As Thetford resident Maureen Burford told it, Callie was a fourth-grader at Hartford’s White River School in 2012, the inaugural year of Burford’s Creative Lives After School Program (CLASP).
Callie, whose real name Burford withheld, was adjusting to life without the decreasingly effective attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) medication she’d taken since kindergarten. For days, Callie’s attempts to complete her math homework during CLASP ended in crumpled papers, tantrums and tears of frustration.
Observing Callie’s anxiety and inability to focus, Burford recalled the calm and focus Callie demonstrated while walking the balance beam used by another CLASP instructor to teach circus arts. Burford dragged the beam to Callie’s desk and said, “You know how you feel when you’re on this? When you’re focused? That’s how you need to feel when you’re doing your math.” Burford invited Callie to walk the beam whenever she was frustrated and to return to her math when she felt relaxed and focused.
For three weeks, Callie bounced between math book and balance beam without tears or intervention. On Monday of the fourth week, Burford observed Callie engaged in homework and offered to drag the beam to her. “No thanks. I don’t need it anymore,” Callie replied. “I just imagine I’m doing it.”
CLASP, now in its seventh year, is a program of Creative Lives, a nonprofit organization Burford founded in 2012 while also serving as artistic director of Revels North, the part-time position she held from 2006 to 2015. The aim of Creative Lives is to help students thrive by means of a whole-child, contemplative approach to education.
This fall, Burford, 56, will offer training in the approach to Upper Valley educators through a six-month, grant-funded course scheduled to meet bi-monthly in Hanover’s Howe Library. Burford’s course-specific goals are to help participating educators achieve their desired outcomes with students, to test and gain feedback on training materials and lesson plans and to refine a workbook, currently in draft form, for broader consumption in 2019.
Success on these measures would further Burford’s loftier long-term goals, which include year-round, in-person and online training opportunities and resources for educators and parents; significant and documented positive impacts for participants; a summer institute for in-depth study and innovation; a robust consortium of educators and schools practicing applications of the approach; and to spark a national conversation on childhood well-being and learning along the way.
Burford, who’s trained in creative arts and contemplative practice, is a mother and teacher of more than 30 years. Based on her mounting experience and anecdotal evidence, she’s convinced the approach she follows can give children relief from trauma, stress, anxiety and depression, thereby removing barriers to learning. In an interview at Cedar Circle Farm in Thetford, she said the approach can “build inner awareness, focus, acceptance and positive self-regard. It can deliver what teachers want most, which is for children to feel inspired and curious to grow and contribute their gifts.”
Her approach, though nascent and non-traditional, has been well received by students, parents and educators thus far. According to Burford, more than 94 percent of the 400 parents she’s polled since 2012 report improvements in their children’s ability to focus and communicate.
Shelia Powers, principal of Hartford’s White River School, has supported Burford’s CLASP since the beginning. She said via phone that the program “teaches students strategies to regulate, engage and find focus when that is tricky for them,” and does so “in an environment that is nurturing, safe and fun.”
In addition to CLASP, Burford has developed and tested her techniques with parents at the Family Place in Norwich and with students and educators at Crossroads Academy in Lyme and Marion Cross School in Norwich in her capacities as music teacher and yoga teacher, respectively.
Lebanon resident Chelsea Nolan participated in Burford’s 2016 Adventures in Parenting workshop at the Family Place. Via email, Nolan lauded Burford’s humor, calm and real-world application of her methods.
“Exposure to the framework,” Nolan wrote, specifically to “understanding the meaning behind our emotions such that we can react in productive ways, is a powerful gift.”
The framework to which Nolan referred is the inspiration for and foundation of Burford’s work. It’s the brainchild of Ellen Tadd, Burford’s longtime counselor and spiritual teacher. A Bostonian now living Virginia, Tadd is a self-proclaimed clairvoyant and clairaudient and the author of four books, including the 2003 Boston Globe nonfiction bestseller Death and Letting Go and the forthcoming A Framework for Wise Education, for which Burford’s educator course and workbook are named.
Tadd’s teachings and evolving framework focus on seven chakras, or energy centers, in the body. Tadd correlates each chakra with an aspect of human nature, e.g. the crown chakra with inspiration, the third-eye chakra with focus and the heart chakra with caring. In her draft introduction to A Framework for Wise Education, Tadd writes that the chakra system serves, “as a clear and cogent means to organize individual and interpersonal complexity into categories …” and that the structure of the system can “simplify our understanding of the course of human development and aid us in creating an educational strategy that supports and endorses the maturation of the whole child.”
Though chakras are part of numerous Eastern traditions including Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism, they are neither detected nor accepted by Western medicine and are generally associated with new-age spirituality.
Burford recognizes the non-traditional terminology and techniques — among them meditation, singing, and recitation of affirmations such as, “I am good, and I am learning” — can be off-putting in the West, much the way yoga was in 1960s, but she’s determined to remain transparent about the source of her inspiration and to respect Tadd’s intellectual property.
“I want Ellen’s way of knowing to be credited while not proselytizing or saying you have to believe in clairvoyance,” Burford said. “You don’t have to understand a computer to gain value from it.”
Respectful of “the spectrum of human experience and individual perspectives,” Burford has found, “there is a graceful way to help people experience the concrete strategies and benefits,” regardless of their personal beliefs.
While Burford has no expectations as to perspectives and beliefs, she has high expectations of participants in her upcoming course. Participants will be required to develop priorities for personal development, maintain a journal, complete a case study, implement applications in their respective classrooms and provide feedback on Burford’s workbook.
Grant funding covers tuition, but participants will be required to make a $250 “commitment deposit” refundable upon completion, and to pay for graduate credits as offered through the Upper Valley Educators Institute in Lebanon and Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester.
For her part, Burford is excited for the opportunity to reach more educators and students in need of an alternate path toward classroom success.
Rebecca Perkins Hanissian is a freelance writer from Lyme. She can be reached at perkins_rl@yahoo.com.