How can you shine a light on your treasure?
A dear mentor and spiritual guide shared with me a poem that I have also come to read with my students, and the metaphorical premise is that we are all ships carrying precious cargo meant to be transported to a starving world. The challenge is that before the cargo can be delivered, it must first be discovered.
Similarly, in “The Alchemist,” Paulo Coelho describes the journey of pursuing a personal calling, which requires of everyone the “courage to confront our own dream.” Coelho asserts that obstacles, including various forms of fear, will appear that distract us from the path of our purpose. “We are told,” Coelho writes, “from childhood onward that everything we want to do is impossible.” And with every negative voice comes another layer of guilt or shame that blocks out our passion and turns our life into a detour. Thus, the cargo does not get discovered or delivered, and we all remain hungry.
I want to give children a chance to see the world in a new way. Based on observation, deficit mindsets and negative self-talk are some of the problematic effects of standardized assessments and ratings. When evaluated according to pass-fail, at-or-below, this-or-that measures, and a child does not meet a certain standard or normalized expectation, cultural and structural messages, even if only implied, influence the stories young people begin to believe about themselves. As young as elementary age, they begin to say, “I am not smart,” or “I have a small brain.” Additionally, industry, research, and medically-modeled systems continue to situate neurodiversity as a problem; the academic literature traditionally explores difference as a deficit by seeking to understand what is the cause and what is the mitigation. Hence, the narrative about what it means to be different is dictated by a model that works to fix.
One aspect of confronting problematic paradigms and cultural beliefs is resisting the notion that professionals or experts are the only viable resources to disseminate new knowledge and effectively change the story (Haapanen et al., 2023; Maton, 2000). Because prevailing narratives often reflect interests of the powerful (Haapanen et al., 2023), while denigrating those who are different, these internalized dominant narratives become barriers of powerlessness and apathy, and in the mind of a child, that sounds like, “I am not smart.”
How could children’s self-concept change if they had a chance to tell their story and shape the narrative?
Our identities are built around stories. How people tell their stories is how they see their lives (Bruner, 2004). Furthermore, personal storytelling, and more importantly, the moment and manner of telling, is critical because it crystallizes life up until that point and also charts what is still possible (Bruner, 2004). The telling is the moment of healing that activates transformation and reparation by finding alternatives to dominant narratives in society (Olson & Jason, 2011). In this way, “I have a small brain,” becomes “I have an imagination and many important thoughts and ideas.”
Coelho writes in “The Alchemist” that because most people see the world as threatening, “the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place.” Perhaps the more important meaning is that we find what we look for – and we can look for threats, or we can look for treasure. So the key step in discovering and delivering our cargo is believing that it exists and having the determination to find it. Young people, especially, deserve the compassion and curiosity to look within and search not for a problem, but their purpose.
References
Bruner, J.S. (2004). Life as narrative. Social Research. 71(3), 691+.
Haapanen, K.A., Christens, B.D., Freeman, H.E., Speer, P.W., & Crowell-Williamson, G.A. (2023). Stories of self, us, and now: Narrative and power for health equity in grassroots community organizing. Frontiers in Public Health, 11(23).
Maton, K. I. (2000). Making a difference: The social ecology of social transformation. American Journal of Community Psychology, 28(1), 25-57.
Olson, B.D., & Jason, L.A. (2011). The community narration (CN) approach: Understanding a group’s identity and cognitive constructs through personal and community narratives. Global Journal of Community Psychology Practice, 2(1), 1-7. Retrieved March 15, 2022, from http://www.gjcpp.org/
