A Primer on Gentle Teaching

1
A Primer on Gentle Teaching

• Gentle Teaching is many things. Gentleness toward
  others, in spite of what anyone does or does not
  do, is the critical factor. It is a paradox.
  Fists are met with hugs. Cursing is met with
  words of affection and nurturing. Spiteful eyes
  are met with warmth. Gentleness recognizes that
  all change is mutual and interwoven. It starts
  with caregivers and, hopefully, touches those who
  are most marginalized. Its central focus is to
  express unconditional love. It is the framework
  around a psychology of human interdependence. The
  main idea of gentleness is not to get rid of
  someone elses behaviors, but to deepen our own
  inner feelings of gentleness in the face of
  violence or disregard.
• Gentle Teaching is also a teaching approach. As
  such, it has four initial teaching purposesto
  teach others to feel safe, loved, loving, and
  engaged. These do not just happen. They are
  taught through repeated acts of love. Gentle
  caregivers learn to use their presence, hands,
  words, and eyes as their primary teaching tools
  to uplift and honor others.

2
Gentle Teaching is...

• Focusing on being kind, nurturing, and loving
  toward marginalized children and adultsthose who
  have been pushed to the edge of family or
  community life,
• Helping those who have sorrowful life-stories
  feel safe with us and loved by us and others,
• Helping those who have inherent vulnerabilities
  such as extreme poverty, homelessness, mental
  disability or mental illness feel safe with us
  and loved by us and others,
• Looking at our role as teaching feelings of
  companionship and community,
• Mending broken hearts hearts that have been
  broken by tragic life stories or by the
  particular nature of a mental or emotional
  disability.

3
Safe, Loved, Loving, and Engaged

• Gentle Teaching is based on a psychology of human
  interdependence. It asks caregivers to look at
  themselves and their spirit of gentleness to find
  ways to express warmth and unconditional love
  toward those who are the most disenfranchised
  from family and community life. It views our role
  as critical and requires a deep commitment to
  personal and social change. It starts with
  ourselves, our warmth toward others, our
  willingness to give without any expectation of
  receiving anything in return, and our intense
  desire to form feelings of companionship and
  community with those who are the most pushed to
  the very edge of society.
• Gentle Teaching focuses on four essential
  feelings that need to be taught to those who are
  served safe, loved, loving, and engaged.
  Caregivers not only need to ensure that those
  whom they serve are safe, but, more importantly,
  feel safe.

4
Safe means

• Safe means a sense of self-dignity because "My
  care givers sees me as whole and good." It also
  means that caregivers have to teach each person
  "You are safe with me!" My hands will never harm
  you! My words will never put you down! And, my
  eyes will never look at you with disdain!"
  Feeling safe gives a deep sense of being at peace
  while with caregivers. And this spreads
  eventually to others.
• Flinching in terror at someones approach begins
  to disappear and is replaced with a calming
  sensation and a feeling of relief. The teacher
  can now walk up to the child and the little one
  feels relaxed and attentive. The parent can walk
  by the child in the living room and the child
  feels a sense of warmth. The man who used to
  curse and hit the caregiver now looks for a warm
  embrace. The woman who used to run away now wants
  to be with her caregiver.

5
Loved

• A spirit of gentleness involves teaching those
  who are marginalized that they are loved. This
  also starts with a feeling "I am somebody!" It is
  intertwined with a feeling of being safe, but
  goes beyond it. It deepens that sense of security
  and gives hope to the person. Feeling loved by
  others means the person begins to learn "I am
  more than safe. Life is more than no harm coming
  to me. If I am safe and loved, then I perhaps can
  give this to others."

6
Loving

• Once feeling loved, the child or adult begins to
  have a deepening sense of warmth toward othersa
  smile when seeing a caregiver, cheerful words or
  sounds, a twinkle in the eye. The man in the
  homeless shelter who has no material goods begins
  to think "I am somebody because my care givers
  see me as somebody!" As the person begins to feel
  safe and loved, these feelings then begin to
  spread out to others. Those who are marginalized
  begin to reach out to others with their love.
  Hands become tools for tenderness and embraces.
  Words become tools for uplifting others. Eyes
  become windows to the heart.

7
Engagement

• Caregivers also teach human engagement.
• This is made up of three basic feelings
• 1) it is good to be with one another,
• 2) it is good to do things with one another.
  And,
• 3) it is good to do things for one another.
• Human engagement is the homeless person in the
  shelter preparing and serving meals to others. It
  is the child in the classroom doing projects with
  other children. It is the man or woman in a group
  home doing chores together simply because it is
  good to be together. It is street children
  forming community to protect each other and share
  the little they have gathered.

