Community Resilience

Rick: OK, so I am here with a colleague, Nadine, we’ll introduce ourselves in a moment, but we want to talk a little bit more about the concept of ecological systems and the many different communities that humans exist and evolve and develop within in the context of thinking about community resilience and the classroom as a community.

Nadine: Yes, certainly, so my name is Nadine De Gannes and I’m an assistant professor in accounting and sustainability. I’m also director for our undergraduate program at Ivey, so been spending a lot of time thinking about the Ivey community, the undergraduate community in particular, and also the world within each of our students. And so I enjoy this particular conversation as we get to dive into the layers within that world.

Rick: Yeah. And my name is Rick Ezekiel. I’m the director of Equitable Learning, Health and Wellness at Centennial College and yeah, also excited about this conversation, about the many different contexts and influences and interacting factors that impact student and human development in terms of both mental health and learning, and bringing that to bear on the ways we understand the learning communities we’re in within the classroom.

Rick: So I guess two of the founding theoretical models that we’re using within this toolkit. And I guess the original theoretical model is called ecological systems theory and was developed by Bronfenbrenner in the 70s, I believe.

And the idea of thinking about ecological systems is realizing that every organism develops and evolves in the context of multiple systems around it.

So if you imagine a plant that’s growing on a riverbank, that plant is reliant on the stream and the kind of ecological system within the stream. It’s reliant on the forest, it’s reliant on insects that might be pollinating it or spreading pollination, and it’s reliant on the predatory environment. The deers that will eat it, the population of deers impacted by the predators. It’s reliant on the climate, it’s reliant on the rain, it’s reliant on the sunshine. Equally, we are humans and we’re evolving and developing within many systems, many of these same systems, and also many built systems that we build within our own environments in sort of the artificial human environments that we exist within, including our institutions, policies, et cetera, et cetera. And the ecological systems model was actually expanded by some brilliant developmental scientists, Arjumand Siddiqi, Lori Irwin and Clyde Hertzman in a report to the World Health Organization Commission on the Developing Child.

And their model is titled A Total Assessment Model of Human Development, which really does look at how individual factors within a human.

So when you think about what those individual factors are, their physiology, their genes and their development, their age over time, and then that individual develops over time within multiple levels of sort of ecological systems. So that includes, of course, their family units, their neighborhood, their community immediately around them and extended to their school community the sort of provincial regional environment which includes all the institutions that make it up. So sort of health care hospitals and criminal justice systems, mental health care, et cetera, et cetera. And then, of course, broader, national environments. What nation were you born in? And then broader than that, international and geopolitical environments, so when we think about the context of migration, of colonization, of interactions across multiple nations existing in the complicated world we live in and over developmental time that that individual human, their biology regimes, their physiology is actually in this really complex interacting way, interacting with the world outside of it. And it’s at the complexity of those interactions that we see differences emerge in terms of human development outcomes, whether they be mental health outcomes, whether they be learning outcomes and those aspects of a human are, of course, influenced by all of that human’s identity. So whether that be their gender, their sexual orientation, their racial identity and all these types of factors influence the way we interact with the world around us. And so from my perspective, the concept really underscores and nudges us to think about the complexity of human development, the multilevel factors influencing human development, and helps us understand that the student in our classroom, in front of us, in a post-secondary education environment is really complex and made up of this whole developmental history that’s been influenced by both the individual in front of us in the ways they’ve interacted with the many systems at multiple levels around them. And our classroom is in fact one of those systems and communities. Yeah, not so much of a nutshell.

Nadine: So I have some questions and reflections on what you’ve shared, and I’ll start with the question and let you answer just as well at the end of the reflection. But is this, is the reduction of this very complex world often experienced as a dichotomy between nature and nurture? is the question. And from my own reflection on that is I worry how simplistic division that is, given just how much is happening within, around, and as you described this as well, over time. And so I am really enjoying the language of intersectionality in the ways that it’s being taken up now so that we can all take a moment and I ask this of every single student and every colleague and any human I that I would have a conversation with on this, that we take the time to explore what parts of our identity are salient for us. And I know if I were to make that quite personal, you know, I recognize then that different parts of my identity are salient at different moments in different settings and the practice of thinking in that way allows me to better get a sense of what’s happening for me. And then therefore better react to what might be happening for me. And so and I think in the context of gender, where I reflect on an environment in which I felt that I did not see my own gender or my own biological sex reflected in a whole range of roles in society, in the context of careers and accelerating through, you know, the hierarchy of careers as we think about them, that that that shapes much of how I react in the context of gender roles and expectations and the way I talk about them in a business school and in a business classroom about, what, coming back to the very question I posed to you, you know, what is natural for women to do vs. what is part of our nurture? And so now I turn it back to you for your reflections on that, Rick. And what you think of that dichotomy.

