I had the honor of reconnecting with a friend and amazing person, Amanda Houpt, MPH, founder of Chrysalis Training and Learning Solutions. She previously worked at The Center for Women and Families in Louisville, KY when we originally met. I learned a lot from her then and continue to through this conversation.
I learned a lot and am continually humbled by how much thoughtfulness she brings to each topic. As I mentioned, i’m coming to appreciate the depth of the Abolition movements, and Amanda highlighted how much imagination and future oriented thinking is coming out of that space.
http://amandahoupt.com/
FuMbling Towards Repair – Mariame Kaba
Names she mentioned that got jumbeled together:
Geni Eng
Meredith Minkler
Barbara Israel
Transcript
keevin bybee 0:01
Welcome to the one school podcast. My name is keevin Bybee. I’m a family physician, exploring how we might turn schools into 20 473 165 days safe spaces for our children, and having conversations with experts and people with experience that might inform such a such an endeavor. Today I am speaking with Amanda who she is a person that I’ve known for a long time. She has a master’s in public health is a community educator, lover of dance and liver of life. And I would just love for you to take a minute, pardon me and tell us how a little bit about yourself and how you came to find yourself on the other side of an internet microphone with me today. Yeah, sure thing. So Hi, everybody. I’m Amanda. As you’ve said, I have a background in public health keevin and I have known each other for a while we met in Louisville, Kentucky. And at the time we met I was a community educator at an organization called the Center for Women and Families that does violence prevention and response. So their domestic violence shelter rape crisis center, but much more than that they do a ton of education and prevention work in the community. And so I was doing that when we met.
amanda houpt 1:16
I have a Master’s in Public Health. So I’m a health behaviorist only instead of focusing on a traditional public health topic like epidemiology, which let’s be real Keven would be super useful right now. I focused on interpersonal violence prevention and interpersonal relationships. So I do that. And that’s in my background, and in my wheelhouse, and I am currently the I’m running my own business. So I, I run and operate kind of work for myself under the name chrysalis training and learning solutions. And so I both do trainings, mostly now focused around how do we create positive organizational cultures? And how do we prevent things like workplace harassment, increased psychological safety. So I do that, and I also do instructional design.
keevin bybee 2:04
Fantastic. I remember when we first moved to Louisville, our apartment was a couple blocks away from the Center for Women and Families. And my wife and I were walking down and we’re like, oh, that might be a really nice place. And she ended up volunteering there. But we actually met each other through your wonderful partner, who I’m a longtime friend with as well. And I also remember one time we were having a dinner and I just want to apologize, how insufferable I may have been, I tried to bring a lot of libertarian philosophy to public health and medicine. And I would like to say I’m quite reformed from then and just wanted to throw that out there and acknowledge that I probably was, still am kind of super annoying. So
amanda houpt 2:46
no, I love the journey that you’ve been on, I should apologize to you. Because when you first moved to town, Joe was like, my friend keevin moved to town. And I was like, how you know, this guy, and he was like, Oh, I met him through engineering school. And I was like, this guy’s an engineer. And he was like, Yeah, and I was like, you go, I’m gonna go do my own thing. I think I went to the dance class or something. And he texted me and was like, you are going to be so jealous that you didn’t come to this dinner, because you’re going to love Kevin’s wife so much. And so, um, truer words were never spoken. So I apologize to you for writing you off as an engineer.
keevin bybee 3:19
we briefly talked about my ideas here. And, you know, I want to say I appreciate you kind of dreaming big with me. And, you know, obviously, something like this would take a lot of money. And let’s just pretend the money is there. Given the background and things that you have done in scene. How do you think a project were children could go to just their local public schools at any time of the day to get their needs met? How would that help and influence the kind of work that you’ve done and the things that you’ve seen in the past?
