This is the description found on the York Region District School Board web site of the the Quest Conference held November 15, 16, 17 at the Sheraton Hotel in Richmond Hill.

“The Quest For Communities That Work: Sustaining Student Improvement” Conference

Educators are increasingly aware of the importance of building community capacity as a means of enhancing student learning in a rapidly changing world. Schools must be interwoven into the fabric of communities, incorporating and reflecting the hopes, interests and values of the families they serve.

I attended the first day of the conference as that was all the time in my calendar. The Board of Education generously found enough money to assist my program and partnering community program by covering the registration fees for the one day.

I’m not dissappointed that I missed the other two days as I had a pretty good sense of the conference assumptions and approach after day one. I’m appreciative that the school board brought educators and community groups together, however I think the methods used by the conference organizers to raise the level of understanding of current issues just didn’t do the job. Danah Boyd in her Blog apophenia has a great article that addresses issues of homophily, diversity and learning at conferences.

The assumptions I saw been played out in the conference were:

• To work well with communities, educators need to know who all the service providers are so they could properely refer their students and families.
• Service providers are expert problem solvers of complex issues
• Having a “major dormo” super powered case coordinator will tie all the fragmented pieces of the service delivery “treatment” plan togother and that will resovle the student/families problems.
• Students (and families of students) in crisis and in need of help require specialized professional services to make them well and only these service can legitimately do this job.
• People in crisis (students & families) need fixing so lets not bother looking at what they think, feel, believe or what their strengths are because we specialists have a fixing job to do.

Anyways – I think you see were I’m going with this post. I’m pleased that the York Board brought people together around the theme of education and community working together but in my view the conference organizers just didn’t choose the means to elevate the learning of the practicionerse.

To help the participants understand how complex, problem solving can be, a half day long case management excersize was used. I think it was designed to make teachers and the few community representatives attending more aware of the complexity of working with kids and families. To be fair, the facilitator did explain that the goal was not to solve the problem but to bring awareness to the attendees of the inter-dependent relationships and expertise of the problem solvers.

The notion that the difficulties that kids and families are facing is not a school problem, not a health problem, not a police problem etc.. but a community problem, seems to be the new mantra that our mainstream groups have adopted. When the problem soliving time comes as evidenced in my group of some 60 or so members, all we can do is the same old problem management thing because we choose to use the same old lens for looking at what is happening in our communities and in the world.

Speaking of world, not once did I hear the words e-learning, digital literacy, Internent communication technologies, blogging, web 2 and on and on. Nor did I hear anything remotely describing the communities that our kids are growing up in as being inhabited by a constant need for refreshing ourselves as learners and managers of these tools. I know the one theme that will get air time at the conference is literacy, however I don’t think the conference definition of literacy connected to the digital literacy world. I may find out from reading about day 2 and 3 – if there is a report or any recommendations.

In my group of 6 or 7 practitioners I was confronted with some very experienced and expert problem solvers. The group approached the case management excersize like a delta force squad force that knew it’s battle objective. It was amazing to me how much my group members believed that because a service is offerred in a community and a student/family is sent to this service, the situation is on the mend or getting solved.

The conference lens used to get the participants thinking about community was that of the service provider clinitian. There was no mention or remote reference to more wholistic community and family driven approachs exemplified by John McKnight’s – Building Communities from the Inside Out, or the Wraparound approach developed by John Vandenberg or the research driven resiliency framework so well written about by Bonnie Bernard. At the core of these approaches the family and the informal community supporsts are the centre of the action planning, not the expert service providers. In addition, a strength and asset based lens is used to see these young people not at risk but at promise (with untapped resiliency strengths). The community, composed of informal supports (not the experts) are marshalled to shore up and wraparound these families and kids. Their web sites have detailed explanations of their approach and philosphy, far more than what I can offer in this already too long post.

I did appreciate some parts of the conference, particularly presentations by Marc Kielburger from Free the Children and Armand Lebarge from York Regional Police.

When I was leaving and completing my satisfaction survey I asked the quest student volunteer why she wasn’t in the conference room learning with all the others. She said, “it was a school staff and admin conference not something for students. I guess it was felt that their job of giving directions to the bathrooms and picking up stuff in the lobby and giving out satisfaction questions were enough of a learning experience for these students. I think having the young people in the conference hall as partners and contributors is a far more useful role and the diversity that would be present by including them would add immensily to the conference learning goals.

Research data says that over 50% of high school students do not go on to post secondary education or training and at least one half of these students have the ability to succeed but choose not to continue school. Several of the presenters talked about the issues facing students being a community problem, not a school, not a police, not a hospital problem etc… . I am pleased that the discourse is happening between community and school, however I believe we need to really put more effort (at least in my area of the world) into seeing what is happing in our communities and schools and what does learning and community really mean in this point in our evolution.

This conference really brought home how important our work is in the school. We are in a school because we want to assist youth in their transition to the community as local and world citizens, as workers, as life long learners and future parents and all the that goes with growing up in our community. We have much work ahead.

Brent Uncategorized