Rick: Yeah. I love the words that you use in being troubled by that dichotomy because it’s a false dichotomy. And the research tells us this really, really clearly actually, that that there isn’t a binary of nature or nurture. It’s always both. And insofar as it’s always both, it’s actually an interaction between both nature in terms of when I think of nature, I think of our biology, our genes, right? Like what’s our kind of biological makeup, and nurture being just as you say, the experiences with the world around us, how we’ve been raised, our experiences, how we’ve experienced or been socialized based on our identities to exist in the world. Just give like a sampling of some of the research that kind of supports this. I think of the first five years of life, many kind of critical windows in terms of language development, rapid human development and brain development. It’s also when we’re at our most malleable in terms of our kind of taking in the world around us. There’s been some really interesting research. Michael Meaney from Western Canada, who actually works a lot with the developmental scientists who developed this model, has done research looking at experiences of adversity and neglect on the genome, but not on our gene structure itself, on the ways our genes are expressed. So there’s this process called methylation, which is basically when a carbon hydrogen group clamps on to our genes, so doesn’t change our genetic sequence, but it changes the way our genes are expressed. Because to do anything, our genes have to be translated into proteins. And then that leads to a developmental outcome, a phenotype—the way we look, the way we behave, the way we act. And what Michael Meaney and colleagues showed is that in the first five 10:05 years of life experiencing childhood adversity, experiencing adversity or neglect writ large influenced or changed the way over 1500 individual locations on our human genome are methylated in a significant way that would change the ultimate proteins that are produced that would change the developmental outcomes of that individual. They did this study in rodents, but we’ve been able to replicate and show that those different types of methylations are present in humans as well. So, for example, an individual who experienced childhood adversity and a high level of childhood adversity is going to actually have a different set of genetic expression than, say, even a twin who had an identical genome who didn’t experience childhood adversity. So, it’s a deep interaction that the environment and the experiences are in a way, getting under the skin. A term often used is biological embedding of experience. So we’ve had these experiences in the world around us. But they impact us biologically and physiologically. And similarly, factors that are sort of genetic or biological, like temperament, personality, you know, there are some stable traits that are linked to genes—they influence the ways we’re responded to and the experiences we have. For example, someone with high risk tolerance who’s more comfortable with risk taking behaviour, often more likely more curious, more likely to wander and experience the world. There’s also a developmental aspect of that. We’re more curious early on in development because we need to learn and we need to try new things. But that’s going to change the way we interact with the people in the world around us, which is going to change our experiences, which in turn are going to impact our physiology. And another really interesting example of this is even connectivity of the brain, functional connectivity of the brain. So, so there’s been significant research that shows after experiences of trauma, you see, actually disruption of functional connectivity in the regions that support sort of long term, goal oriented attention. And it’s reversible over time. But it takes a long time, sometimes depending on the severity of the trauma to see reversal of some of those functionality changes. So that means we’ve had, say, a trauma experience or really stressful period of chronic stress. Our brain has changed to adapt to that stress, it’s actually good right? Not all stress is bad in that way, because sometimes we need to adapt to survive and make it through a stress. But then our experiences in the world for the year and a half to two years to follow or wait longer if their trauma is severe enough, are going to be impacted by the fact that that our physiology has changed to adapt to that scenario. So in all that, it helps us understand that there’s this constant interaction, right? And that comes just as well when you’re talking about the idea of socialization, of how we’ve been socialized to exist in the world, to behave. Many of those things are grounded in—when I think of, for example, gender, use the idea of gender, when we think of how we represent the expressions of feminine and masculine. Speaking of false dichotomies, right? We think of those representations at the very tail end of human difference. So, if you actually measure differences in behaviour and developmental outcomes based on gender, they’re quite tiny, actually. Like, the average difference, if you were to picture some normal curves (being nerdy quantitative person). But average differences are actually quite small, and there’s far more overlap in variability of different types of skills, behaviours and outcomes between genders and attributes. Yet our societal representation of gender happens at the extreme ends or tails of that. And then we socialize people to sort of fit into those constructs and boxes, which we know can have lots of problematic effects in terms of fueling patriarchal belief systems, a value system where one gender is more powerful, better, et cetera, than another, or expecting people to behave in a certain way. We’re asking people to, or trying to socialize humans to behave in ways that actually aren’t grounded in who they are and how they wish to be in the world. So some of the aspects where we see biological sex very much differing from gender expression and gender identity elsewhere, where people affiliate biological sex, often with those extreme notions of a binary of male-female gender expectations that are not rational or true to begin with. They’re on the extreme tail end of existence within humans. So, yeah, long winded answer to all those things.

