historically preserved house is somewhat stressful. During the heavy rains 40-50 people were crowded in to the rooms with period furniture, making art projects with glue, paint, clay, etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment