Transformative repair

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Mike Broadstock: 

Hi everyone and welcome back to isPodcast, ISV's show for schools and the wider community. I'm Mike Broadstock.   

The turmoil of the last few years left many of us – school staff, students and parents – feeling a little bit broken. On today's episode, Shane Green explores Transformative Repair – an arts program which takes broken things and remakes them into something beautiful – and he discovers how educators are using it to make a difference in their school communities. 

Shane: 

Here at Independent Schools Victoria, we always aspire to create programs that will make a meaningful difference to the lives of those within our school communities across Victoria.  

Amid the global challenges we've faced in recent years, the standout being Covid-19, we wanted to find a way to support schools, students and teachers.  

And so with the help of our colleagues at Harvard University's Project Zero, the idea of a program to help communities repair themselves was born.  

The program is called Transformative Repair, and is inspired by the Japanese art movement Kintsugi, where broken pottery pieces are put back together with gold lacquer that highlights the damage rather than hiding it.  

Dr. Flossie Chua from Project Zero at Harvard University is helping lead this highly successful pilot program. She talks about how the pilot has been implemented at Carey Baptist Grammar School.  

Flossie Chua:   

I’m the Project lead for this wonderful initiative with ISV. The whole idea for the project came from our sense that there is something fairly broken in the world that we live in, particularly with the bush fires, with the pandemic and all that, and we really wanted to think about how we might encourage people to look at damage in a different way. Damage that could be transformed in some ways so that it could be inspiring us to look at it as a part of our lived experience.  

The hope for this project is that we are going to encourage young people to look intentionally at damage, to think about why the damage matters, not only to them, but to their community and to the world, and to think about how they could transform it in a way that highlights the damage, but also brings up the beauty of how we have come out of it, and how that could be a way for us to recalibrate our relationship to things in the world, and to recalibrate how we function as human beings.  

Shane Green:   

Carey Baptist Grammar School joined the pilot with the Year Seven cohort. Flossie and the team from ISV returned to the school to see how they were going with the project.  

Flossie Chua:   

At Carey Grammar, they have already started on Transformative Repair as part of their visual art program for the one entire year level, and it's been exciting for us to see how they ran with the tools and the activities. The activities are not intended to be lockstep. We have seen how the Carey team has really transformed the tools that we have, and added things that are interesting.  

For example, they invited an artist in residence to work with the students.  

They also tied it very nicely to their school's vision on sustainability, so that became a theme that ran through the program that they had with their students.  

We are here to learn from them. We are here to see what they have done, and to see ways that we can further improve the program. We're excited about the second phase that they're running over the next few months, and I believe we'll continue to learn from them.  

Shane Green:   

The Carey students who took part in Transformative Repair were given the task of creating a model featuring broken household objects. Student Eva and her group made a model of a beach that featured a broken teacup, a tap and a soy sauce fish, among other things.  

Eva:   

Art is a really good way to bring out some issues that words can't describe. It was just so enjoyable and I really just loved collaborating with a ton of other kids my age. It was really fun, just sort of, well, getting out of class, but also just hanging out and being creative and bouncing ideas off each other and just seeing other people's and your own artwork just come to life. I've really got a new-found respect for broken objects, and I always think, I look at things and I go, how could I fix that? And I just think it's a really, really interesting way of giving a new life to old objects.  

Shane Green:   

The leadership team at Carey felt the need for Transformative Repair in their school and became committed to the project from the start. Here is Carey principal, Jonathon Walter.  

Jonathon Walter:   

We've been really keen to get involved in the Transformative Repair project just because it's a beautiful way of us, I guess, acknowledging the brokenness that is in our community, which we've seen flow out in all sorts of different ways over the last couple of years.  

But it moves it into a more productive space in the sense that we can acknowledge that things are not perfect, but there is some beauty that can come out of us focusing on the imperfection and looking for ways to find opportunities or ins, if you like, to make things better as a result of focusing on what we can improve and what we can focus on.  

Shane Green:   

During their visit to Carey Grammar, the ISV team walked around the campus, marvelling at what the students had created. ISV's Arts Learning Executive Anne Smith, who was leading the project with Flossie describes how she felt, seeing the work.  

Anne Smith:   

It's been amazing. What they've come up with is truly, I think, exceeding any expectation we had. We've obviously been working on the pilot materials for a while to come up with not just the arc, the three elements, the explore, transform and storify, but also the various activities that sit under each of those headings.  

To see them kind of take shape and form in a school is very exciting. I think it gives them a really great context to step into where they can think about what might be broken in the world and what they can do to fix it.  

It makes them active agents for change, thinking about how they can make positive steps to change the future. And also where does hope dwell for them? It gives them a space to hope, even though it's just a small object and they're going through this process, it is quite powerful in providing that for them.  

Shane Green:   

Another school starting the pilot has been Christian College Geelong. There they decided to bring their teaching staff on the Transformative Repair journey first.  

Anne Smith:   

Christian College Geelong have taken a different approach. The principal, Glen McKeeman, has asked us to work with a group from his leadership, middle school leadership team first, so they can then share the project at the staff conference at the beginning of 2023.  

So, by delivering it and working comprehensively with a group of teachers, we're hoping to enable them to facilitate and work with students in the future.  

Shane Green:   

Christian College Geelong principal, Glen McKeeman, explains the school's interest in the program.  

Glen McKeeman:   

Well, it began... Flossie did a presentation for a group of principals and shared a little bit about the whole notion of that possibility for people in the school setting to look at life through a different lens that helps us to think about the challenges in life in a different way and to create an opportunity for us to have conversations around that, so we jumped at it. It's a close fit with our context, in terms of us being a Christian school. We understand that notion of people being broken, and the challenges that life can bring, but that's not what defines you.  