Nadine: But all very fascinating pieces, and it had me reflect on another aspect of my social identity that we all have and have differing relationships with, because I often think that I rail against my racial construct. But to dive into that one a bit, we’ve only recently, if I think of the long history of humankind, we only have very recently come to a clear understanding of the mapping of the genome and an understanding that race isn’t biological. And yet it’s often hard for students coming into an early understanding of that, to say race is a social construct, or any human who is hearing this for the first time. And so when you think of the context, the language of false dichotomy or myths that we have, I would love for you to also comment on the challenges that many people have reconciling this particular, this particular construct.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, it’s challenging, and these conversations have been wrought for many years because of racialized science that has created artificial groupings and used sort of biased tools to measure differences that don’t really biologically exist. But of course, we have that element when we’re trying to talk to people about this, where they’re like, “But there is a difference! Look, our skin colour is a different colour”, right? And then the dichotomize and group. And I think what the key, the key principle that we have to get at is, of course, there’s a difference in biology insofar as melanin expression in the skin that changes the colour of it. Right? That’s the meaningful biological difference that changes a phenotype or an outcome of how we present to the world. There is no meaningful biological differences that drive, for example, intelligence, cognitive ability, emotional connection, relational ability and all these other things that get caught up in when people say the social construction of race, I think that’s what we’re getting out of. We’ve created all these stereotypes of what race means, and those are socially constructed, and they don’t have any meaningful biological ground that drives them or leads in a causal or meaningful way to those outcomes. So in the same ways that we operate on stereotypes of gender often, we’ve constructed these meanings of race that are grounded in white supremacy in a hierarchy that also embeds colourism and all these other kinds of challenges and puts value on one’s skin colour over the other others and doesn’t realize this sort of, you know, continuity or distinction between what is biological, which is really melanin expression and skin colour versus what is socially constructed, which is all the stereotypes that drive prejudice and bias. And I think of an example of how this can play out when we have this system of socially constructed meanings of race. A really interesting example: My background’s sort of in mental health impacts on learning and disability and learning in students. And I look at that developmentally, and there was a really interesting study by Drummond and colleagues done just recently, I believe in Ontario, and they were looking at different developmental trajectories of students with learning disabilities and how learning disabilities get accurately diagnosed, not diagnosed or misdiagnosed based on a number of factors including race, gender and socioeconomic status. And what the researchers found was that largely anyone who came from a low socioeconomic status background had a much lower incidence rate of being accurately and properly diagnosed with, say, ADHD or learning disability in grade school, in the sort of grade or early grade school years, like one to three area, and the most pronounced difference, or the most pronounced group that was impacted by underdiagnosis was low socioeconomic status Black boys. So we’re operating at the intersection of socioeconomic status, race and gender, where often we have this sort of notion that boys are high energy, boys are poorly behaved, especially black boys are poorly behaved, which is a stereotype, a false stereotype. And then socioeconomic status at play across all groups that may be driving… How fed are you in the morning? And how much access do you have to support around self-regulating, so different behaviours might present in the classroom? And then you, of course, have teacher bias that led largely and most significantly, young black boys who are from low families to have their presentation of symptoms associated with a learning disability or ADHD, misidentified as a behavioural problem. And if we look at what then happens over that, those individuals’ developmental trajectory, right? For one, those students are likely going to start to internalize some of that, and think “I’m badly behaved,” or, “I’m stupid because I can’t keep up with the rest of my class, and I’m being treated as though I’m badly behaved and unintelligent versus I have the presence of a legitimate learning condition that makes some things hard, but I have all these other strengths over here.” And then we see these trajectories form over developmental time where, you know, like that that lack of diagnosis in elementary school probably means you’re going to be streamed into, you know, maybe an applied or workforce-directed stream in high school, where you won’t have the supports you need to perform academically to make it into college or university. Where you’re treated often poorly and negatively and as though you’re always engaging in bad behaviour by teachers, family, community, whatever it might be, that then drives we know educational attainment, self-concept, all these internalized challenges and likelihood to experience, you know, bias in other aspects of life. We could see very quickly how that individual who could have had an accurate diagnosis, gone through school with adequate support, had access to college or university, had access to all these other systems within our society, so across all those ecological systems I mentioned, that initial kind of gap in accurate diagnosis of a learning disability can significantly widen, and we see that, a widening achievement gap over time from that first instance and then exacerbated by bias over developmental time at the intersections of race, gender and socioeconomic status to lead to heightened risk of criminality or misidentification of behaviour as criminality, to low educational attainment, to more challenge getting a job, to financial risk, to housing. So, like all these massive impacts over the course of a life span can be impacted at that first interaction that’s all grounded in our irrational or stereotypical beliefs about black folks and about boys and access that’s grounded in socioeconomic status.

