You're One of Us!: Systemic Insights and Solutions for Teachers, Students and Parents

By Marianne Franke-Gricksch

In this gripping account of her work, Marianne Franke-Gricksch speaks from her experience as a teacher and therapist, describing how systemic ideas enable fundamentally new and effective learning and encourage creative cooperation between students, teachers, and parents. Rather than viewing the participants in this process as isolated individuals, she shows how people and their environment constantly influence and change each other. Franke-Gricksch's own systemic view connects Bert Hellinger's work on the power of one's bond with his or her family of origin with various other approaches within systemic theory. The author's reports are consistently supported by practical examples from the everyday classroom situation. Especially fascinating is the children's enthusiasm and array of ideas that they use to pick up and transfer the new impulses and procedures. Readers who are new to these methods will also be amazed at the powerful effect that is released by systemic thinking and action.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carl-Auer Verlag
• Release date: Jul 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9783849784102

Book preview

1. Introduction

In this report, I would like to show how I sighed with relief upon managing to integrate the systemic view of family therapy into my everyday school routine. From the systemic perspective, people are not perceived as separate individuals but always in the context of a relationship. I began viewing my mission as a teacher in a different light, and this brought great joy to both me and the children. Many ideas began to be generated for how school can be lived.

In order to help you understand my teaching context more easily, a few words of explanation are necessary. In Germany, children traditionally attend neighborhood elementary schools until the end of grade four. Starting at the end of grade three, students are evaluated on the basis of their grades and their aptitude, and are subsequently tracked into academic secondary schools (Gymnasien), vocational-preparatory schools (Realschulen), or general education secondary schools (Hauptschulen). In several German states, attempts have been made to reform this system by such means as delaying the tracking process by two to three years, or by introducing comprehensive schools. Bavaria, where I taught for so many years, is not one of these states. Recent studies have shown that tracking recommendations are consistent with the students’ socio-economic background.

Once considered a viable alternative to the academic and vocational tracks, in many German states, the Hauptschule has become a catch-all for students without a parental lobby. Hauptschule populations have high percentages of students who come from non-German-speaking and low-income families. It is the teachers’ and the students’ reality. On the other hand, the fact that I taught at a Hauptschule made it easier for me to implement new ideas. In Bavaria, teachers at the Hauptschule not only teach the core subjects of German and Math, but also subjects such as History, Biology, and Geography, and sometimes Art and Music or English, thus having fairly constant contact with the students throughout the school day. From this point of view, I was presented with ideal conditions to consistently discover the systemic view of things along with the children and to the extent that this was possible, apply it in my classroom.

At this point, I had already been teaching at various Hauptschulen for over twenty years, in either the seventh – eighth grade or fifth – sixth grade. Most of what I will be describing in what follows came about in my work with fifth and sixth graders, since that is the level at which I taught in my final years in the classroom.

Bert Hellinger’s thoughts and doctrine, which I had learned about and experienced in a number of workshops, had the most long-lasting effect on the children. They completely transformed the way they saw their homes and their school. With this new way of looking at the world as our basis, it was easy and inspiring to understand and apply what I learned about different systemic schools of thought. It did not take long before the children began tackling their school-work with extraordinary enthusiasm, contributing many more ideas, knowledge of resources, and suggestions for problem-solving than I could have ever conceived would be possible. The application of the method included areas of personal development on the part of the children at home and at school, as well essential aspects of school per se: Questions on the efficacy of studying, how to approach new areas of knowledge, study techniques involving the children’s imagination, and questions as to how to reorganize the school day, getting along with one another, dealing with aggression within the class and with pupils in other classes, to mention only a few.

I have decided to portray my ideas and procedures the way they evolved as an interactive process in the class. Thus, rather than using a consistent systematic outline throughout the book, I will be describing my findings from the point of view of the situations in which they were experienced. Readers will have access to this new way of thinking via the reports. Where I have deemed a theoretical background helpful in understanding the reports on a deeper level, I have provided it in short paragraphs either at the beginning or the end of the respective chapter.

Schools are guided by different types of thought. They appear to be friendly or less friendly. Some are modern and performance-oriented, while others are conservative and strict. Others have an ideological basis, and others focus on a certain subject or skill. Many schools maintain their essence for decades. In these schools, administrators and teachers who join the staff jump right in and carry out whatever tradition requires, making changes subtly and slowly. My father was the principal of a Hauptschule, and he enjoyed his work because he succeeded in actively contributing to the shaping of the essence of this school. He was a musician, and his school had a soul, and the soul was that of the muses. The regular classroom was embedded in music and art appreciation. For my father, these minor subjects were the core of education. He felt that one of the most important jobs a school had was teaching students to work and play together. This included singing in the chorus, playing in an Orff group, or being part of a play. Sporting events did not just focus on athletic achievements, but also on preparing productions with dancing, magic tricks, and much, much more. There were always pictures, handicrafts, and shop items that had been made by the students on display.

When I started teaching in the mid-seventies, I also taught for a year at my father’s school. I was able to see first hand the way my sixth grade students were infected by this enthusiasm. I saw how willing they were to work quickly and how they were completely focused on subjects such as German, Math, or English for the sake of a play or music rehearsal they might have needed to participate in. The Beatles were in then, and my father, who truly had nothing in common with pop music himself, had set aside a place for a little rock group, consisting of a drummer, a guitarist, and a vocalist, to practice in part of the school’s basement.

Everyone at the school was enthusiastic and involved. The classroom continued to be the focus, of course, but we did not mind sacrificing a little time for a school-wide project. In its classroom methods and methods for teaching individual subjects, the school was no different than the conventional schools around us. Yet the basic construct was something else. It lived and breathed an energy that allowed teachers to use their intuition and that stimulated the students to live their own lives. To enable this, my father provided opportunities for group experiences and ideas and impulses. Both teachers and students were caught up in the momentum of the school and this in turn pleased the parents.

Later, I got to know other Hauptschulen. These other places of learning did not have the same flair as my father’s school to carry me away, and I felt that it was up to me to try to instill the love of learning and sharing in my students.

Like many teachers, I often felt overcome with despair when trying to cope with my job. I felt increasingly restricted by external conditions. The list is endless, but includes the children transforming into little consumers and TV-watchers, the changing milieu in which the children were growing up and types of behavior associated with that. Yet these conditions also included being increasingly dictated to when it came to the curriculum, which insisted on transmission and left little time for hands-on learning; the manifold requirements imposed by the state office of education; the organizational rules in the school building itself and those that dictated the class work; rules and regulations pertaining to teaching units and periods, which had to take place in the classrooms, at desks and chairs, in too many, too brief units of time. Left to my own devices in the classroom, the way I perceived myself and my abilities both as a human being and as an educator became increasingly negative.

After ten years in the classroom, I was completely and utterly exhausted. I did not have the faintest clue as to how I could regain the joy and involvement that I had experienced as a teacher starting out in the sixties and early seventies. There was a complete absence of any kind of basic concept that could provide the impulses I needed in my teaching, such as the one I had known in my father’s school.

When I thought about my discipline, it was always couched in terms of constraints, of what is not allowed. For me, the view of the depth of this fantastic profession and the access to the possibilities for creativity and development, which are always available for teachers and students, was obscured.

In my personal and professional despair, I turned to a supervision group for teachers. I developed an interest in psychotherapy, attended workshops facilitated by several family therapists, and also made the acquaintance of Bert Hellinger, who was in the process of developing a special type of family therapy called Family Constellation.

For a number of years, I dealt with school, my area of work, and Systemic Family Therapy, the new area in which I had received training, as though they were worlds that were completely separate from each other. There were numerous situations, whether in dealing with parents, children, or fellow teachers, or in the classroom, when the systemic approach or a comment or piece of advice from the systemic point of view would have been quite fitting. I increasingly felt pulled in two directions, as though my work in the classroom would forbid systemic thinking, and even more, systemic intervention. I wanted to leave the classroom setting as quickly as possible and rededicate my professional life to psychotherapy.

However, one day in the early nineties, the seed of this knowledge and the systemic experiences I had already had in individual and group therapy began to bear fruit in the classroom without me doing a single thing to encourage it. I was able to transfer many insights and approaches from systemic family therapy to the entire school setting.

For me, the basis of any and all systemic thinking and action in the school setting was Bert Hellinger’s teachings. In his impressive method of Family Constellation, children can physically experience the orders of the family and their effects. This is what fascinated, shocked, and transformed them. All other systemic ideas, methods, and procedures emerged from this method.

2. Systemic Work in the Classroom: The Impact of Experience with Bert Hellinger’s Systemic and Phenomenological Approach

2.1 T HE B REAKTHROUGH: U SING S YSTEMIC AND P HENOMENOLOGICAL A PPROACHES IN THE C LASSROOM FOR THE F IRST T IME

Bert Hellinger’s Phenomenological Point of View

In the course of his work as a psychotherapist, Bert Hellinger, much more urgently than his predecessors (V. Satir, M. Selvini, and I. Boszormenyi-Nagy), made it clear to what extent we have been interwoven into our family as a group affected by destiny on a deep and unconscious level. He further pointed out what effects the relationships to our parents, siblings, grandparents, uncles, and aunts can bring about. In the context of family constellation, Hellinger succeeds in demonstrating that we are part of a large soul that encompasses all of the members of a family. We perceive the way in which we love our parents and serve our families, often unconsciously attempting to compensate for debts and needs belonging to our parents or relatives from previous generations in our own lives. In so doing, we are even willing to take the place of family members who have died tragically or as children, or to compensate for serious losses or deeds carried out by parents or relatives. When they do this, people do not live self-determined lives, but instead, feel as though they are strangers to themselves, and in extreme cases, they may even feel an urge to die early. Using family constellation, Hellinger shows that there is a basic order in which all family members feel good. He shows us how to find this order and take the appropriate place in our family. In this method, the primary objective is acknowledging the fate of other family members, especially the parents and the siblings. Beyond this, Hellinger provides the means to make up for repressed grief that often continues to affect family members generations down the line. Entanglements with the fates of other family members, often those who have already died, are revealed and can be resolved by showing respect for them. Respect and love for one’s family are not feelings. Rather, they are a fundamental attitude that is in most cases unconscious. For this reason, opinions and views about family affairs often have nothing in common with our actions, which are guided by the power of this unconscious attitude. Whenever Hellinger suggests that people change their attitude toward their parents, siblings, or relatives, he continues to emphasize that our inclusion in the great soul has been determined by destiny, and that we are at the mercy of our (family) destiny.

Hellinger has used the term systemic and phenomenological to refer to his approach. This is in contrast to the systemic and constructivist approach that I will be describing below.

In family constellations, pictures of families are portrayed through representatives that have been selected by the client. In the course of the constellation, a field is set up in which the representatives experience the feelings and attitudes of the people they are representing. Thus, one could describe the field of the family that emerges as a phenomenon that gives rise to the attitudes and feelings of individual family members. In a family constellation, the change in attitude on the part of a client can rearrange the composition of this field, which may have a healing effect.

In contrast to Hellinger’s approach, systemic and constructivist schools of thought have as their objective a reshaping of reality. In the context of a democratic process, a person grows beyond his or her family and becomes an individual. I found this concept very useful in my work as well, and it served as the point of departure for rich, creative work. However, the fundamental insights and transformations that my students experienced through work based on Hellinger’s principles came about on a different and much deeper level. Acknowledging orders of love, acknowledging fate, bowing down to what is incomprehensible and inescapable, and reliving grief were all experiences that gave them a new feeling of security with respect to their world, their family, and their friends. From this feeling of security, they managed to grasp ideas from the schools of hypnotherapy and the constructivist direction of family therapy and to continue to work with these ideas creatively.

The Teacher’s New Way of Seeing Her Students

Teachers are always coming up with the idea that children need to be liberated from the shackles of their homes, in which trouble, TV, and the consumer culture always have the upper hand. We think that they need to be motivated to be convinced of a set of social ethics, and for the generally agreed upon set of intellectual and cultural values that the school transmits in the social framework of the class society, as if the school can intervene as a cultural and social corrective. This is also called for by the media.

Using family constellations led me to a new understanding of the students. I saw the way in which they were embedded in their families, and I observed the loyalty to their families. But I also recognized the energy that they were constantly employing to connect their family life and school and experienced that this energy could be harnessed in an extremely productive way. This comes about when teachers become genuinely open to the children’s homes, opening our classroom doors to them and allowing them to be a permanent invisible presence there. It was Hellinger’s fundamental idea of being embedded in the family context that first led me to use systemic ideas in my teaching.

Slowly but surely, I was able to see the representatives of the children’s families in them, with their laws, their own dynamics, and their particular tasks. The students constantly showed me that they were deeply obliged to their families and unrelentingly accorded these dynamics their foremost priority.

School as a new life component, and learning per se, can make children feel insecure, and this insecurity is easier for them to deal with when they receive acknowledgment in everything that they bring with them to the classroom. This does not mean that school is a better alternative to living at home, but rather an enrichment of what they have there. And in turn, the respect that teachers have for a child is nothing other than respect for his or her family of origin, and that also includes respect for the entire family destiny, whether or not we deem it a positive or negative influence on his or her development and willingness to learn.

The best thing we can do for a child is to acknowledge his or her fate, just as it is, and that requires a great deal of discipline for teachers. For example, it means dispensing with the notion of wanting to help the child by having him or her overcome the constraints of his or her family of origin.

We are only teachers. The children themselves remain connected to their fates and their families. For example, a turning point in difficult constellations comes about when a child succeeds in acknowledging his or her own fate. However, in most cases, they remain entangled in love. On the outside, they reject whatever it is they are suffering from and what they (unconsciously) love unconditionally. Once I looked at it this way, it was clear to me that all of our fates have the same significance, or as Bert Hellinger would put it, they are all equally valid.

Once I became aware of these deep relationships, I initially felt the futility of my efforts in the classroom even more intensely. The longer I taught, the more helpless I felt. Could I, as a teacher, help a child from a difficult background, who was poor, living in confusing social relationships, neglected by her mother or her parents, persecuted, perhaps growing up without a father, to acknowledge her fate? Could I contribute to her seeing her fate as just as valid as that of a child from a well-to-do, solid background? And was I willing to see it this way? Question after question began to arise.

A Systemic Idea – The Family Context as a Learning Tool

One day back in the early nineties, I was talking to the students in a sixth grade class that I had had to take over at short notice. When I look at you, I always see you with your parents in our classroom. I know that the people sitting here aren’t twenty-two children, but rather twenty-two families. That means that counting all the dads and moms, plus me and my children and my children’s father, that makes sixty-six people!

The children in the class, most of them twelve years old, burst out laughing. Yet when I assured them that I was serious about what I had said, they started thinking