Disrupting School Rituals

           In this article in Urban Education, Eric DeMeulenaere (Clark University) describes how he and two high-school teachers started their school year in a way that shook up the usual get-acquainted/syllabus-review/rules-and-expectations ritual for a group of 27 seniors: 

• The classroom lights were out and the blinds closed. 
• At the rear of the classroom, a projector displayed the question, Why are we here? 
• On a side wall in bold letters were several signs with life aspirations, including: Write a novel, Hike the Appalachian Trail, Be a Mom, Live off the grid. 
• Chairs were arranged in a circle, and students sauntered in and sat near their friends. 
• The teachers stood in a corner, backs to students, talking among themselves. 
• Three minutes passed, and students’ chit-chat subsided to puzzled whispers. 
• Finally one teacher walked to the middle of the circle and read a story about a painful conversation he had with his father, who had returned after abandoning the family. 
• The teacher said, “I’ve only shared that story with four people before today,” and then, gesturing to the back of the room, added, “This is partly why I am here today.” 

          This was the kick-off for an innovative “Roots and Routes” class in this low-performing urban high school in central Massachusetts, designed to change the usual pattern of very few students going on to post-secondary education. The group was drawn from every achievement level in the school – potential valedictorians and gang members, gamers and teen moms – and all, says DeMeulenaere, were “woefully underprepared for college.” The principal’s charge to the teachers and DeMeulenaere was to help students prepare for and apply to colleges – and teachers had free rein to try different methods.

          “While this project focuses on the internal and micro-level interactions of students and teachers in a single urban school classroom,” says DeMeulenaere, “it recognizes that the classroom culture is deeply influenced by the larger school and community context.” This included a depressed economy, poverty, and segregation, along with inadequate funding for the school, poor administrative decisions, less-than-effective teaching in some classrooms, and insufficient counseling and psychological services. Still, DeMeulenaere and his colleagues hoped to change the distrustful relationships between students and their middle-class teachers by shifting school rituals associated with factories and the military to trust-building rituals drawn from the theater and places of worship. 

          DeMeulenaere describes three other experiences from the first week of the Roots and Routes project (which took place during the 2008-09 school year), all designed to “shake the students free from going through the motions of schooling…” 

• The altar – At the end of the first day, students were given a handmade artist book created by one of the teachers and given several days to create their bucket list and a symbol that represented themselves on their life journey. When they were finished several days later, students placed their books on a table at the back of the classroom decked out with a black tablecloth and candles to resemble an altar. DeMeulenaere shared his aspirational list and symbol, and invited students to follow suit. After an awkward silence and some giggling, one student stepped forward, and others followed, clearly investing in the ritual that couldn’t have been more different from standard school protocols. “The fact that no one could even assess these projects,” says DeMeulenaere, “that teachers completed this task alongside students, and that everyone shared their books in the class disrupted the status hierarchies in this classroom and began to forge new relationships between teachers and students. And through a collective and ritualized sharing, each member of the classroom community was recognized for their individual humanity rather than their status role in the classroom.” 
• The mountain climb – On a hot day shortly after this, students were driven to the base of the tallest mountain in the region, divided into three teams, and dropped off at different locations. With no maps, compasses, or assistance from the teacher accompanying them, students were asked to figure out how to get to the top of the mountain. In addition, each group had an egg, a helium balloon, a bag of ice, and an opened 50-pound bottle of water; the challenge was to get to the mountaintop without breaking the egg, popping the balloon, spilling any of the water – and before the ice melted. Each group got lost at least once, says DeMeulenaere. Students expressed frustration that the teachers wouldn’t help them and struggled with the four items, especially the water container. But all the groups came up with creative solutions, including using hair ties and plastic bags to seal the top of the water bottle and using sticks and belts to harness the heavy jug. All students reached the summit before their ice melted, and there was great celebration and euphoria, with the first arrivals cheering on the others. One high-achieving student who initially wanted nothing to do with one member of her group who she believed was headed for prison was deeply moved by the leadership he took and, in her college essay, said she “began to see myself and the people I grew up with in a new light.” 
• The permanent marker incident – At the top of the mountain, one of the teachers noticed that several students had used a permanent marker to write their names on one of the stone lookouts. Before they returned to school, the teachers gathered students in a circle and asked them to reflect on the incident without saying anything. Back at school, there was a lengthy discussion in which some students said it wasn’t a big deal (like carving initials in a tree, a way of capturing the moment), others saying they should tell the principal and accept the consequences. But the discussion wound up in a different place: several of the perpetrators paid for cleaning supplies and those students, accompanied by others who weren’t complicit, returned to the mountain with their teachers and scrubbed the stone markers clean. 

          DeMeulenaere and his colleagues continued in this vein for the rest of the year, including taking students through a high ropes course, visiting their families, and returning several times to the “altar” to discuss students’ and teachers’ aspirations. The result was a higher level of trust within the group, students seeing their classmates in new and more-accepting ways, and improved academic achievement. 

          “Teachers want students to do more than just go through the motions of schooling,” DeMeulenaere concludes. “But teachers too often fail to recognize that their deployment of scripted school rituals fosters routinized relationships marked by hierarchy, control, distrust, and disengagement. This is even more pronounced in urban schools where differences in the socioeconomic and racial backgrounds between teachers and students foster even greater distrust… Teachers committed to social change need to think beyond curriculum redesign and pedagogical innovation and begin to re-envision the micro-level interactions of classroom rituals.” 

 “Disrupting School Rituals” by Eric DeMeulenaere in Urban Education, January 2023 (Vol. 58, #1, pp. 59-86); DeMeulenaere can be reached at edemeulenaere@clarku.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #966 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.