Intro to the Bedrock Series & Bedrock Layer 1: Belonging

In the first decade of SPAN's existence, we compared transitions to the loss of cabin pressure on an airplane. Put your own mask on first. We may be inclined to help others first; the reality is that our long-term capacity to do so requires caring for ourselves. Someone who's lost consciousness in the stratosphere can't help.

If we started in the stratosphere, our second decade sees SPAN landing on the ground.

On bedrock.

This Bedrock Principles Series is a journey designed to help participants understand why the dizzying experiences we all know during transition happen at all. It is a comprehensive grounding of this work upon a few simple ideas.

The first layer of bedrock is belonging. And this first layer makes immediately clear that the Bedrock Series is more than instructional. It is timely. It takes a stance. We at SPAN believe this stance is more sorely needed now than ever before.

Let me explain.

Belonging is SPAN's Bedrock Principle 1 because the meta-analytic scientific literature is unequivocal: more than any other construct, belonging captures whether students are thriving in their education—or not.

Belonging is SPAN's Bedrock Principle 1 because helping students, parents, and colleagues with issues of belonging is hard. Transitions nibbles at belonging, or even takes entire bites out of it, leaving grief. Dealing with grief at the community level can feel—and be—overwhelming, like seeing a tsunami coming at you.

Belonging is SPAN's Bedrock Principle 1 because I, personally, had nowhere to turn when I was dealing with these issues as a counselor in an international school. At first I had my amazing fellow transitions team members. But they started to leave, too.

What do you do when you feel grief about those who were helping you deal with others' grief? A kind of Super Grief?

You turn to SPAN, folks. This is why I founded the organization back in 2016. I needed a place to go, and I was sure others felt the same way.

Over the years since writing Safe Passage: How Mobility Affects People and What International Schools Should Do About It, I have become convinced that a few core scientific and clinical principles are at work in what we do. I'll cover these principles over the course of this year. I'm not kidding when I say you'll get a mini-PhD by taking the Bedrock Principles journey with us.

But there's more. Belonging is SPAN's Bedrock Principle 1 because it is the core idea and experience that SPAN has to offer our troubled world.

SPAN wants you to belong and to connect, not just because it feels good and boosts educational outcomes, but because we believe it is the very fabric of society this fraying world needs more of. Connection. And not just with people who are like us. More so than ever before, we need to feel connection with people who may seem different or think differently.

George Walker was prescient when he said that students at international schools were ideally positioned to learn that “other people, with their differences, can also be right."

Connection is the only answer to polarization.

We invite you to join us in upholding Walker's posture. As international schools struggle—as the very word "international" has somehow become a bad word in certain circles—we can adopt Walker's posture, in the Nest: other people, with all their differences, can also be right. Walker was right when he said these values "no longer sound like high-flown idealism but seem, on the contrary, to offer the only practical hope for the future of humankind." Mary Lou Kownacki said, "There isn’t anyone you couldn’t love once you’ve heard their story."