Nadine: And so when I think of what presents and as extraordinary challenges and amplify challenges to the trajectory of a single life, I have to ask, what do we, what can we equipped our students with? Just as much as I know, we’re working on systems and correcting for these systems. When we work on building resilience in our communities. What gives you hope, optimism? And how do you embed that in how we engage individuals just as well in changing the course of their life, given some of the obstacles they’ll face with respect to stereotypes.

Rick: Yeah. Yeah, I think the first thing is just thinking about the context of this toolkit and our audience of faculty—the opportunity we have to create a supportive and understanding classroom that realizes those types of trajectories that some students who are now in front of us in our class might have experienced, and help our understanding and empathy and care can go. So we have this ability to stop treating that student who might have an underdiagnosed or misdiagnosed learning disability as dumb or as badly behaved, and to have that supportive conversation about, hey, what’s going on for you? Like, how can we support you? How can we create conditions where this isn’t at play? And just as well, we have the opportunity to shift our models, right? Like when I’m thinking of post-secondary education and I know within my team, my work, we’ve been doing a lot of work of opening up psycho educational and neuro psychological assessment. And this is again really specific to this example, but what where students who historically have never had a diagnosis of learning disability or ADHD, the thing we keep hearing and students who wouldn’t have had access to that support because it’s an expensive resource, to access psychological care to get that diagnosis. It can be transformational in making meaning out of all those experiences over time, where a student is like, oh my goodness, I literally this whole time thought I was dumb, thought I was badly behaved, and now I have this thing that I know is not me. It doesn’t define that was driving all these challenges that can really then shift and help folks engage in learning and life in a different way, where they’re separate from that history of challenge. And outside of that idea, of like really intensive professional supports, we know from thinking about any kind of minoritized community, any student struggling with mental health challenges, disability, but even that idea of collective meaning, if you feel a sense of belonging, if you feel like you matter, if you feel like you’re not othered in the context of a community, of a classroom, say, that really contributes to healing and engagement and well-being. So what we can do within our institutions is create spaces where folks can share or meet people who have other shared experiences that they have, and they can meet sort of collectively, like it wasn’t just me who went through this. There were lots of us who did. And then we can provide supports to those around, you know, let’s acknowledge that this all happened. Let’s acknowledge that the harm, the difficulty, and then let’s sort of make sense of where we’re at now and all the brilliant strengths and skills we bring into our classrooms and the world around us and support students in leveraging those skills to have, you know, really rich experience in post-secondary learning and their life beyond it. So yeah, we continue to be plastic. Our physiology continues to interact with the world. And if we build those nurturing supportive communities, we have an opportunity to shift some of those developmental trajectories. Right?

Nadine: And in your words, I remember that faculty of humans as well, looking for a sense of belonging, and it’s so important for us to think about what’s showing up for us in our own intersecting identities that play out in amplifying or hindering our sense of belonging in our institutions, in our classrooms. I think we have to do the work for ourselves first, right, before we then think about what it would mean to create those spaces for students just as well. So I’ve massively benefited from this conversation and thank you for the insights.

Rick: Yeah, thank you for the curiosities and the really strong ability to kind of make sense of those common conversations of, the false dichotomies we create and see in our communities and opportunities. We have to challenge them.