Utopia or reality?

We believe that a school embedded in the community, and interacting recursively with it, can turn into a centre for the promotion of community health.

We consider illness to be part of a larger totality called health. Thus an individual is healthy or ill depending on the moment, or on the way the observer observes them. A fragment of behaviour is part of a recursive process; that is why it would be useful to consider a more encompassing reading of it.

The way teachers feed back on one another would in all likelihood lead the members of the community to organise their own behaviour towards them, and so on, turn after turn.

What we seek is for teachers to recognise their own conduct towards the community, and the way the community responds to theirs.

Since this is a cybernetic system, our punctuation starts from the teacher, in the knowledge that this belongs to our distinction and therefore to our construction.

The work consists essentially in making it possible for teachers to let the community, in a dynamic interaction with them, carry out its ecological adjustments and develop its potential for health.

The starting point

Out of our experience, gained in different fields of work — hospital clinical practice, psychopedagogy, psychopedagogical services in mainstream and special primary schools —, we gradually became more firmly convinced of the need to change the operating model, moving from an essentially assistance-based mode to a community-based and participatory one.

Systemic epistemology, enriched by the contributions of second-order cybernetics, made this possible.

The difficulty of finding a solution to the countless problems that present themselves as situations of “illness” from within the school as an institution pushed us, over time, to look for new ways out of this endless parade of “problems” which, of course, also means endless waiting lists.

We punctuate our distinction from the school because we considered that this could be useful in turning the school into a “non-trivial machine”, which would change the outcomes. We did not think that this “trivial machine” was responsible for the situation.

We were convinced, and we still are, that the school would move from working as a vast factory of failure and dropping out to working as an institution that promotes health and the development of the person, respecting differences in the needs, rules, value systems and codes of the various sociocultural settings.

Our working method consisted in building the project together with those taking part in it: the difficulties that arose served to modify our way of working as we went along, adapting it to the groups involved.

Who took part

The steps we followed in order to be able to work with the schools respected the hierarchical levels: from the general inspectors down to the inspectors of the districts corresponding to the mainstream primary branch (state and private establishments) and to special education.

We then moved on to working with the management staff and the psychopedagogical services of:

At the following stage, these same teams work with the teachers who, in their turn and at another moment, will work with the family community.

The experience began in 1989 with group “A”. That group today includes the teachers.

Group “B”, running since 1990, is at the same stage of work as the previous one.

Group “C”, begun this year, is working with the management team and the psychopedagogical service.

As a coordinating group, we insert ourselves into the school system, but we do not consider ourselves one of its components. This gives us a certain freedom of movement and an autonomy with regard to the institutions we work with, and thus allows us to reach a meta-level of interaction.

Where this experience takes place

It is from the C.E.F. (Centro de Estudios de la Familia) that this project begins to take shape, before being carried into the districts of Moreno, La Matanza and Morón.

In La Matanza, as in Moreno and Morón, similar contextual markers are found.

The population does not have sufficient resources to meet its basic needs. Getting around is extremely expensive there. The families’ level of employment is low.

The families themselves are often single-parent, blended or broken.

A possible construction

In this context a particular relationship is established between educational institutions and health care centres.

The former express, through their referrals, an excessive demand addressed to the health system, which in turn cannot provide the response hoped for.

The conception underlying these two systems (health-education) belongs to the linear problem-solution paradigm.

The school “demands” on the grounds of the learning disorders it detects. The care centres, “the place of the experts”, are supposed to produce the solutions.

Both would leave the protagonists aside.

Out of the analysis of these difficulties arose the need for an epistemological turn: it could be observed that, in both systems, the difficulty was placed outside.

In this reflective process there began to take shape, as a possible working hypothesis, the attempt to step out of the problem-solution, school-care service complementarity and, from within our epistemology, to widen the view: not to centre ourselves on a single aspect of the pupil-school relationship, but to look for the pattern that connects, building a more encompassing model.

Our hypothesis points towards a school which, drawing on a cybernetic conception of learning, can become a promoter of health. We think that health exists, that it is in the community, since health and illness are a complementary reading. We do not deny the existence of “learning disorders”, but we understand them within a context, where the relational takes on importance and goes beyond the individual. Learning disorders are manifestations of a crisis that involves not only individuals but the whole of which they are part. That is why health should not be understood as adaptation or balance, but as the possibility of providing answers to that crisis and to the conflicts generated in the dialectical play of life.

Taking up the definition of health given by Silvia B. Knecher, we understand health as a construction: not as the exclusive attribute of an isolated subject, but as something that arises and is elaborated within a whole — community, family — in which the subject lives with others, acts, takes part and works. The actions that are set in motion must be thought of as a permanent interrelation between the members of a group, within which individual and collective resources are constantly mobilised, and in a spirit of solidarity.

This poses anew, from within the health-education systems, an ethical and social dimension of professional practice.

