RELATIONSHIPS … AT A DISTANCE

"We need to keep our feet firmly planted on the ground, but our gaze must be skyward"

Madalena Tedeschi, 2017 Conference Reggio Emilia Australia Information Exchange

So here it is, the post that I vowed I wasn't going to write. Watching the world over the past 10 weeks has been a fascinating and perplexing experience; no person on the face of the planet would probably beg to differ. 

Returning from a trip to Italy in late January, standing at the threshold of a new leadership role in a school, I was well aware that it might be my last long haul flight for a few months, a novel thought to entertain after spending the better half of the past 15 years traveling between airports, taxis and schools in different contexts for work. I knew that my relationship with my work, my family and my global mobility was about to change, but what I didn't realise was that this was about to be everyone’s new reality: no airports, no taxis, no travel and no schools. