Finding Your ‘Be’:  A Starting Place 

Transformative Educational Leadership Journal | ISSUE Spring 2024

In order to walk with intention and live up to her values, Deena relies on a set of tools she designed specifically to help her navigate nuanced and tricky situations. These tools encourage thoughtful action and decision-making so as not to default to perpetuating the systemic inequities inherent in our systems’ design. This piece invites you to centre the stories of the human beings in front of you and take action from this place of understanding, rather than from a place of assumptions and systemic defaults.

By Deena Kotak Buckley

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Complex organizations and institutions, including education, are founded on a system-centered design model, meaning the functional requirements are the focus, not the humans using it. Efficiency, scalability, reliability, cost reduction, ensuring compliance, and security are central to this design model (Żak & Pakrosnis, 2023). Leaning solely on this design model, it is difficult not to notice gaps between best intentions and best outcomes as even the most well-intentioned people within an organization stumble to collaboratively fulfill student, staff and community needs, especially the needs of those that have been historically underserved (Cranston & Jean-Paul, 2021; Oloo, 2023). To overcome this gap between intention and outcome we must center student flourishing; policies and practices that will equip students to care for themselves while making contributions to others and the wider world (De Ruyter & Oades, 2022; VanderWeele & Hinton, 2024). This approach moves education away from system-centered to human-centered. A human-centered enterprise is one that exists to fulfill a purpose for those it serves and orients all innovation and operations around those people (Luckin, Rosemary & Underwood et al., 2006). Given the current governance structure of education, these questions arise:

1. Can we navigate our day to day through a human-centered (as opposed to a system-centered) lens while staying true to our fiduciary role? and
2. How can we navigate this convergence and still maintain the positive aspects of both human- and system-centered design?

I have reflected on these queries many times throughout my career as I have moved through different roles. To illustrate how I came up with some tools to overcome these potentially competing imperatives, I share the story of a student whose identifying descriptors have been removed to protect their anonymity.

This student attended a high school close to a major intersection near a body of water and was eloping from school property on a regular basis. He loved water and was a talented athlete so could get himself to the water before staff could even get out the door. While the student loved water, he could not swim. The school often had to call emergency response to help find the student. As the student had recently come to Canada from a refugee camp, this intensive emergency response would escalate his behaviour. Using this scenario as a foothold, I will share two tools that I developed to help me do this work in a good way. I share these, not as an expert, but as a premise for personal reflection by the reader. I invite you to think of a story you have navigated in your work and, while you continue to read, ask yourself:

• What is resonating with me?
• What is not?
• What questions do I have?
• What more do I want to learn?

I ask the dichotomous questions of what is resonating and what is not as the tension that arises at the crux of these two questions is often where our own voice emerges.

My ‘Be’

The first tool is my ‘be’. In the fall of 2018, I watched a presentation by Suzanne Hoffman, CEO British Columbia School Trustees Association, at the UBC Women in Education series. In her presentation she outlined 20 Be’s and while I do not normally save presentations, I saved this one and would come back to it time and time again. Since that time, I have really considered my ‘be’ as we all have different lived experiences with which we approach life; knowing our ‘be’ can help us avoid the pitfalls of unconscious bias and allow us to be more impactful, powerful stewards for those that we serve (Emberton, 2021; Greenwald, Dasgupta et al., 2022).

In reflecting on my ‘be’ I recognized that my ‘be’ was a set of guiding principles. I share with the understanding that they constantly transform as I learn more about myself and the communities I serve.

My ‘be’ as guiding principles:

• Humanity is the spirit
• Equity is the lens
• Leadership is the how
• Education is the opportunity

With my ‘be’ becoming more defined, I turned to drafting a roadmap that would help me navigate a system-focused enterprise through human-centered design. Again, I share this roadmap with the understanding that it grows and transforms at the intersection of my learning about myself and the communities I serve.

My Roadmap

My second tool is a road map which I based on Furman’s ethic of community (2004). This spoke to me as while the ethic of community serves as the foundation, Furman acknowledges the necessary connection to the ethic of care, critique, justice, and profession which can help manage the interplay of personal conviction with fiduciary obligations. Using Furman’s model of ethics, I created guiding questions that I ask myself when responding to emergent situations as well as during proactive planning.

By first asking ‘who are the people involved’ (humanizing) we authentically step away from seeing situations as problems that need to be fixed (dehumanizing). Circling back to the story of the student, in the past I would rely on a solution-focused design and try to fix the student to fit the situation. I would consider bus routes, time on the bus, available spaces in neighbouring schools, and so on. I would want to solve this problem of ‘fit’ as efficiently as possible and, as the student was non-verbal, it would be easy to assume what his needs were and try to meet them. I stopped myself from falling into ‘fix mode’ by leaning on my ‘be’ and roadmap. These tools helped me intentionally unpack the circumstances centering on the student and his needs first. Paying attention to his non-verbal signals and using an adapted empathy interview model (Lochmeiler, 2023), we recognized that the need he was trying to meet was sensory. He loved to run, and he loved to be in the water because he loved movement; eloping fulfilled this need to move. We wanted to support his autonomy and self-determination, but we also had an obligation to keep him safe (governance); this is where human-centered design and fiduciary role can bump up against one another. But, using the principles of co-design, putting the person most impacted by the system at the centre, can overcome these potentially competing imperatives (Greenhalgh et al., 2016). We centered the student’s love for movement and learned that being on a bus satisfied that need. We were able to find a placement at a school that allowed him to be on the bus for a long enough time that his movement need would be met. We also chose a school that was far from traffic so that if he did elope, he would be safe, easy to find without requiring an emergency response.

This story shows that approaching education through a human-centered lens may impact some aspects of a solution-focused design (efficiency, scalability, etc.), but the acknowledgement and care for the person outweighs those aspects. Fay and Funk (1995) share data that shows the correlation between different factors and academic achievement and found that the biggest factor, 78%, was the quality of human interactions in the school. This data suggests high quality relationships matter most. We also know that well-being is closely related to individual and community health, flourishing, and prosperity (Haim-Litevsky, Komemi et al., 2023; Oberle et al., 2018). Investing the time and heart into learning about those you are in community with is time well spent. As Shawn Wilson writes in Research as Ceremony (1998) “rather than viewing ourselves as being in relationships with other people or things, we are the relationship that we hold and are part of” (p. 80).

The two tools I have shared, my ‘be’ and roadmap, reground me when I find myself being pressed by time, solutions, and urgency and they give me the time and space to refocus on the relationships that I hold and am part of.

My hope is that in sharing these tools with you, you can visualize ways to embed aspects of human-centered design into your own practice. Having these two tools in my back pocket have made me better able to navigate the tensions that can arise between passion and policy by recognizing the places where discreet or subtle activism can expand the space of what is possible by quietly unsettling norms, rather than overtly rejecting them (Kjærgaard et al, 2024; Ryans & Tuters, 2017). I return to the questions I shared at the beginning of this article and invite you to ask yourself:

• What resonated with me?
• What did not?
• What further questions do I have?
• What more do I want to learn?

My hope is that as you unpack these questions your own tools will begin to emerge for you. Thank you for joining me on this journey.