Finally, the North is the orientation of the coeur/care educator-leader, whose core vocation is to support and nurture wellbeing: mental, physical, social, and emotional. This work involves both connecting with and building on the strengths that people already have as individuals (i.e., the cultivation of resilience) and weaving new connections with human and more-than-human others and with the sacred. Coeur/care educator-leaders promote, encourage, and celebrate practices of connection, thoughtfulness, kindness, and gratitude. They foster a growth mindset: the belief that abilities, intelligences, and skills can be developed through intentional effort. Coeur/care spaces are inclusive environments that respond to the diverse needs of participants, their families, their communities, their contexts, and the denizens and beings that make up these more-than-human places.
As coeur/care educators, educational leaders can work with the imagination as a gift-filled, place-shaped space of personal and group development in which they, too, take part. This includes seeking out and spending time with Elders and wise teachers, human and more-than-human—especially in outdoor settings where the imagination can more readily be released from its colonial domestication. Simple practices such as sit spots and listening walks can allow one to receive more of the gifts being offered, to recognize them as such and to take small but genuine steps towards reconciling mind, body, spirit, and landscape, towards autochthony. Local Indigenous practices of reciprocity and gratitude with our more-than-human kin are often relatively accessible and willingly shared. Diverse art practices can be adapted to similar ends. Here, too, there is a balance to be held along the North-South axis, so that the robust intertwining of community remains open to ongoing, ever-deepening, and sometimes challenging and disruptive learning.
Examples of some pedagogical competencies, capacities, and capabilities of coeur/care educators:
- Promote positive relationships. Increase knowledge about the impact of positive relationships. For example, educators’ self-care/compassion and providing positive feedback, encouragement, or expressing optimism regarding students’ abilities, contributions, or achievements. Teach how to respectfully co-exist with the more-than-human community. Connect to larger groups or movements.
- Decolonial love. Purposefully deconstruct dominant cultural conditioning including biomedical, individualized notions of well-being. Destructive and disheartening narratives that serve to isolate, alienate, or separate.
- Advance gratitude education. Regular exercises, practices, and expressions of gratitude. Promote, encourage, celebrate acts of connection, thoughtfulness, kindness.
- Strengthening optimism, hope, and resiliency. Provide a supportive space to share vulnerabilities, overcome or face challenges (e.g., healing pain/trauma), and ask for additional help. Foster a growth-mindset; the belief that abilities, intelligences, skills can be developed through effort.
- Responsive collective care. Community recognizes and responds to individual/group/family needs for help, support, or intervention.
- Provide healing/therapeutic support. Become a trauma-informed class/school/community. Connect members to external services as needed. Build relationships with external community support (e.g., health professionals).