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At the College of Education and Social Services (CESS) Commencement Celebration for the Class of 2023, Senior Lecturer Emerita JB Barna delivered a poignant and powerful speech the audience will never forget.

Spoken with the eloquence, grace and humanity that students and colleagues have come to know from her 23 years of teaching and service in the Department of Social Work, Barna's moving words captivated graduating seniors, families, friends, faculty and staff gathered at the Flynn Theater in downtown Burlington.

What follows is an exerpt of Barna's speech. Her story and her message are worth your time. 

COMPLEXITY, CURIOSITY, and CREATIVITY.

I am going to do my best to use these words to reveal a little secret about how your future work can be made, not just easier, but more interesting and more fulfilling. 

And I’m going to do it by telling you a story. 

This a true story from my work as a social worker many years ago. It is about how the COMPLEXITY of a family became more intimately known through authentic CURIOSITY, which led to a very CREATIVE solution. 

Ok, here we go.

In the early 1990s, I had a job that gave me the luxury to work with families for many hours a week. The goal was to keep families together without the threat of the children going into the State’s custody. One of the families that gave me the honor of relationship was comprised of a 35-year-old mother of four boys between the ages of six and twelve. I’ll call the mother, Peggy Anne. 

As I got to know Peggy Anne, I learned that her children were really struggling in school. I also learned that she didn’t know much about what their behavior looked like in school and how much of their learning was being compromised. Additionally, I learned that she didn’t know what the teachers were doing or not doing to support her children.

I became very CURIOUS, of course, about what things were like when the boys were at home, if she enjoyed being a mother, what was challenging for her, what was rewarding, etc. Suffice it to say, she expressed great love and appreciation for her children and more than anything, she wanted them to have a good life. 

I told her I had read the referral notes but that I knew referrals were limited in how they told a story about any one person’s life. I did, however, mention that it seemed that the state was concerned that she hadn’t attended any of the scheduled meetings at school for her boys. I got very CURIOUS and asked if that was her experience (not attending) and then what she thought was the reason for her not attending. 

It was in that conversation that I learned that she had actually gone to a bunch of meetings but could never make herself walk in the doors of the school. That she had straight up panic attacks when she got close. Together, we got CURIOUS about the panic attacks. She was responding with a lot of “I don’t knows” and shoulder shrugging. We were stuck. But then, I simply got CURIOUS with her about her own experiences in school, as a child. I asked her to tell me the stories that she remembered. 

I know you are following me very diligently here and you probably have already surmised that she had a pretty awful experience throughout her own schooling – enough to have her drop out before she graduated high school. Together we discovered that her panic attacks were probably due to the fact that, internally, she was preparing her adult-self:

• to be bullied,
• to be told she wasn’t good enough,
• to be told that she was unworthy,
• or even that she was in a whole lot of trouble. 

After that aha moment, we looked at each other and said, “now what?”  I knew that it was not as simple as me taking her out for coffee and telling her that she wasn’t in trouble, that she was worthy and that she was good enough. So, I got CURIOUS with her about what might be helpful for a first step to get her through the school doors and into the meetings. 

She got CREATIVE and suggested that we meet in a more neutral place for her first meeting. Battery Street Park picnic tables seemed like a good plan since it was close to her home and the school. I was going to be the messenger to the teachers and ask about their willingness to meet off school grounds. I broadly explained the panic issue and our idea for a possible “first step” of eventually getting Peggy Anne into the classroom for meetings with the boys’ teachers. It wasn’t right away but her team eventually warmed up to the idea. We met at the park, and it was such a success that our next meeting was on the school’s outdoor playground. And by the third meeting we were sitting in those short little chairs – with our knees to our chests – in the classroom of her oldest son. 

The meetings continued and were going amazingly well. My presence was becoming less and less important (the goal of any good social worker).  Peggy Anne wanted them to know she was interested and that she wanted to partner with them. They were impressed with her thoughts and ideas for the challenging behaviors they were seeing. She became such a presence in the school that people really got to know and love her.

Peggy Anne was on a virtual CREATIVE roll when she casually mentioned to me and one of the teachers that she wished her boys could physically see her as part of the school team. She wanted them to see her investment. I was asking about the possibility of her becoming classroom aid or an aid in art classes (she was a great artist). But Peggy Anne piped up and asked if she could help serve lunch in the cafeteria.  Within two weeks, she was not only helping in the cafeteria, but they hired her for pay. At first her boys were embarrassed that their mom was one of the lunch ladies, but it turned out she was a really cool cafeteria worker, and the other kids loved her so much that her boys ended up showing pride in their mom and even gave her hugs – publicly – when they saw her in the hallways.

I’ve told you just a fraction of this story.  It’s COMPLEX and nuanced and it is, to be honest, more Peggy Anne’s story to tell than mine. But I did think, with an audience full of teachers, social workers, and human service workers, that it might just make sense to you and inspire you.

You see, we all have COMPLEX individual stories to tell, don’t we? But sometimes we see a mother NOT showing up and we think she doesn’t care about her children. We call her “resistant” or we call her “disengaged”.  We look at her children and give them diagnoses, or label them as “dysregulated” or talk about their adverse childhood experiences. But if we can just believe that it is going to take some immense CREATIVITY to work through that COMPLEXITY, then maybe we are on to something. And to get to that CREATIVITY we’ve got to start with authentic CURIOSITY. We need to genuinely engage with others. We need to get CURIOUS about the whole situation – the whole of their lives.

COMPLEXITY, CURIOSITY, AND CREATIVITY.

I’d like to end with some inspiration from the work of Chimamanda Adichie. She is a writer and thinker and humanitarian from Nigeria who talks about “the danger of a single story.” I highly recommend her work.

What I learned most from this amazing woman is that a single story lacks the CURIOSITY that I’m talking about. And we can be so tempted to buy the single story – the one narrow way of understanding something. It can be too easy to read a report, or hear a few nuggets of information, or meet someone once on a singular day at a singular time and jump to conclusion as to why that person is acting the way they are acting, or saying what they are saying, or doing what they are doing, or not doing what you think they should be doing. We become tempted to take that single story and diagnose a person or put a label on them. Sometimes the single story makes it easier to SAY we understand what’s going on. We trick ourselves into believing, therefore, that this single story and diagnosis or label will help us know exactly how to respond. But frankly, it lacks CURIOSITY, and therefore CREATIVITY doesn’t stand a chance.

Chimamanda Adichie says a single story “flattens” our experiences and overlooks the many other stories that form us. She says the single story creates stereotypes.The single story is incomplete. It robs us of our dignity. And finally, she says, it makes it hard – really hard – to recognize our equal humanity.

So I say, while it is tempting to hear and to tell and to even be satisfied with a single story of one’s life, we are oversimplifying experiences that are much more COMPLEX. We are eliminating our ability to be CREATIVE in that COMPLEXITY. And we are oppressing our own childlike CURIOSITY about the world and the humans around us.

One of the hopes I have for you all as you go from this place to the next is one of the last things I said in class to the senior social work students a couple of weeks ago, and now I share it with all of you.

My hope is that you will continue to develop deep and authentic CURIOSITY about all of our unique individual life stories, and that you will continue to know deep down that these stories don’t fit neatly into boxes of prescribed language or diagnoses or judgment, because they need to be told and heard and witnessed in order to be truly known. And it’s only in knowing the COMPLEXITY, that we can truly help each other out.