To see that some of those points in your life can be opportunities for growth, and to look back at those and to see how, through images, through artwork, through expression, that that's a way that we can... To see the wholeness of ourselves. I think these initiatives are really important because what they do is, they provide, I think, a really good platform from which to launch that learning or that conversation with people, that's underpinned by some really authentic research, but then something that you can put in teacher's hands that they can then grab hold of and, transform that into our context and make it work for whatever setting.  

Shane Green:   

Our teacher, Dianne Martin, is pleased the teachers at the college have had the chance to have a go with the Transformative Repair program first and says this top-down approach may benefit the students.  

Dianne Martin:   

I think it's exciting that we're doing it with teachers, and I think what we said before was, we often do stuff, PD and development programs that are about the kids. I'm a big fan of Parker Palmer, you teach who you are, and I think this is going to help teachers connect to who they are, and I think it will help teachers by connecting to who they are, actually inform their practice in different ways. That's kind of exciting, I think. As we're thinking and going through this with our staff, it's not going to be about how do you engage the kids, but how do you engage yourself, and then what does that do to your teaching?  

Shane Green:   

There are three phases to the Transformative Repair program. Explore, transform, and storify – tell the story. During a full day session at Christian College Geelong, a group of teachers were given the time and space to explore their campus for damage. Then they discussed the damage and ideas for how it could be transformed.  

Dianne Martin:   

We did a walk around of inside the buildings and we were looking, I think started with looking for literal damage, cracks in the walls, bits missing and all that stuff that happens. But I started noticing things that were broken in different ways.  

We went to the art room, we had a look at the sinks, and the sinks are covered in paint, and some of the taps are covered in paint and broken. The way the kids perceive damage is interesting, and the value they then place on it. If it's damaged, it's not worth anything. The Transformative Repair gives an opportunity for that.  

But I also started taking photos of like, we had some window seals in one of the classrooms and there was a cup with a banana in it and a pencil there, and just that idea of that lack of care for a space. Actually, we are damaging the space by leaving our food there, or not putting things away or not looking after things.  

I don't think we pay attention to how we view brokenness, and we expect things of kids that we don't expect of ourselves, which all the teachers out there watching this probably not like, but I think sometimes we have these expectations of our students and we never stop and go, "If I held myself to that same account, would I match up? Am I practicing what I preach?"  

I think by getting teachers to look at this and looking at how we view damage from a personal level, again, I think I said before, it comes back to then how do we then translate that for the kids? And I think that's a really important opportunity for staff to think about, and to learn from.  

Shane Green:   

Dr. Flossie Chua explains the long-term vision for the Transformative Repair program in schools.  

Flossie Chua:   

We are hoping that the schools, when they take the Transformative Repair project on, they will find ways in which they can move their students towards a vision of a more sustainable, a more beautiful, a more joyful world, that they can have agency in that world and they could transform something that other people have discarded or have deemed as irreparable or damaged, and to feel that there is something they could do about it and to look at value of things beyond just perfection.  

We are hoping that students can begin to see that perfection is not really the end of life, that's not the reason why we are doing this, but that there is beauty in everything that we do, and that we should embrace that.  

Shane Green:   

Flossie believes the arts program could deeply impact students and generally affect the way they approach challenges in life.  

Flossie Chua:   

I think young people will become more agentic about the challenges that they experience in life. Think about climate change, it's huge, and it's really challenging for young people to think about what they could do.  

We know that there is something called eco-anxiety, which is now deemed to be an actual psychological illness, where people feel just floored by this idea of, there's so much damage around in the environment, what can I do about it? I cannot do something about it, therefore I feel helpless and I get depressed about it.  

So when you give young people the agency and the tools, it becomes the way they think. It frames who they are, and it helps them internalise all these ways of thinking that will propel them forward in a very uncertain and challenging world.  

Shane Green:   

At Independent Schools Victoria, we've loved seeing how our participating pilot schools have engaged with Transformative Repair. In particular, the way they have chosen pathways that mean the most to them. This is the great thing about working with arts-based programs such as Transformative Repair; there's a chance to personalise the work and craft your own story of damage and repair.  

The materials for Transformative Repair allow schools to take a plug-and-play approach to explore, transform, and storify their own journeys of damage discovery and repair.  

We look forward to making the program available to more schools in mid 2023. To find out more, follow the links in the show notes.  

Mike: 

Students and educators can get a taste of the powers of Transformative Repair at this Year’s Arts Learning Festival, which ISV is launching in the coming weeks. There will be a series of arts learning opportunities over the coming months aimed at exciting the imaginations of students and educators.  

Our first three events include the  Art as Repair Party and Exhibition  on May 11, where images of damage in our own world will get students thinking about the need for repair before they engage in their own artmaking activity. 

On May 10 and 11 students will get to unpack works of art from the  Australian Muslim Artists (AMA) Art Prize  – an annual showcase that celebrates the creative breadth and cultural diversity of Muslim artists – before creating works of their own.  

And on May 10, senior secondary students in music and technology (and their teachers) will get an insider’s view of the vital role music composition plays in movies and computer games from  internationally renowned screen composer Mark Buys. They’ll learn about the the processes behind recording and composing for the big screen and explore potential career pathways. 

And that’s it for this episode of isPodcast. We’re going to leave you with this ominous and evocative excerpt from the movie soundtrack to  Surrogate, by screen composer – and Arts Learning Festival presenter – Mark Buys.   

Excerpt from Surrogate

isPodcast is brought to you by Independent Schools Victoria and presented by Natalie Moutafis, Shane Green and me, Michael Broadstock. This episode was produced by Tess van der Riet and Duncan MacLean. Our podcast theme was composed and performed by Duncan, and there are transcripts of our show with links to what we've discussed at  podcast.iseducation.com.au .  

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