amanda houpt 3:56
Yeah, I mean, I’ve done a lot of of work with kids who are living in homes with domestic violence, or who are living with family in the wake of somebody leaving an abusive relationship. And I’ve done a lot of work with with survivors of child sexual assault, and all of the varying kind of life circumstances that they have. And so I think that what you’re talking about is something that definitely relates to that population of kids, every kid’s experience around the violence that they’re experiencing looks different. But certainly for kids who who don’t have a safe home to go to, and that’s a lot of kids. It’s more kids than I think anybody realizes, I think that something like this is is a potent, and and and kind of powerful idea. I will say to you that i think that i think that funding is a huge piece of the puzzle, but I do think that this is something that that that is happening in some ways. And what I mean by that is, I think that kids that don’t have safe homes to go to often realize that like they know their situation better than anybody and so they are often Kind of utilizing school in that way. Now anyway, they’re signing up for extracurriculars. You know, they’re joining clubs, they’re they’re doing homework things after school, they’re, you know, maybe going home with friends on days when that’s an option and thing, because they are trying to kind of delay getting home as much as possible. And so kids are kind of finding ways to do that with the systems that are in place now. But I think with funding and energy put towards it and kind of dedication, it’s a really powerful idea.
keevin bybee 5:29
Yeah, and the thing that has struck me is the, the we need an integrated approach where so many resources are already kind of CO located in one building, or one place so that we don’t have to try to shop around all over town, for example, or it could be hard to access services. So at the Center for Women and Families, I’m sure they had a lot of services. And what would you say are some places that are what needs that were still unmet? Or things that could have been improved? In a situation like I’m trying to describe? What are some extra things that could be added? Or how would you make it more robust, I guess?
amanda houpt 6:16
Yeah. I mean, I think the integration is, it’s great that you’re thinking about that, because I think that that’s, that’s an important concept. I think also having the school, which is what you’re really kind of thinking is the school is sort of the heart of this particular kind of initiative. I think it’s smart, right? Everybody families know how to get there. kids know how to get there, they know how to navigate the space, they know, the people and the staff that inhabit that space. So trying to layer on something that is a place of familiarity for kids, I think is a good idea. I mean, I think that something that comes to mind is I think sometimes about barriers, right? And then I think about how do you get around barriers. And so one thing I’m thinking is just around how do you create something like this, so that kids who need it can use it, but so that kids who need it aren’t stigmatized, right. One of the things when we first talked about this, I mentioned it is that there was a bill that didn’t make its way through the legislature. But it various points, people have tried to pass bills like these when they’re trying to extend the school day until like 5pm. Both because the burden on working parents to provide childcare is is really great. And also for some of the reasons that you’re wanting to do the one school project. And there was a lot of pushback from from parents saying, being at school till three o’clock is enough. Like I don’t want my kid to be in school all day, I like to pick them up. And they have stuff that they do after school and we have snack time. And I mean, there was a whole robust, I’m sure I’m not capturing all of the pushback. But one of the things I thought, as I was kind of listening to that commentary is, you know, for kids who who need this, and I don’t think it’s just kids who don’t have a safe home to go to like, I think there’s a whole broad spectrum of kids who could use this, I don’t think our communities are great at building spaces for kids, particularly preteens and teenagers, there’s, there’s like nothing in between when you turn 21 and go to a bar. And when you’re a little kid that can go to a splash park, like there’s often a really great gap in recreation and free recreation for those kids. So, you know, and maybe that’s a piece of the puzzle. But I think that one of the challenges is how do you create something that does fulfill a lot of different needs, and that doesn’t stigmatize kids who are who are using that or set them apart from their peers, or highlight, you know, the ways in which they’re experiencing inequity, often inequity that they had no control over, right, if your parents are abusive to each other, if one of your parents is abusive to the other one, you don’t have any control over that, like so much is out of your control when you’re a kid. And you know, and if you’re experiencing other types of marginalization, that’s not your fault, that’s systems and structures. So wanting to create something that that helps the kids that you’re trying to reach, but that isn’t sort of stigmatizing or kind of further marginalizing is something that kind of comes to mind is a barrier. So I guess the solution that’s embedded in there is trying to find, you know, trying to find things that meet the needs that that all kids sort of have in that age range that make it appealing for lots of different kids to take advantage of the services.
