A restorative practitioner’s experience of lockdown

I want to begin this piece by acknowledging the privilege I have to be able to stay at home without needing to worry about food and money. We live frugally and grow much of our own food anyway and, although my own earnings have dried up, there are two of us and two can live as cheaply as one. In addition, we have a light, airy house with lots of space, and a large, beautiful garden. We live in the countryside in England — a country which is permitting daily exercise — and so we can walk, cycle, run and enjoy sports like kayaking and paddleboarding in the nearby river.

Furthermore, in this house live just my husband and I. We are not trying to balance work with child care and home education like so many people. Our daughters are both adults and have their own independent lives. One is a hospital doctor, but fortunately, as she is a paediatrician, she is not facing the frontline of Covid-19 care. The other works in an outdoor centre doing amazing work in nature with troubled young people who do not respond well to the strictures of conventional schooling. She was off work for a while, furloughed like so many others (furloughed staff in the

UK have 80% of their income paid for by the government), but is now back at work, as these very vulnerable children need what the centre can offer for their own mental health and well-being.

I think this personal context and acknowledgement of privilege is very important as millions of people all over the world are living in much, much more challenging circumstance.
 

I appreciate that so many people are facing financial hardship, lack of food, loss of jobs, fear of what the virus could mean for them, and heightened stress often leading to conflict and violence. And this awareness has been the motivation for some of the projects I have been involved in since our lockdown began.

And that brings me to Zoom! This on-line platform was something I knew very little about on March 23rd when the lockdown began. I now spend several hours a day on this platform — either taking part in meetings hosted by someone else or hosting them myself. I love it!

I have learned how to use break-out rooms, share my screen, record footage to make into a film to share later and I am gradually developing the confidence to be able to run training courses on-line. So far I have only run two webinars but I can see that even skills-based training can be possible using breakout rooms.

One way I have been learning is by signing up to other people’s courses. I can see that there are various ways to offer on-line training — either ‘live’ using something like Zoom or in a more pre-packaged way using film and downloads like PDF materials. This is my next learning challenge — to make and edit my own films and design a training package to share.

Another way I have used Zoom is to facilitate an on-line restorative meeting. I was asked to do this by a colleague working in the field. I made it clear I had never done anything like this before and that I would be feeling my way. However both parties were very keen to ‘meet’ and move on from the issues that had occurred and so I agreed. In fact the first preparatory meeting with one party was done using Skype, but my confidence and experience with Zoom was developing by the day and so the second preparatory meeting and the face-to-face meeting were both done using Zoom. The feedback I received was very positive from both parties and I certainly learned a lot from the experience. I know there have been some concerns over security and confidentiality with Zoom but we had no problems. And I believe Zoom has now added other features which make this a much safer platform.

I have also participated in one of the on-line forums hosted by Ian Marder on behalf of Estonian colleagues which have been proving very useful. The reports of these are available to read here. On the first meeting I was the only person there who had had any experience of this (at that stage only two preparatory meetings — with the face-to-face meeting happening a few hours after the on-line forum!). Since then I believe there have been many more experiences .— we are all learning together and being very experimental. It is inspiring and exciting. More recently the UK charity Why Me?, on whose Board I sit as a trustee, has been running some on-line forums for restorative practitioners and there is a similar growth in creativity using on-line ways to support victims, offenders and their respective families.

We are all learning together and being very experimental. It is inspiring and exciting

I have also discovered a new platform called circl.es to which a colleague from Mallorca, Vicenç Rulan, introduced me. I recommend it to restorative practitioners and trainers. Once you log in you find yourself sitting in a circle with everyone else. You can sign up for a free demonstration and then you can get started. It does not have the Breakout Room feature that makes Zoom so useful but I believe the company, a young enthusiastic start-up, is working on this feature.

‘An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.’

Viktor Frankl (1962)

The restorative way of thinking about behaviour, and the awareness from nonviolent communication that all behaviour is motivated by our unmet needs, can really help adults respond positively to conflict and challenge. It is still possible to hold people to account, but with empathy, patience and compassion and with an eye to putting things right, rather than with harsh words and sanctions.

One of our group came up with the acronym RESTORE that stands for Recognition, Empathy, Safety, Trauma, Relationships and Engagement. We believe these are key elements to attend to on returning to school after such a long break. We divided up the task between us of writing a short piece about why each of these key topics was important right now and how a restorative approach could contribute to addressing the topic.

We were all so fired up with enthusiasm that we were often meeting on-line twice a week and e-mails have been, and still are, flying between us daily, if not hourly! Within a week or so of beginning one colleague had designed a website to host what we had created and within another week we had launched! We are adding new content every day it seems — methodology, blogs etc. — and we have had over twelve thousand hits from all over the world — and many thousands of downloads.

The feedback has been extremely positive. We have created something that schools realise they need.

We have the perfect opportunity to show how restorative practice, with its emphasis on relationships, connection, deep communication and healing, is exactly what schools need — now especially, but also for the future.

Here is our website. Please share this with anyone you know who either works in a school, has contacts with a school or who has school-aged children or grandchildren. If it is helpful, translate it and use it — all we ask is that you acknowledge the source.

Belinda Hopkins is the director of Transforming Conflict, the National Centre for Restorative Approaches in Youth and Community Settings (UK).