Use Case: Positive Deviance Inspiring Work in Schools, Orphanages, and in Interactions Around the World

Junlei Li, Ph.D., Harvard Graduate School of Education 

I was very nervous meeting Monique Sternin in person for the first time. It was 2019, and we met for lunch in Cambridge, MA, after corresponding over emails. Like many people who have learned from Positive Deviance, I was inspired by Monique’s book on PD more than a decade earlier. I searched and found nearly every PD resource shared online. I think about PD in every project and every workshop. But what made me nervous was the nagging question, “What if I did it all wrong?” I wanted to thank Monique and share with her what my colleagues and I have done to identify and strengthen simple, ordinary relational practices with people who help children across many contexts. But I honestly worried that Monique would say, “I don’t think that’s PD at all!”

Well, Monique is such a curious, gracious, enthusiastic, honest, wise, and warm person. Over lunch, I told her about our work in orphanages and schools. I said that I might have done PD wrong because I did not follow all the steps in a PD manual I once found online. She chuckled and grimaced at the same time, and whispered to me, “I did not like that manual! But a government funder really wanted one.” Over the next few years, Monique would come as a guest in my course on human relationships at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Our students come from over 60 to 70 different countries around the world, and many of them would later tell me that positive deviance became one of the most transformative ways of thinking and doing for them.

It was similarly transformative for my colleagues and me when we started to work on orphanage quality nearly two decades ago. As one can imagine, orphanages are typically under-resourced settings. Even when there is an increase in public funding, it would go to buildings and water fountains rather than to the most essential resource - the caregivers. The positive deviances we found are caregivers who provided exceptional relational care for children even though they worked in institutionalized facilities, administrators who created conditions to support the caregivers, and communities who rallied together to help orphans with disabilities. One such place is a small rural village with less than 800 families and close to 200 foster children. The parents and teachers there taught us the meaning of “it takes a village.” Inspired by their practices over a decade-long friendship, we developed a visual tool to help others recognize simple, everyday relational practices from early childhood to school to youth development contexts. Using this tool as a catalyst, we help communities discover high-quality caregiving and educational practices in low-resource settings. Here is a recent talk at Cambridge University (UK) sharing the story of the village and its implications for the work in education and human development.

There isn’t one correct way to do positive deviance, as Monique would remind me and my students. However, we can all aspire to be “an expert at being a non-expert.” That has made a world of difference in everything we did and everywhere we visited.