Rethinking Accountability – June 9, 2017

Father Joseph has argued that we have a responsibility not only to be in solidarity with those in extreme poverty, but also to live in thick relational community with them. Political alignment and empathy are insufficient. Social solidarity is required. For years ATD Fourth World volunteers have made a commitment to creating community with people living in extreme poverty in locations throughout the world.

We have argued that we all have another shared responsibility, which is to not abandon those who are risk of being excluded. Anyone can fall into extreme poverty or exclusion. A key example and the focus of this paper has been children who are failing in school or who we will suggest below are better understood as children whom schools are failing.

We have taken insight from policy research in the United States on the homeless that the most effective way to deal with the problem of homelessness is to prevent individuals and families from becoming homeless in the first place. In this paper, we have argued that responsibility, as the ability to respond, entails four related practices for making commitment actionable: ‘Acknowledging the Challenge’; ‘Deciding Not to Abandon’; ‘Reframing’; ‘Building Thick and Trusting Relationships’. We have called this the ADRB model. To illustrate and explain these stages we have focused on student teacher relationships. Specifically, we have built on the insights and use the stories from Michal Razer’s and Victor Friedman’s 2017 book, From Exclusion to Excellence: Building Restorative Relationships to Create Inclusion Schools (Sense Publishers). Although our focus has been on the student-teacher relationship, we believe and have argued that Razer’s and Friedman’s procedures for rebuilding relationships apply to relationships of all types.

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