Our Story - Our Logo

Hi all,


I've been on quite a journey these past couple of months. You may have noticed that we have a brand new look for Connect RP, which we're very excited about, and I suppose the purpose of today's blog is to tell you more about this change and the meaning behind the elements of this logo which I'm so passionate about.


Intention

I can find change hard!

 

I don't always embrace it, but in this case, I have (mostly!) loved the journey of creating my new logo with the amazing team at MX3 (special shout out to the wonderful Christina Clarkin and our designer James Walsh), alongside the support of generous mentors and dear friends. As I continue this work, I learn, I grow, and I grapple. As my clarity around Connect RP's mission;

 

 …to co-create relational school communities by aligning values and actions that honour a culture of empathy and connection…

 

continues to emerge, I wanted to visually align my logo and messaging with the work that is close to my heart, a logo that told the story of Connect RP!



The Sun – Lighting the Way Together!

The beautiful bright Sun of my new logo represents all the partnerships that are fostered within the work that I get to do, seeking to co-create a relational school community through community, within community, for the communities we serve. The multiple inner rays represent the internal partnerships within each school, the UBUNTU Leadership teams and the Be RP Hive (guided professional learning community), where staff come together to share, reflect and support one another. This is the heart of growing a sustainable approach to enable the culture of change, whereby the team guides the students, parents and the BOM to engage with, experience and understand Restorative Practice and they, in turn, guide the team.

 

The outer rays illustrate the external partnerships between all the UBUNTU Team leaders of each school that gather in our online monthly cafés to offer ongoing support and guidance to share their school-directed individual journey with one another.

 

Then one of my favourite elements, the circle rings connecting the rays, portray the mentor partnerships between Connect RP and the teams and schools where we co-learn and co-create, lighting the way for each other in the community!



The Giraffe – Guiding Our Practice!

The beautiful silhouette of the Giraffe is at the heart of our circle here. This was an essential feature for me, as Sophie, my giraffe sharing piece, accompanies me when I am facilitating circles.

 

The Giraffe, inspired by Marshal Rosenberg's NVC, is known as the restorative animal and offers the compass of its big heart and long neck. I have a very long history of connection to giraffes which began as a very-tall-long-necked-kid with siblings who thought they were hilarious. This evolved into a deep appreciation of the gifts of empathy and nurture represented by the Giraffe and of which Restorative Practice has offered me and my life's work. I am so grateful for this.

 

You can find out more about why we LOVE LOVE LOVE giraffes in this short video extract from our On Safari with our RP Buddies oral language development module for junior primary.

 

 

Patterning – Seeking to Honour the Philosophy!

The gorgeous patterning has an African expression and a link to my UBUNTU Learning Platform. UBUNTU is a South African word that relates to our interconnectedness, our shared humanity. This choice was inspired by my desire to embed Connect RP’s work within the heart of the philosophy, to honour the understanding that the work I get to do has its roots in indigenous communities. It is not something new and shiny with tips, techniques and tricks to get the kids to behave but a way of being, informing how we move through the world. I wanted to illustrate that deep ancient wisdom is attached to these processes and beliefs that seek to honour, model and practice the understanding that we are profoundly relational – UBUNTU!


Colour – Courage, Hope and Perspective-Taking.

I love the bright oranges and yellows of the Sun, conjuring up the image of illumination and hope. I don't wish to promote the thinking that RP offers unicorns and magic wands, but I do believe it can offer us the hope of connection and transformation - the potential to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud (Maya Angelou), to find a brighter view within my own internal landscape, and to also appreciate the beauty in the range of colours of different perspectives around me.

 

For me, the pop of colour of the RP represents these intentions and beliefs, which inspire me to continue this work. This pop of colour also acknowledges my previous logo that has served me very well and got me to this point of the journey where I am today.


Font – Strong Back, Soft Belly (Brené Brown)!

I wanted the font to be warm, approachable, inviting and strong – adjectives I associate with this work. Sometimes people can misunderstand or dismiss RP as a ‘soft approach’, whereas it is often about having the courage and capacity to have brave conversations that can be messy and hard at times but that offer the potential to heal, CONNECT and transform. RP supports us to develop the conflict literacy skills to do this and, most importantly, the relational thinking needed to believe it is a worthy investment.  The openness and warmth of the bold, strong font represent my wish that the work that we do as a community allows us to develop a strong back of skills, beliefs and intentional experiences so we can have the courage to risk sharing and showing our soft bellies. This is where connection lives, the journey from fear to love. I love the fact that RP is tucked under the embrace of CONNECT, which represents my intention as the director of Connect RP to continuously nurture, model and seek an authentic understanding of RP for me personally and to cultivate this within our Connect RP schools….

 

Co-Creating Relational School Communities

 

…If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together!...