keevin bybee 9:17
Yeah, thank you so much for bringing up that point. I hadn’t very much thoughts along the same line when I’ve been brainstorming. I think, at least in my mind, things that would help to do that would be the, you know, being open all the time. And then being a little bit lacks with when classes start or when this school day starts and stops are still kind of relics of the industrial age when we needed to turn agrarian kids into factory line kids. And part of that is broadening how we deliver education and how we provide education. And I think some of it would be if we make the everyday things peer led you know classrooms are more like laboratories that are available adults are available at whatever point that kid needs it, you know, of course, extracurricular sports, arts, etc. But yeah, I think very much. How do you make it so that this is just something everybody does not just something those kids do, right. And you had also mentioned, the the luck factor, right? Nobody chose to whom they were born, where they were born when they were born. And like I said, I’m a recovering libertarian, and part of it was starting a mindfulness or meditation practice, and you realize that you’re not even the author of your own thoughts. And so when you start to realize how little little we really have control over our own life, then we it kind of behooves us to pay it forward as much as we can, at least for me, it becomes it became like an innate obligation. So and, as you mentioned, that I was thinking, how we could incentivize families to be part of this school. And if it’s open 24, seven, then if there was a need for parental or family education, it’s already placed to bring your kids because I know a lot of resistance to bringing kids to or for parents to come to parent classes is who’s going to watch the kids? When are we going to have dinner? So, you know, as a community educator, you know, how do you think this would make your job easier? If we were to, you know, have you in our group or somebody like you?
amanda houpt 11:28
Yeah, I mean, I think and people who are who are kind of doing this work actively now, I think, would shout this out. And maybe they found strategies around it. But one of the biggest challenges to doing community education with adults in the community, adults who want to, not even it’s not even about education like that, even adults that are wanting to come to an educational program, but adults that are wanting to actively partner and use their expertise to transform their communities. A huge barrier is childcare, like, yeah, I want to come You know, in the evening, but I have kids, I have dinner I have, you know, my kids are engaged in sports, or you know, we have a whole routine, and there’s no way that’s going to happen. And there are all sorts of barriers to providing child childcare. So oftentimes, you have to rely on another agency that’s able to do that, it becomes really complicated to do that. So I think that one of the things that would be nice about this is if you do have this kind of integrated service center, that is equipped to provide that kind of childcare that has educationally enriching, or socially enriching programming is that it liberates adults to be able to do some of the things that they’re wanting to do and know that somebody that they trust is going to be watching their kiddos that they’re going to be having an enriching kind of activity and not you know, sitting around twiddling their thumbs being bored, doing what you do when you’re a kid, and you’re bored. I think that that’s huge. Providing childcare, I think is a big piece, something else that I think is huge is and I think about this a lot and intervention, I thought about it a lot. When I was doing work at the community level, I thought about it a ton when I was in public health school and learning about global health and even just domestically interventions is that I feel like a lot of times when we do an intervention, and when I say intervention, I mean that really broadly. So that might be a training, it might be a long term educational opportunity. It might be a program like the one school program, a lot of times the way that we think about it is like I am an expert that’s coming in with expertise to intervene upon you to to teach you something that you don’t know, to give you a skill that you don’t have. And I think that’s something that’s really important in creating an integrative service really is to lean into the wisdom and experience of the community that you’re you’re trying to intervene in. So you know, wherever the first one school kind of project school is really wanting to do some kind of community based work to uncover one, how the community defines its own needs, like what are the needs and services they want? Do parents want childcare? I keep throwing around this term enriching activities, is that something they want? And how does enrichment get to define for that population of parents, really kind of leaning into them and their expertise, their knowledge of their neighborhood, their children, their community, what their day to day life looks like? I think is really key and should be a part of the planning stage right? Having having even I don’t know if it’s an advisory board, or if you have some kind of cooperative model where everybody’s engaged in participating, I think that increases the success. And it gives you really, you know, phenomenal insight into to, you know, what the right thing is to create because sometimes I think what happens is, is outsiders create programs, without understanding any of those things, or they introduce a program that might be great and beautifully built, but there’s no buy in from the community because they’re a total outsider. And when I say also community wisdom, I don’t just mean adults. I mean, kids like there is no, I mean, kids are incredibly wise. Anyway, you have two kids, you know, I’m sure that they blow your mind with the insights that they have and the things that they perceive and the compassion And encourage that they bring like kids are incredible. And so I would say that kids should be informing this too at the school like, what what do you want after school? You know, if you’re going to be here till six o’clock or later, like, what do you want to do during that time, you know, and really kind of letting them kind of guide the way, I think if you do that engagement in the program will increase and community buy in, and likely effectiveness because you’re, you know, the stakeholders who are going to be using this or informing it and hopefully have some control over it some decision making power.