8
Gentle Teaching is Not..

• A behavioral or behavior modification approach
  that uses reward and punishment to change
  behaviors rather it is based on unconditional
  love,
• A "whatever works" approach rather one that looks
  at broadening and deepening a sense of
  companionship and community as a life-project,
• A fast and easy approach toward helping others,
  but one that calls on deep commitment and
  dedication on the part of caregivers,
• Just a way to look at changing someone elses
  reality, but first asking us to look at our own
  reality and make it warmer and more loving,
• Simply a technique but also a psychology of human
  interdependence.

9
Who Needs a Spirit of Gentleness?

• Those who are homelessliving on the streets and
  not knowing where their next meal will come from,
  
• Street children in the Third Worldlittle
  children living in sewers and gutters, finding
  their respite under bridges and door stoops, and
  making their meals from garbage thrown on the
  streets,
• Individuals locked up in long term psychiatric
  hospitalspeople with schizophrenia,
  manic-depression, depression, and a host of other
  diagnostic categories,
• Institutionalized individuals with mental
  disabilitysometimes tossed into warehouse-like
  settings, sometimes in more home-like places, but
  most sensing deep loneliness, and
• Individuals being supported in community living
  and working settingssometimes able to connect
  easily with a feeling of companionship and
  community, at other times left to live lonely,
  empty, and sad lives,
• Elderly men and women confined in nursing
  homesoften forgotten and left to die alone,
• Children and adolescents in public
  schoolschildren with "behavior" problems,
  children segregated from other children, children
  suspended from school, children who see violence
  as their only way to live their short lives,
  children who find meaning in gangs instead of in
  families.

10
Who Are Involved in Gentle Teaching?

• Parents and families who are in a quandary as to
  how to help their children,
• Teachers in classrooms who are having a hard time
  helping children and adolescents with
  life-stories filled with violence, harm to self,
  and meaninglessness,
• Care givers in institutions who are trying to
  find non-violent ways to deal with impersonal
  systems,
• Care givers in community homes who want to create
  feelings of companionship and community,
• Care givers in shelters for the homeless, jails
  and prisons who want to bring a spirit of
  gentleness where it seems impossible to find,
• Program administrators who want to implement a
  management style that establishes a culture of
  life, and
• Policy-makers and legislators who want to
  initiate creative laws and ways to support
  marginalized people with dignity and respect.

11
How Can I Teach a Spirit of Gentleness?

• Touch tenderly without provoking any violence.
  For the little child or the adult abandoned to
  years of ware housing this might mean a 1,000
  hugs a dayfirst just light and slow touches to
  the hand, then to the face, and eventually
  transformed into an embrace.
• For some, touch might be very minimal-- for the
  man or woman racked with extreme poverty touch
  might be a warm handshake upon greeting and
  leaving or for the adult traumatized by sexual
  abuse it might be just our physical proximity.
• Speak softly, slowly, and affectionatelyusing
  your word to uplift, encourage, and nurture
  instead of to correct or reprimand.
• Gaze warmly into the persons eyes as if they are
  the windows to the soul.
• Do activities with the person, or even for the
  person, before expecting anyone to do things for
  you.
• Beckon the person to reach out to you with loving
  touch, soft words, and warm gazes.
• At all costs, avoid provoking any violence and
  focus sharply on evoking a sense of peace.

12
What Can I do as a Gentle Person?

• It might be the priest in Japan who smiles
  lovingly at the child who screams and curses
  words of hatred.
• It might be the teacher in the United States who
  greets each child who enters the classroom with a
  warm smile and a pat on the back.
• It might be the mother in Mexico who starts a
  school for children with severe disabilities and
  makes sure that each feels safe and loved.
• It might be the physician in Portugal who sees to
  it that single pregnant mothers learn their own
  worth and that of their infants.
• It might be the caregiver in an institution in
  Denmark who gives tender hugs to a woman with
  autism.
• It might be the group home worker in Canada who
  forms a care giving community and ensures that
  caregivers and those who are supported feel
  companionship with each other.
• It might be the parents of sons and daughters
  with life-stories of psychiatric hospitalizations
  forming an advocacy group to bring about social
  change.
• It might be the militant in Brazil living on the
  streets with abandoned childrenteaching them to
  feel safe and loved, to recognize injustice and
  justice, and sharing with them the values they
  need to bring about their own social change.

13
Administering a Spirit of Gentleness

• There are many governmental and bureaucratic
  barriers that make gentleness hard, not
  impossible, but unnecessarily difficult. Some of
  these are
• Congregating large numbers of people together so
  that warm relationships are hard to establish,
• Looking for ways to control instead of to
  nurture,
• Using behavior modification analysis and planning
  as the be-all-and-end-all of what we must do,
• Training caregivers in practices that are
  perceived as violent the use of physical
  management, chemical restraint, and
  punishment-based intervention,
• Writing policies that encourage congregation,
  segregation, and control rather than
  interdependence, companionship, and community,
  and
• Pushing people into independence without needed
  support systems.