The Rose Garden Forum and the Five Shifts - The Work of Sherlock I. Graham-Haynes

The Rose Garden Forum and The Five-Shifts Curriculum

A Proposal by Sherlock I. Graham-Haynes

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The Rose Garden ForumMaking the head to heart shift!

Until the hearts of men change, nothing will change.

— Mahatma Gandhi


What is the Rose Garden Forum?

The Rose Garden Forum is a customizable program that is designed to produce enduring results for different communities regardless of their specific needs, prior assumptions, or the level of antipathy that has existed between their groups before entering the workshop space. These results are accomplished primarily because of the powerful feature that I call making the head to heart shift.


The Rose Garden Forum was initially designed as an education and community development program to close the academic achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students in US high schools. It accomplished this by addressing the root causes of this gap, namely by working to bridge the more fundamental “gaps” between students of different ethnic, social, and economic backgrounds, between teachers, parents and students, and between schools and communities.

The Rose Garden Forum was developed and launched in 2002 by Sherlock I. Graham-Haynes, M.Ed., Advocacy Specialist for Chapel Hill High School.

The Rose Garden Forum intentionally brings together diverse groupsof students, later joined by parents, teachers, school administrators and community members, for guided conversations to establish a new paradigm of communication. The Forum creates a “safe space” in which participants develop relationships that transcend race and class. Participants experience what it means to be “seen”, to be “held-well” and to be “met,” possibly for the first time.


This important step creates a new way for youth to connect with themselves and others thus laying the groundwork for growth and development.

Building on the foundation of this experience, the Forum then guides participants to co-create solutions to the challenges they face in their school community. The Forum helps schools foster a climate in which excellence in character, caring and academic achievement is encouraged through a variety of means.


Examples of Activities:

• Peer tutoring sessions

• Home-work cook-outs

• Student-initiated community service projects

Such initiatives are supported through the Forum by ever-expanding partnerships developed between students of different backgrounds, between parents, students and teachers, between schools and government, businesses, non-profit organizations, and churches, etc.


The Five Shifts – Making the “head” to “heart” shift.

1. Menu—Meal:

This shift explicitly makes the distinction between “conceptual knowledge” and

“experiential knowledge”. That is, in order to change entrenched behavior, we

must appeal to the meal of the experience, rather than the menu of the concepts.

2. Material—Spiritual:

This shift is a crucial re-orientation of the way people are presently holding their

view of themselves. That is, rather than seeing themselves as “human beings

having a spiritual experience” they come to see themselves as “spiritual beings

having a human experience”. This helps people experience their oneness, and

thus engenders a new grammar of compassion for self and others.

The Five Shifts – A Procedural AlgorithmThe problems we face cannot be solved at the same level at which they were created.

– Albert Einstein

3. Cognition—Affect: This shift seeks to bring about balance between our

present privileging of cognitive ways of knowing over affective ways of

knowing. The major yield from this shift is privileging deeds over words.

4. Certainty—Curiosity: This shift invites people to bracket their

predisposition to “certain knowledge”, and place an unconditional value

on curiosity. It helps people to genuinely understand another person’s

point of view without making judgments of any kind, even if at first

hearing one might not agree with what is being said.

5. Solution—Transformation: This shift invites people to be involved in the

important inner work of transformation rather than waiting or relying

on experts to provide them with canned solutions. It helps to provide

courage and motivation in people to see that the difficulties they face

stem largely from their own crisis of perceptions rather than continuing

to blame or seek answers from others.

The Five Shifts – A Procedural AlgorithmThe problems we face cannot be solved at the same level at which they were created.

– Albert Einstein

Oneness Experienced

This experience helps individuals perceive, integrate and inform their behavior based on the reality underlying the principle of the oneness of humankind, which is essential for solving numerous problems including economic, ethnic, racial, and many other difficult social and spiritual issues.

The Five Shifts Outcome

Sherlock’s Educational Background

Williams CollegeB.A in Moral Philosophy

Harvard UniversityGraduate School of EducationM.Ed. in Human Development and Psychology Concentration in children and adolescents at-risk

Testimonials

Professor Roger Fisher

Samuel Williston Professor of Law, Emeritus at Harvard UniversityFounder of Conflict Management Group (CMG)

“Sherlock, The Five Shifts and the work that you do are going to have a massive impact on the peoples of the world.”

Professor George Noblit

Joseph R. Neikirk Distinguished Professor of Sociology of Education, University of North Carolina

“In my thirty years in higher education, I have never seen a curriculum have an impact in the lives of children such asThe Rose Garden Forum has.”

Testimonials

Mort Shapiro

Former President of Williams College

“Sherlock, thank you for bringing your students to Williams College. Typically, our first-generation students are very bright, but do not know how to take advantage of our resources. Exposure to our resources early will help them make a more meaningful contribution to the world in the future.”

Laura Chasin-Rockefeller

Former Board Member of CMGFounder and Chair of the Public Conversations Project

“You should apply for a Rockefeller Foundation Grant because your work is very significant and important. But don’t submit a written proposal. You need to present your proposal in person, because the efficacy and power of your work is much more palpable in direct interaction.”

Testimonials

Abby Clark

Former Chapel Hill High School Student and Rose Garden Forum participant

“Unity is what CHHS needs and unity is what the Rose Garden Forum has to offer…. The Rose Garden Forum is an exit sign in a dark room leading away from the problems of today and lighting the way toward a better tomorrow.”

The ProconianThe Chapel Hill High School paper (Tuesday, April 22, 2003)

“The beauty of the Rose Garden Forum is that the Honors and AP students are able to get something other than service learning hours out of the tutoring; they are able to really connect with the person they tutor. This special connection enables them to get over stereotypical views of others.”

Testimonials

Sam GuzzardiFormer CHHS Senior, Rose Garden Forum participant and now a graduate of Amherst College

“There’s so little space in modern society for us to really hear each other’s stories…. To me, these stories are what the Rose Garden Forum is about. It’s a place to share. A place to really understand how people who live very different lives than we do think, and what dish they are bringing to the dinner at the table of brotherhood…. It strikes me as a terrible misunderstanding and grave miscalculation to try to judge the success of the Rose Garden Forum on some kind of numerical norm or fixed scale. The problems that this Forum is trying to tackle are just too big for that…. This is the path to long-term success.”