keevin bybee 15:33
Yeah, very much. I’m a big proponent of kind of emergent processes. I’ve been diving deep on something that’s called meta modernism, but it’s basically the you provide resources, and you know, at most a blueprint or a description, but far from a prescription, or, and a, you know, that’s what I’m looking for here. But basically, you know, give people the resources so that they can enact what they want, more than, you know, come in and say, This is what we’re doing and drop it on them. So 100%. And so part of this is coming up with what would be basic blueprints and gaining enough attention that people go, Oh, this is a good idea. And then we can then come up with the resources to give back to whoever, wherever the project might need to go.
amanda houpt 16:32
Yeah, there’s a really beautiful tradition. I mean, it’s I’m calling it a beautiful tradition, I think it’s in that whole academic discipline, in the field of public health, known as as community based participatory research. And then there’s also participatory action research, you might have heard of modalities within that kind of field like photovoice digital storytelling. Anyhow, I think that those offers some really great models of how, how to both build a blueprint, and then and then execute the blueprint in not just in cooperation with community but kind of CO lead. And you can see some of the just really amazing results that cvpr based programs have have had. I know I feel like I know the generation of thinkers, I feel like I probably could have some more emerging knowledge about who’s sort of doing that right now but I think about people like Genie ink and and there’s a Meredith Israel, like there’s a whole group of people who have really kind of pioneered how do we do work in conjunction with communities because I think communities could even be involved in the in the kind of blueprint building process.
keevin bybee 17:46
Yeah, I’m writing out writing all these down so I can do some deep dives offline. So thank you so much. You would also pointed me to Merriam Cobbett. How do you pronounce your name ma’am? kabe, or Cabo Cabo, Cabo and the, you know, restorative justice, which is something that has only recently been put on my radar? And I think, is it? Could you tell me a little bit about that, and how an organization like one school would could benefit from a restorative justice approach?
amanda houpt 18:16
Yeah. I mean, I would, I would say that restorative justice is sort of the the kind of tip of the iceberg and that transformative justice is, is has even kind of evolved the thought pattern there. But so transformative justice is basically, you know, this notion that that we should be able to make conflict. And I don’t know, I don’t want to say bad experiences, because that’s too broad. But conflict in particular should be sort of a generative thing. Like we should experience growth out of conflict. And so how do we, in situations where somebody needs to be held accountable, or where a system needs to be held accountable, where change sort of needs to happen? We do it in such a way, that we’re able to transform everybody that’s involved in transforming the outcome. And I’m probably people who out there who are transformative justice, like thinkers and practitioners are like, that was a terrible explanation, maybe. But I think that transformative justice is one of the most hopeful, kind of thought movements out there. I think the practices are really interesting. I’m interested in in my own work around violence prevention, in that, I think that a lot of times when somebody perpetrates violence, we treat them as disposable. And, and, you know, the truth is that people aren’t disposable, right? This is especially true when it comes to intergenerational family violence, right? That somebody that loves you can hurt you. And that you can know that that person hurt you and you can hold them accountable and you’re still related to them at the end of the day. Now, whether or not you decide to be in a relationship with them. You know, that’s that person’s decision. But I think that people who’ve experienced interpersonal violence and violence within families, understand This notion of you know, when somebody hurts you, even if they do something that’s really egregious, that’s a real major violation. It’s hard to dispose of them because you are still related. Because maybe you are a kid, and you don’t have a lot of control over what that relationship looks like in that moment. I think that transformative justice is a really nice thing, because it looks at how do we sort of hold people accountable in a way that helps them grow, and in a way that kind of preserves community and preserves family. And that doesn’t mean you know, sweeping abuses that happen under the rug, it means talking about them, and really engaging with them, it means the person who caused harm, engaging in a process that they’re willing to engage in of looking at, okay, what is what has brought me here, there’s this old adage that hurt people hurt. And I think that a piece of transformative justice work is examining, okay, what is that legacy of hurt? Like, how, how have I been hurt? And let me process this? And then how am I then carrying that legacy on by hurting others? And how can I change this and transform this? So there’s a ton of accountability, I think that’s built into the process. But it feels a lot more holistic to me than then some of the other kind of, we tend to go to really, there’s a word that I’m looking for, and I’m feeling really punitive measures, right? Like, we go there immediately. And I’m and I don’t want to wash accountability, like a way, because I think that accountability is hugely important. But I do think that really thinking about how do we make how do we make things generative, that seemed really destructive, is a really valuable kind of piece, because a lot can be built of things of hardship and things that that are not great on the surface?
keevin bybee 21:43
Yeah, well, thank you for that. I was, you know, really, I mean, when when I first heard it, it really opened my mind. And, you know, I’ve been thinking about this myself, and you touch upon how, if there’s people that are doing things that are anti social, you’re right, we currently put them in prison. And there’s an enormous recidivism rate. And I had often thought that, you know, why don’t what we currently call prisons basically look like really nice mental hospitals, you know, if people are hurt and sick, we need to take care of them as such, and provide them with a place to regulate if they need medicines, that therapy, and, you know, skills to be able to reintegrate, because, as we’re seeing, putting people in prison at the enormous price tag that we’re doing, it really isn’t helping anybody. And when I first heard about abolish prisons, I think the way that I’m framing it is that what we currently call prisons will be so radically changed that they won’t be they won’t resemble prisons anymore. So in one sense, it does make sense to abolish prisons, if we’re going to just give people places where that they can actually restore or if they’re just incapable of being safe, at least we can hold them humanely. I’m just curious if what I said resonates at all with with what you’re saying.
amanda houpt 23:08
Yeah, I mean, I think that abolition is a word. And I mean, it’s not it’s more than a word. It’s a whole philosophical movement that’s rich and worth exploring. But I think that often when folks hear abolition, certainly this is true, I’m prison abolition, it’s true around abolition in a in a sort of broader sense, we sort of hear destruction that we’re going to destroy we’re going to get rid of, but I truly believe that abolition, the whole philosophical movement, you cannot find and will not find a more hopeful, imaginative, innovative space. abolition does not, you know, as a broad philosophical movement advocate for just destroying things and not and not replacing them with something it’s about. It is about abolishing systems, getting rid of systems that don’t serve us that don’t serve us individually that don’t serve us collectively, and, and replacing them with things that are going to serve other people rebuilding them. One of the things you know, I’ve been doing violence prevention work for a really long time. I do it in a different context now than I used to. But one of the things that kind of blows my mind all the time is how limited my imagination is that when I’m you know, I’m working with a workplace that’s maybe having a really difficult issue. There’s a lot of incivility people are bullying each other. Maybe there’s harassment happening, you know, I’m trying to see through the solutions. And I’m so limited sometimes in the thinking I have. And I will say that looking at both transformative justice looking at abolition, abolition, and reading those kind of thinkers, always challenges me to be more imaginative, imaginative, and to create something that that potentially might benefit more people. We just get very stuck. I think sometimes in our traditions and our systems and the way that things have always been and I understand that right because humans are creatures of habit. I’m a health behaviorist. If there’s one thing I learned it’s that right in graduate school. So I know that we get attached to those But the truth is that when something isn’t working, we don’t have to be resigned to it, we can change it. It takes effort to change things. And sometimes it feels like that effort might be way beyond, you know what we ever imagined it would be. But the cost of having systems that don’t work over and over again on us individually and collectively is so great. So I don’t know, I just think that there’s a lot in abolition that’s misunderstood, in a widespread way. And I think it’s it’s so hopeful as a philosophical movement.
