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I have been thinking a lot about liminality. I guess it comes with my age and maybe this past school year. Or COVID or my children getting ready to graduate or move to high school. Perhaps my own education or any of the thousand things that randomly run through my mind, but it keeps coming back.
Liminality.
Change. The process of change.
When a thing changes from one thing into another, that time when it is no longer the former but not yet the latter, that is liminality.
Writers and researchers talk often about liminal spaces. Those places that are safe for this fragile mid-metamorphosis state. The not-yet-butterfly no-longer-caterpillar, safe in its cocoon. Without the cocoon, it would die. That protective place allows vulnerability and protects the change.
It is a liminal space.
As educators, we strive for schools to be liminal spaces, where students have the freedom to think and change, to grow and become. Always the becoming.
And change is messy. It does not happen without failure, grief, heartache, and loss. Change can be sought or not. It can be intentional or not.
But it almost always is filled with error.
Mistakes.
Trial and error is nothing without the error.
So, in reality, liminal spaces are privileges. Who gets to grow and change, to be protected in that vulnerable place?
Who gets to screw up and get a second chance? Or a third? Or fourth?
Who gets to try something with potential for great success, experience great failure and still get the opportunity to try again?
Certainly the wealthy, who are given countless opportunities to redefine themselves. And often the very well connected. A powerful ally can bring protection in times of mistake or failure.
Rarely is it so for those in trauma.
Or poverty.
Which students are allowed to make foolish choices and still be allowed a do-over? Rarely the ones who are tough. Or difficult. Or unseen.
Not the porcupines, all bristle and defense, all protection but little welcome.
The thing is, it isn't just students. Adults need liminal spaces too. Adults experience liminality. We think of childhood and certainly adolescence as a place defined by change, necessarily inclusive of it. But isn't adulthood also?
When one goes from being not a parent to a parent, sure, that may occur in a moment, but the process, the evolution, it can take time. And especially for women, if it takes too much time, they are denied the comfort of liminality and face guilt and shame and judgment. Questions about their maternal instinct and womanliness.
Why? Why do we expect change to be instantaneous? Why is liminality a luxury?
I think of this around teaching. A lot. Rarely are teachers amazing from the start. When I think back to my first one or two years of teaching (and probably third, as well) some of the boneheaded things I did! But when someone is new and tired or frustrated or desperate, excellent decision-making rarely rules. It takes time to develop teacher instincts and to weed out the bad ideas from the good.
But in a world of standardized tests and evaluation rubrics, there isn't a lot of room for grace.
Growth is expected, and failure is given good lip service but rarely is there room for it. And in education today, there is certainly no time for it.
Teachers can't become good teachers without liminal spaces.
When I tell people this, especially people not in education, this seems obvious.
Why, then, is it so hard to allow inside the world of education?
I would hypothesize that, at least in part, it comes from the Teacher Hunger Games mentality created by No Child Left Behind and nurtured through the diligent care of the Gates Foundation and watered with plenty of Pearson administered tests. (But we all know how I feel about that.)
My concern is that it seems like this has taken a new, more sinister phase. Not just in education but in, well, everything.
The world is so quick to accuse. So quick to comment. Everyone has a biting 144 character comment, often shielded by distance or anonymity. We can't seem to find grace for anyone, and certainly not mercy.
But ripping open a chrysalis for a biting comment on the lack of progress doesn't speed things along. It leads to death.
George Saunders, an author I deeply respect, often talks about the need for love and kindness in everything we do (while still recognizing the difficulty in that). (If you have some time, this video of his 2013 Syracuse commencement address is priceless).
In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, Saunders talked about a comment of his: “Kindness is the only non-delusional response to the human condition.” They talked about how to be kind, why it took practice, and what Saunders did to specifically encourage this in his life.
What an idea! To be intentional about kindness. To practice it and work at it, seeing it as a skill that we learn and nurture it.