                                                                                           (African Proverb)

 

How Creativity & Crank the Croc Create Moments of Connection in the Classroom

March 1, 2025
This idea that Restorative Practice is all about the Restorative Questions is a sentiment I hear a lot. Here, I would like to discuss some of the experiences I would have missed out on and some of the things I may not have learned had my learning in Restorative Practice stopped at the Restorative Questions. One of the most disappointing losses one might experience if you focus merely on the Restorative Questions is that of Positive Relationship Building. In September this year I met a little boy in my new class who was very shy, withdrawn and had little self-belief. He struggled academically and explained that he found school really hard sometimes. I was struck by how happy he appeared playing on the yard with his friends but how rapidly his demeanour changed when he re-entered the classroom. It didn’t take me long to figure out the classroom was not a place of safety or welcome for this child. At the end of the first week of school I gave the children big A3 blank white folders and asked them to design and decorate them as they saw fit. I suddenly saw this little boy light up. I went down to his desk and sat beside him. He talked more to me in those 10 minutes than he had for the full week. He explained that he loved to draw and that he created comic books at home. He was engaged, happy and very open with me and I began to see all the wonderful gifts and talents he possessed. From this encounter on, I took every opportunity to praise him for his creativity and to find ways to incorporate this into his learning. I have had the privilege of seeing this child grow in confidence over the last few months. Positive relationship building is something that comes very naturally to many teachers restoratively trained or not. However, what I have learned and what really helped me in this situation was to make this positive relationship building an explicit part of my teaching practise. To make time in the day to build relationships with my students. I have developed simple and manageable procedures such as a checklist of positive interactions to remind myself to praise all of my students. Had I not been using such strategies I may have lost out on this very positive experience and an affirming relationship with one of my students. Another area which falls outside the scope of the Restorative Questions, and is a huge benefit of Restorative Practice is it’s power to support and nurture student’s emotional literacy. In September, I met a group of students who had had little experience of Restorative Practice and I was concerned by their struggle to label and describe their emotions and at times to regulate these emotions. Over the first few weeks of school, I introduced the children to the Restorative Animals, one of whom is Crank the Croc. He can be a little snappy at times and needs understanding and a love bomb to help him to regulate his emotions. Two or three weeks after we had introduced these animals, I noticed one of the little girls in my class was behaving in a manner that was outside the norm for her, she was very sharp with the other children and seemed very frustrated in class. One Friday morning I asked her to have a chat outside the door. I started by telling her I noticed that she was acting differently and I asked “What happened?”. At which point she burst into tears and told me she was just feeling like Crank the Croc, things hadn’t gone according to plan at home that morning and she was in a very cranky mood. So I asked her what does Crank the Croc need to help him when he’s in a bad mood. She replied; “A love bomb” and I asked her what that looked like for her. With some suggestions and scaffolding she decided she’d like to sit beside her friend at lunch and to have five minutes in the Cool Down Corner. At the end of the day I rang her Mam to check in and discovered that the family were going through an extremely challenging time and that things were very emotionally turbulent at home. I have never been so glad that I took an empathetic approach, had I not and had I taken a more punitive approach I feel I would have destroyed my relationship with this student. I would have left school that day with little understanding of that child’s experience and no insight into how to support her for the rest of the school year.  Finally, Restorative Practice can act as a powerful lens through which you view your professional and personal interactions with others. A question I learned to ask through Restorative Practice is “Who do I want to be?” As educators we know there are times where so much of a situation is out of our control. This can lead to some very stressful situations when dealing with parents in particular. I find looking at a situation from the parents perspective and recognising that it’s rarely a personal issue with me, rather their deep concern for their child that causes anger and frustration. This helps me to deal with conflict. Also when having contentious meetings with parents I ask myself the question “Who do I want to be?”. It by no means guarantees that I will be met with the same level of empathy but if I can leave such a meeting feeling that I was kind, professional and empathetic well then I’m happy with the only side of the conversation I can actually control.

A Powerless Connection

December 12, 2024
Sometimes, in my role as Guidance Counsellor, I get asked to intervene in situations where several consequences have already been implemented. One such example was a second year “feud” between a boy and a girl who had no dealings with each other in first year and were in the same class for the first time in Second year. Over the first few months, their bickering had escalated to Year Head intervention, detentions and still the teachers were reporting problems in the class. In fact, the whole class atmosphere had been impacted and the class was labelled the problematic one of Second year. “I felt powerless. I was confused, I couldn’t understand why she was treating me like this. I never spoke to her in First year and when we were put in class together this year she started sniggering and whispering to her friends every time I walked into class for no reason. ” (Boy X) These were the words of the boy in a preparation conversation before a Restorative Meeting. But they didn’t come easy. In the first round of the questions, I learned he was angry and that he thought his reputation was ruined. He couldn’t get beyond defending himself and making her out to be the ‘bad guy’. He wanted compensation and for the Year Head to call an assembly and tell the whole year he didn’t do ‘it’. At that stage, based on those answers, I was skeptical that there was a readiness for a Restorative Meeting between the two parties. In my work as an RP practitioner, I know that identifying what feelings reside behind the facts listed are where connection and empathy are built so I delved a little deeper – back to the start of the story rather than this specific incident. I followed the question protocol again and that’s when we started getting somewhere and he made the above revelation. This boy was very articulate, and I could empathise with the feelings he described. He described the mixed emotions of new beginnings, new classmates, and the added burden of this mysterious quarrel with a girl he didn’t know who just had it in for him. In an attempt to regain power, he began acting in a way that he wasn’t necessarily proud of but couldn’t think of approaching any differently. ‘Investigating’ the incident that landed them in my office wasn’t the priority, giving them clarity and a new path forward were.

Individual and Collective Accountability in a Restorative Framework

September 5, 2024
Individual and Collective Accountability in a Restorative Framework
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