Zone’in Workshops

All First Nations Schools in British Columbia recently received Zone’in and Move’in Programs and Workshops, provided by the First Nations Education Steering Committee. Cris Rowan was offered a unique opportunity to travel to a small northern native village, and provide school based teacher workshops and student consultations. This article is intended to offer readers a view of Zone’in in a small First Nations school, from not only Cri’s perspective, but also by the school’s Special Education Teacher.

Cris Rowan’s Dialogue

During the past twenty years as a pediatric occupational therapist, I’ve had the opportunity to work in many diverse environments with hundreds of children, but I’ve never truly experienced the wonderful spirit of First Nation’s children until last week. In a small village in northern BC, where transportation is by snowmobile and field trips are ice fishing and 40 km “bush wacking” treks, lives a school full of warm hearted children who desite numerous obstactles, were were an absolute delight to work with! Living close to the land seemed to enable these children to more easily access their inner drive and sense of spirit needed to succeed and perform. These children made my heart soar each and every day, and firmly established that The Zone is accessible to all people, regardless of culture, age or experience.

While some children initially appeared quite withdrawn, using a variety of vestibular, proprioceptive, tactile and connection tools and techniques, quickly brought spirit and joy back into their eyes. The impact of Zone’in on enabling these children to access their innate ability and accept the challenge to perform academically, was nothing short of wonderful. Calm and centred, many of the children were finally able to output mountains of “buried” knowledge. The ability to “ground” their energy and “prime” their bodies for learning, finally allowed these brilliant children access to the power of their mind.

Special Education Teacher Dialogue

After attending Cris’s workshop on Zone’in, myself and another teacher, started to look at the different ways we could bring the program into our classrooms. My colleague had the most structured approach. She showed the video to her students about once a week. The students loved the movie. Their favorite scene in the movie was when the characters dressed up and completed the chores that children would have had to do 100 years ago. In this skit stuffed animals were roasted over a fake fire and that always got a laugh.

While watching the movie weekly, my colleague put a pencil box in each child’s desk with things they could chew or fiddle with. She also set up a corner in her room where the children were allowed to get in the Zone during particular times of the day. She found that many of her students used and academically benefited from the new tools.

I found it was very obvious that certain students needed certain tools. Two of my boys went for chewies, while another girl immediately wanted earplugs. Overall the experience opened up a new relationship between teacher and student as us teachers were continuously trying to see if adjusting sensory stimulation could help our students focus. And the students started to understand self-regulation. It was a start.

After working on our own with Zone’in we invited Cris up to our school in March because we wanted her to help us work with our more extreme kids. Cris did a great job. She gave us a lot of practical exercises which we were able to implement right away. We tied rubber tubing to some of the desks so the students could pull really hard while they had their feet up against their desk legs. One boy who was so angry at life that he often shut down was able to put his anger into pulling on this band while doing his math. For another boy just doing the hand push from the video on his own was not enough and he has learned to come up daily and ask me to stick my hands out so he could push on them. This same boy also frequently requests that a lot of weight be placed on his shoulders. These activities have helped these boys be more calm and attentive in their classrooms. There are so many other examples I will just briefly list a few more:

- FAS student rolling head on desk and hated doing work needed pressure on his head because it hurt, after giving him this pressure he was able to concentrate on his reading and was motivated to do so,
- ADD student who frequently climbs walls in school and distracts other classes is using 22kg weights to ground his energy, he doesn’t like being in the Zone because he is not used to it and he lives a life in which he needs to be out of his body, but the weights do work when he uses them.

The above discoveries have all come from Zone’in and Cris’s visit to our school.

The Zone’in program opens up dialogue for self-regulation between teacher and student, it is a good starting point. And for some of our students the program alone did increase their academic output. But most of the students I work with as a Special Education Teacher are way more out of the Zone than the students in the video. I think FNSA Schools and their students would benefit from having Cris revamp her Zone’in video for First Nations Schools.

My overall suggestions for a First Nations Zone’in Video:

- Have First Nations Children in the video and the more footage we can get of remote village schools the better it will connect with those kids.
- Perhaps more consideration to the activity level of the First Nations Children who live in remote villages (many of them do live in the bush at times during the year, so I wonder how many hours of T.V these children watch)?
- Show older and younger students in a classroom setting.
- Watching Cris with my students was when I learned the most, and after a few sessions I started to see patterns on my own. The new video could have a section on some common symptoms that our students exhibit when they are out of the Zone and some ideas on how to get them back in. This section should also include some of the more extreme behaviour and how we can use the Zone’in concepts. I realize that getting in the Zone is not prescriptive, but I think that by watching how other students energy levels can get out of control and then watching another adult work with that would help many of us educators.

Working with Cris has been amazing. She is knowledgeable, flexible and passionate about her work and I think FNSA schools could benefit from having her tailor Zone’in for First Nations Students.