Strategies for change

How we worked with the schools

The discussion-group format, as opposed to the lecture, sought to perturb the system in such a way that other possibilities could arise out of chance. Hence the project was built by everyone together, and the contingent was included in the process.

This demanded caution from us in our interventions: patiently waiting for the signs of an epistemological coherence with the team to show themselves.

In this process we included the experiences and the knowledge of all those taking part, making possible a sociofeedback that enriched the group and out of which a certain possibility of change began to become visible.

Elements for change

As we worked on the bibliographical material, attitudes of “complaint” began to appear in the different groups, standing in the way of another reading of reality.

The complaints were repeatedly voiced in these terms:

These complaints did not only stand in the way of the possibility of a different functioning based on group production: they were also, in a certain way, an effective means of staying united in the face of adversity. “Not being able to do” was the rule of organisation.

On the basis of this reading, we set out to work with it.

The various groups were showing us that we had to go on with the rule of “doing nothing”, in keeping with their repeated experiences (Learning II).

“We say that what is learned in Learning II is a way of punctuating events”, Bateson (1972), p. 330, Spanish translation.

We valued their behaviour, because through it they were seeking to take care of us, to spare us falling into a painful failure like the one they were in themselves, they who had also wanted to do things but had failed.

“Doing nothing” brought them no adequate solutions and paralysed their action; but it allowed them to go on existing until a “miracle” came along to change the school structure.

It was then that we tried to pose the situations differently. If the difficulty lay in the context as it had been punctuated (starting from what cannot be done) and the desired response (working as a group) was not obtained, then we had to consider another punctuation of the context. We proposed working from what can be done, with a reading of possible failure — since, of course, we too were going to fail.

It was then that the obstacles or “complaints” set out in the preceding paragraphs were posed anew.

We used provocation as a technique, proposing that the project be abandoned: “Let us go no further, there is still time to go back to what existed before.” The answer was: “We are interested, we want to carry on, we cannot go back now.”

The new punctuation led to the discovery of viable alternatives, drawn from their own resources, which are also those of the community.

We, as a team of coordinators, did not seek to interpret the situation; we simply tried to build a meta-system which, through a process of self-reference, would allow the team to move closer to points far from equilibrium, thus opening the way to a new equilibrium.

As a team of coordinators, we provided a different frame of reference. By breaking the pattern that connects (the complaint), the group was able to use its own resources and to glimpse the possibility of change, finding a new meaning in its work — a change that lasts thanks to self-corrections.

We sought to avoid the dichotomy that the “either… or…” scheme can produce, by introducing the “both this and that” that Keeney refers to, and by placing the different punctuations back within each group’s own system of interaction.

This attitude made it easier to integrate dichotomies such as:

• community inside the school — community outside the school;
• theory — praxis;
• psychoanalytic theory — general systems theory;
• brilliant pupil — problem pupil;
• reality — application of “recipes”;
• the “power” of the technocrats — the “power” of the practitioners (control — autonomy).

This process arose through dialogue, with the repositioning of roles that were being expressed very rigidly and were standing in the way of the possibility of change. The flexibility thereby acquired eased the preoccupation with power, moving beyond a game of escalations into constructive collaboration.

Faced with specific difficulties, the teachers managed to resolve them by including the views of members of the community (parents and pupils). Let us recall that, in our project, the inclusion of the community was to take place in 1992. The teachers imposed a different timetable on us.

Conclusions

Even though the working groups are at different points, there are some convergences that we can already point out.

It has been possible to decentralise the figure of the “specialist” by bringing the family into the school world, as an element that makes it possible to understand the problem of learning.

We have moved from a conception dominated by the idea that the psychopedagogical team works from theory and the schoolteacher from practice, to the idea of a shared approach in which both contribute theory and practice. This situation has created a climate of greater productivity, which has enriched the relationship.

Another aspect worth underlining in this process: from the very first meetings, exchanges answering to different theoretical lines were established between the psychopedagogical teams and the coordinating team. The inclusion of diverse possibilities (multimodality) made it possible to go on working while moving beyond confrontation.

From then on, faced with various situations of school failure, the problem starts to be seen in relational rather than individual terms; the two terms of the dichotomy problem pupil — brilliant pupil take on another meaning, and the demand for ready-made recipes or standardised methods is abandoned.

Over the course of the various meetings, paths likely to produce some changes were tried out. The care team would cease to occupy a place separate, physically and relationally, from the school community, and would become one more element of the system, where teachers, management, families, specialists and pupils could share the problem and contribute, through their views, more ecological solutions.

Starting from the hypothesis presented and incorporating the experience gathered in the meetings held, we see that, together, teachers and psychopedagogical services arrive at a more encompassing approach. This relationship implies a fuller and richer view, which will widen further still with the inclusion of the community (we refer back to the previous example).

Here, then, is a new strategy for working from health. The way of discerning the data and the rules of organisation of the group is the one we have set out; but we know that there are others, which we have not taken into account and which are just as valid as these.