keevin bybee 25:34
Well, thank you for that. Like, if we need anything right now, it is optimism in these weird times. And this project is nothing, if not quite imaginative, so I resonate with that highly. And then that, you know, with the restorative justice, you know, like you said, hurting people hurt people. And I think it was Dan Siegel and his partner, Dr. Bryson who talk about how every misbehavior in children is an unmet need, right? And so if we’re wanting to reverse engineer why hurting people hurt people, like what are those needs that we can meet, and at least with a project like this, hopefully, we can meet more of those needs, and there will be slightly fewer or less harmful people in the future, right? Next Generation,
amanda houpt 26:27
I mean, to even it’s not even just relegated to children, if you think about nonviolent conflict resolution, which is a key conflict resolution modality, I mean, Sylvia, your wife would know many, many more beyond that, this is her area of expertise. But that whole kind of strategy and process of conflict resolution is based around the idea that conflict is fundamentally about unmet needs. And that even when it comes to adults, so much of of what we experience interpersonally on like a low, low key, you know, non violent sort of scale, just everyday conflicts that we have in disagreements is about, you know, we have needs, and there’s no guarantee that that our needs are going to be the same need at the same moment, or that we’re always going to be able to meet them. So I think that that has relevance not just for kids, but for adults, too. We spend so little time learning how to communicate through that stuff, I don’t know. And we spend, I mean, you’re you’re a doctor, I’m a public health practitioner. So little, I feel like if the systems around both of those disciplines deal with mental health kind of holistically, I’m hoping that that is something that we’re going to continue to kind of move the needle on. But that to me feels like a really critical piece of all of this, of integrating mental health, not only into the one school program, or similar programs like it, but integrating mental health deeply into medicine into public health into school environments into policing what however, that kind of evolves over time, I feel like you know, and we’ve had a more rich dialogue I feel like about this topic over the past couple of years, because of the pandemic because of the kind of racial reckoning that has had a mass resurgence in the United States. We’ve been kind of thinking about this, but I think that that having mental health be something that we all think of as a piece of our overall kind of health picture. And that is well resourced, so that therapy and engaging in mental health services is accessible and de stigmatize like that is, that would be such a transformative thing, because we don’t we don’t get enough of these skills. We don’t treat them as leadership skills and life skills and they want
keevin bybee 28:38
so much so I couldn’t agree with you more. I mean, medicine is coming around to that, you know, with Western philosophy in general, has really kind of been neglectful of interiority. And we’re getting better, it’s slower than we’d like. The funding is not there. I mean, half, at least a big half of what I see as a primary care physician is obviously mental health. And then the other half is stuff that’s indirectly, you know, mental health in the sense that behavior change as it regards to diabetes control, blood pressure control, weight control, or coping with chronic illness such as cancer, those are all interior experiences that we have not been resourcing, you know, the all of the therapists that I know are overbooked. The state insurances really pay pennies on the dollar and only a few therapists accept that insurance at all. The the number of psychiatrists that are out there is about a 10th of what we need, and so I think we Need to kind of demand as a society that we will value interiority as an essential quality and not so much as it’s been in like, large degree, an instrumental quality, like we just want people good enough to show up and pay taxes. And that’s not sustainable. And the All we have is our internal experience of not to be too solipsistic about it. But the if we agree that there’s an external reality that we all occupy, we still only have access to it through our internal experience. And until we recognize that, and have better tools and language around the filter of our internal experience that allows us to interact with the external world and air quotes, we’re going to end up in a in continuing places of unnecessary hurt.
amanda houpt 30:55
Oh, absolutely. And I mean, the two things are your physical health and your mental health, they’re inherently connected, right? I deal with so many professionals that are incredibly stressed out that don’t have great stress, you know, management skills, because they, you know, we don’t reward that we’re all about, you know, like bootstraps and meritocracy and work yourself into the ground. If you work hard, you’re going to attain things. And as it turns out, you don’t have great stress kind of coping mechanisms, you know, the, the impact of that relates to so many health conditions, be it, you know, so you pick up smoking. So you know, the one thing that calms you down at the end of the night, as to you know, is to drink and insomnia, I think about hypertension, you think about I mean, so many you can link it to so many sort of health outcomes. And so if we just kind of dealt with that stress kind of coping mechanism, if we help people process anxiety and gave them a safe space to do that, I think we would see, I think we would see a lot of benefit. And I think we would see actually a lot I mean, I know that profit, we that’s like the thing that drives so many things, but I think people would be more productive and more innovative, and we would save a lot of money on medical care.
keevin bybee 32:05
I know I hate to take it there that just for the sake of the GDP, as much as I hate that as a reductive measure of, you know, civilizational well being if we really fuckin care about the GDP, we’d like pay for people to go to therapy. So we’re shooting ourselves in the foot, unfortunately, literally, as well. And I’ve often advocated that, like we have our annual doctor visit that we’re all like socially aware that we should do like, why isn’t it that we also have a prescribed regular check in that is just something you do. It’s not something you wait until there’s a crisis, but you just have your annual therapist visit or, you know, it could be along any sort of the interior experiences, meditation, mindfulness, I mean, you name it, but just throwing it out there that as a society, and as a health insurance system. We promote that.
