Seeds of Awareness for ‘Kids of All Stripes’ in 2020

Seeds of Awareness is an organization in the Bay Area, offering mindfulness counsel services for “neurodiverse” children. “Studies show mindfulness instruction to have a positive impact on executive functioning, decreasing anxiety, improving focus, and enhancing overall wellbeing. Our counseling, social skills groups, and teacher training and mindfulness instruction create a culture of kindness and care at our schools” (retrieved from seeds-of-awareness.org). The organization offers teacher training on mindfulness for counselors, who sometimes act as special educators or work with the same children. As a means for counselors to explore neurodiverse learning styles, Seeds enforces core competencies for counselors and teachers to understand the ways to relate with modes of understanding the world. I was trained in the Seeds summer camp program Fiddleheads, and I was trained as an ecopsychology counselor. I mostly paid attention to the core competencies embedded in Fiddleheads training “self-awareness” and “social awareness” as a means to enhance self-regulation and help children to develop self-regulated learning.

In “Self-Efficacy and Self-Regulated Learning: The Dynamic Duo in School Performance,” Gaskill and Hoy (2002) discuss how self-regulation implies using strategies that will enable individuals “to act as agents for achieving their own success in an important way to enhance their self-efficacy” (2002, p. 201). Gaskill and Hoy refer to self-efficacy as “individuals’ beliefs about their ability to execute a particular performance” (2002, p. 186). The focus on self-regulated learning and self-efficacy is part of the objectives when Seeds counselors are trained to enter school districts. During an interview with psychologist Susan Wilde, as Director of Seeds, Dr. Wilde said “it’s about learning how to learn.” The goal is to foster a learning environment to form values for children to “feel physically and emotionally safe and supported in order to learn and become empowered” (2016, 560). I consider their conceptual framework in relation to the competencies and conditions necessary to empower a child to recognize their core and inner-strengths, by gaining a sense of agency.

During the pandemic, to develop self-efficacy is perhaps the biggest challenge, yet the most essential challenge to conquer. However, the greatest is a puzzle is how does one even learns how to learn without any support from schooling, especially during cultural disadvantages, language barriers, and lack of financial resources. Dr. Wilde has been involved in a handful of cases during the age of coronavirus, supporting children who are struggling with the change to virtual learning and online education. I asked if there were any issues within the dynamics of bridging communication between parents, teachers, counselors, and principles, as well as the child students. I heard about how in some cases, educators are “too hard” on children and “unempathetic,” while other times the education expectations have been dropped. Either way, Dr. Wilde has found that special education students are encountering a larger amount of cracks in the school system. “For kids that need to ask for help, the screen makes it even harder for them. If the teacher is not aware that the kid has specific learning needs, then how can the teacher be effective with that kid? He is just falling into a whole bunch of cracks.”

A student who suffers from anxiety was getting counted absent for not having his camera on and was failing the class until Dr. Wilde addressed the issue with the child’s teacher. He doesn’t like seeing his face on the screen. Dr. Wilde was told that the student should have told him, and he asked that the student reminded him every day. She responded frankly and simply, “He has anxiety! Would you like me to call you every morning and remind you?” The teacher agreed to take the extra step to consider the child’s challenges. “I know it is really hard for the teachers, but you know, you should be a little more curious then just jumping to conclusions… ‘This kid is just lazy...he’s just lazy and obnoxious.’” She stated how he comes every single day and he tries to go to all of his classes. “He doesn’t understand any of what they are talking about. His mother and his father have not gone to very much school, so they can’t help him with his homework.” She continues, “That is a kid that needs an IEP because he learns differently.” She also mentions how he does not have any friends at school, “there are very few kids that look like him.” He had a hard time with the school before because he did not want to ask for help in front of other kids, and has become extra challenging during online education.

“I have a client who is a 16-year-old kid with severe learning disabilities and ADHD. He happens to be a kid-of-color, and his school district is almost entirely white. I attended his IEP recently and had to put up quite a big battle.” I asked about the cracks and the fault lines that occurred here. Dr. Wilde stated, “I think the teachers meant well...they have too many kids in their classes...they don’t have the time to consider one kid’s special needs. That is what the school district is supposed to do, but they left this kid with a half-finished IEP from February and never did anything. They left him. They put him in all the wrong classes. The mother doesn’t speak English.”

There was concern by the administration months later about how to communicate with the mother, Dr. Wilde expresses, “You have your emails translated into Spanish for her. You don’t just ignore her because you don’t speak her language. So, that kid has really given up on school. He has a really special interest which he hasn’t pursued because he has to do Algebra which he can’t do. He can’t do Algebra.” In order to pursue a future and an advanced career, he has to learn pre-Algebra but they are forcing him into Algebra and he is failing. In this case, Dr. Wilde went to court after playing the role of bridging a gap between the school and family. “In this meeting, there were two lawyers. The lawyer for the school district and the lawyer for the family. Then there was me, there was the mom, and there was a translator from the school district to translate the mom to everybody and back to the mom. There was the gym teacher, the music teacher, the biology teacher, the math teacher, and the history teacher, and there was the special ed person at the school and the vice-principal. The only POC were the mom and the lawyer for the family. The only woke people were them and me.” Eventually, the school paid attention to the unnecessary issues he was facing in school, though dismissing the issues for months. “After me putting up a big fight and the parents hired a lawyer, they finally put him in an appropriate level math class. He told me last Wednesday, he finally understands what the math teacher is talking about, so he feels like he will get a good grade now.” Another striking case that Dr. Wilde stepped into was with issues related to the barriers of the immigration process and cultural disadvantages. “I also have a lot of kids whose parents have immigration cases. They have already the stress of whether their dad will be deported. The hearing is coming up soon. The kids are just falling apart on the inside because they love their dad and they don’t want their dad to be taken away. They can’t focus on school at all, and the screens...they are all failing all their classes...” This case is one of the many that educators and counselors face, facing concerns from the social structures and not having the power to completely shift the make-up society, but to find ways to help struggling children.

The ultimate challenge that arose in our contemporary moment: “To build alliances through a screen, when you have not met that person in real life.” This blog acknowledges the rise of mindfulness counselors, and how Seeds of Awareness continues the mission for children around to develop social-emotional skills, during the age of coronavirus. The goal is to create a way for the children to want to learn and learn on their own, to self-regulate, and to embody their own inner-strengths. Perhaps another significant challenge to consider during the age of coronavirus is the way children are finding ways to stay engaged, as well as finding ways to support engagement. How do children acquire personal education expectations? How can they be shaped and maintained with an online platform? As psychologists and neurologists study this historical moment, with concerns about learning disabilities, more light has been shed on a need for services that offer an appropriate education for “kids of all stripes,” as Dr. Wilde states.

---

References

Gaskill, P. J., & Hoy, A. W., (2002). Self-efficacy and self-regulated learning: The dynamic duo in school performance. In J. Aronson (Ed.), Improving academic achievement: Impact of psychological factors on education (pp. 185–210). Academic Press.

Murphy-Graham, Erin and Cynthia Lloyd. (2015). “Empowering adolescent girls in developing countries: The potential role of education.” Sage Articles. https://doi.org/10.1177/1478210315610257