In a different interview, Saunders said, "My belief is that, actually, this whole mess down here on earth only holds together via small acts of decency and kindness. We tend to overlook or minimize the effect of the small things, but that is really what a culture is – that collection of thousands of small, habitual, decent moves that collectively make life somewhat predictable and 'normal.'"
He goes on to say, "if a kid sees someone behaving lovingly towards someone they love, that gets into their bodies and they will emulate that behavior without even knowing they are doing it".
Which brings me back to liminal spaces.
I wonder if the reason education is so cut-throat right now is that we are not giving the time and space to really develop those habits of mind, to become kinder and more loving.
Schools are so focused on the data from the test (instead of trusting the data from the skilled educator), they fail to allow room for those choices each day that allow us to be kinder and show kindness to others and ourselves.
I think that in the school ecosystem, kindness is both a cause and a result. It is cyclical. The thing that makes the liminal space is the kindness, while, at the same time, the process within that space is (or, more accurately, could be) becoming more kind.
With our students.
With ourselves.
With our colleagues.
And all of that kindness provides a space to grow and think, to change and become, again, always the becoming. In other ways and around other ideas. Beyond kindness. But empowered by it, protected by it.
As I reflect on the past year, I can say, an important aspect for me was a distinct lack of kindness. Not from everyone. But from enough people, groups, situations. Enough to create a sense of unease. Danger. That sense that one can never relax because some peril lurked.
And that sense of danger is anathema to liminality.
One is not free to grow and change, to become if there is always a threat, however vague or undefined.
Looking back, reflecting now that there is a bit of distance between the year and me, I can see that, in large part, the danger I felt was not from COVID but a lack of kindness.
My district masked from the beginning and followed quarantine rules. We allowed vulnerable staff members and students to work and learn remotely. We used a zillion gallons of hand sanitizer and socially distanced and cleaned cleaned cleaned. On the surface, we did all of the things right, and because of that, we had virtually no school-to-school transmissions.
But the unkindness. You felt it. Lurking. Waiting. It was almost tangible. It created fear and destroyed trust. It led to isolation then dug moats around it.
Unkindness in general is horrible. In a school, it is a poison. Not just for students (but definitely for them). For the staff. The families. The communities.
And when it is there, it is almost as if you can see it, snaking out and around, noxious tendrils lurking, waiting, and suffocating those who try even to breathe.
Liminality in unkindness? Forget it.
So, for the coming year, I am again going to focus my efforts on kindness. Compassion. Mercy.
Those are the strands that build the protective space where we can grow and change.
My students need it.
My colleagues need it.
I need it.
In Saunders's speech (Seriously, it is amazing. Watch it.), he says to "err in the direction of kindness". In my first year in my current district, I had that written on the podium at the front of the room. At one point, a student said she didn't know what it meant. So, in the way that is beautifully agonizing for teachers, I got to stumble my way through trying to explain something I deeply understood but struggled to explain.
It was not amazing.
Since then, I have thought about it a lot. How to explain that, what it means, how it looks to err in the direction of kindness.
If I could go back, I would tell that student that every day we make choices--a few, many, some enormous, some inconsequential--that we make having no idea what we are doing. We make our best guess and do what we think is probably correct. That isn't unique to schooling, and it doesn't end at graduation.
Each of those situations is a crossroads of sorts. Of two roads or three or ten. But we have to choose a path, then go.
It is in our nature to choose the one that looks best for us. The outcome that works well with my life and my needs and my goals.
But maybe the better way is to choose the one that is kind. Since we don;'t know and are making a best guess anyway, maybe we should make the choice that looks the best for others. That meets the needs of others. The path that is most likely to make the path not easier but better for others.
That is kindness.
And it is hard. Especially when the others are ones we don't know. Or don't like. Who wants to take a risk that will likely or predominantly help others?
But if we do this, then maybe others see it and make similar choices, ones shrouded in kindness that make the way easier or more illuminated or better for us, when we are the others, when we are those who are unknown or unliked.
That place where things are better, smoother, safer, with a path on which someone has cut away the branches and left a light in the distance even though they may not how it?
That is a liminal space.
And we build that by erring in the direction of kindness.