amanda houpt 33:00
Yeah, no, I mean, I’m 100% on board with that. Yeah, I think too. And I don’t want to add to teacher burden, something that I was thinking about, I was listening to some of the earlier podcast just to feel prepared before this. And I was thinking a little bit about why somebody and I can’t remember who it was talked about the importance of teachers having sort of trauma informed practice, like understanding what that means. It strikes me that if you are going to have an integrative system, like the one that you’re proposing, that, that even if somebody is not a mental health practitioner, that they understand what being a trauma informed educator is. And I almost hate saying that out loud, because I feel like if there’s anybody who’s overburdened, underappreciated, and underpaid, its teachers like we ask so much of them when I think about, you know, in the absence of a model, like the one you’re proposing, how is this issue being dealt with, right? Some of it is what I’ve already said, kids are really smart about their own situations, they’re staying at school doing extracurriculars, because they don’t want to go home. Sometimes, you’ve got teachers who are providing all sorts of stuff. And if you talk to any public school teacher, certainly any public school teacher in a district that doesn’t have massive property, you know, that’s not stuffed with cash, because of the way that we fund schools in the United States. They’re often providing not only their own supplies for their classroom, but they’re providing things for kids, you know, they’ve got like a granola bar and their desk to give to a kid who’s, who’s hungry, who’s, you know, they can tell is, is maybe in need of a snack. And that’s just like, that’s one example of a myriad of things that I’m sure that teachers have that they’re providing to students. Schools are often and we discovered this in the pandemic, right. One of the first crises when school wasn’t in session was how were kids who rely on free and reduced lunch to get their meals. How are they going to get meals in this and schools were really amazing and incredible at mobilizing, you know, buses and doing meal delivery for kids. Like we’re doing it in all of these different different kind of ways. And, and so I want to acknowledge that burden, I want to acknowledge both the ingenuity of that and that burden. And I want to say that I think that for a model like this to work, there needs to be additional professional development around what it means to provide sort of trauma informed care and, and to sort of holistically serve students and families. I don’t think that’s a part often of the training that folks are getting at something that they kind of learn experientially as they’re going through it. But that seems pretty important to me.
keevin bybee 35:24
Yeah, yeah. I mean, in this pipe dream that I’m running, we’re going to have three to four times as many teachers earning nearly as much as a family physician. And, you know, we would be paying paying them directly to get their continuing education. Because you’re right, they’re already overburdened. And it’s, it’s just not fair. And they’re the people doing the hardest work. And, you know, I talk, I don’t know why, but people say, Well, we can’t pay teachers more, because then they’re only going to go into it for the money. And it’s just one of those nails on chalkboard responses.
amanda houpt 36:03
So many responses like that, and it wears me out, it wears me out especially I mean, I am so passionate, I am not I’m not a teacher in a school, right? Like I do training and stuff. And I often in those roles get paid better than a teacher does, which is very unfair. But one of the things that burns me up about that is that when you ask people, you know, all different types of people, when you ask really successful people, what, you know, what was it that led you on this path? So often, in those stories, it’s I had a teacher who believed in me, like I had, you know, people have these really powerful stories of the way that a teacher showed confidence or teacher saw some kind of aptitude that they didn’t see in themselves and encouraged it, you know, or a teacher made an effort to connect with them after a class like, our lives have been so positively blessed often with these teacher interactions. I mean, I can think of so many teacher stories, I I am a writer, a communicator, the person who made me feel most confident about that was an English teacher named Geraldine King, she was like you are, you know, I don’t know if you realize this, but like, this essay that you wrote is really great. And I think that you have a lot of potential in this way. And I had, it wasn’t something I realized about myself, it changed the whole trajectory of of my life of what I thought I could do. And I was like, 11, right. So I don’t know. I mean, I think that, I think it’s interesting, I do think that viewpoint is out there, if we pay teachers a lot, like it’s gonna cause all these problems. And it’s like, maybe they’ll just be able to do an incredible job even more incredibly and sustainably. And maybe it’ll continue to impact us in the way that it already is. And that we have these incredible stories.
keevin bybee 37:38
Exactly. The my new intellectual crush right now is this guy named Zack Stein. And he. And he’s said this a few times in a different ways. But basically, if you consider like, what is education, it’s the intergenerational transmission of information. And then when you ask, okay, so what is civilization? What is the thing that makes humanity different than, you know, even our next closest primate relative, it’s the capacity for intergenerational transmission of information, like education is the civilizational project. But it’s somehow been relegated to not top tier and the more I think about it, if education and keeping our children safe is not the most important thing and most well funded thing we’re doing civilization is going to be a self terminating process. So that’s just kind of what I’m throwing out there right now.
amanda houpt 38:43
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, me, I would like add a feminist component to it, which is like, I feel like historically, and if you look at who’s represented in that field, it’s disproportionately women and societal a culturally we devalue work that women do. And I don’t, you know, I don’t mean to, like be so far in the binary, but I think that that is there, there is a piece of it. That is that is sort of systemic and and I think that if we elevated teachers, we would benefit in a lot of ways, and I think that it would create more gender equity, as well.
keevin bybee 39:15
Oh, absolutely. I mean, that’s, it’s it’s an integrated process. And I don’t know if I can say it’s the same thing. But yes, I agree with you. Well, we’ve been at this for about 40 minutes. I don’t want to take too much of your evening. Is there anything else that I might have forgotten to ask about or anything that you’d like to plug or any kind of closing thoughts that you’d like to share with us?
amanda houpt 39:43
Um, there are two things that I wrote down that I had meant to say when we talked last and I don’t even know if this is worth your podcasts, but one of them is there. You probably know all about this study. I certainly used it a ton and my training as a public health practitioner, but it’s the aces study, the adverse childhood experiences study. I feel like it’s this massive data set. It’s this incredible study that’s been done that looks at exactly that. What are negative experiences we have in children. And there’s a longitudinal component where it’s looking at, you know, how did these experiences relate to things that we go on to experience. And I think it’s a, it’s an incredibly rich and incredibly underutilized source of data in terms of, if we can kind of use it to understand the things that we most need to address with the work that we’re doing that I think it would advance all of our work. And so that’s something I will throw out there as a resource. And I don’t have any, like, I can’t point you to a particular thing. I just think that in your quest to understand this issue, looking at the aces information, might be really helpful. In my own work that I’ve done. I feel like it’s shown up in a kind of a big way. It’s led me to have kind of new insights about it. One of the insights being how foundational and formative what we experienced as kids is, for good and for bad, right? Like it both Adverse Childhood Experiences simultaneously give us incredible resilience, and also have a major impact on stuff that happens long after we’re on the other side of whatever happened with your kids. So that’s one thing. And then I think that the overarching thing, and I know that you’ve got this is just around integrating and having community participation and what you’re doing, I think that almost everything that I do in public health was born out of communities. So one of the things that I’ve trained and taught for years is I’ve done a ton of bystander intervention training. It’s something that that happy no kids, kids are getting bystander intervention training and workplaces. It’s become a model for workplace harassment training. And it is a training modality. It’s a set of skills that was 100% born out of marginalized communities, particularly black communities, and communities of color that were left outside of systems that were intentionally sort of denied resources. And so said, you know, what, if nobody’s looking out for us, we’re going to look out for each other. And so one of the things that I always think about is look at what the community is doing to heal itself. I think about mutual aid. And we see this right, we just had hurricane Ida, New Orleans is in a really rough situation. And one of the things that’s happening that is that is positive in the wake of this is there’s just an enormous amount of mutual aid that’s happening, community members organizing on behalf of each other, finding resources for each other, that the communities just have, they have an incredible amount of wisdom. And so you know, as we seek to do things to improve people that we lean into, to the wisdom, both of communities and I want to just say it particularly marginalized communities, because I feel like they are tasked often with solving problems that they didn’t create, with very few resources. And it’s it’s pretty incredible what exists in those spaces.
keevin bybee 42:52
Yeah, well, thank you for those words. It’s always good to sit with that. And, again, avoid anything that even could be appear to be, you know, colonization or more in position. So behind I agree with that. 100%. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me this evening. Really appreciate your wisdom, always humbled by how much you are able and willing to share. And so thanks again. Yeah, everybody look out Look, check out chrysalis learning, and I’ll post links on the site when I’m done. So thank you. Thank you, keevin.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai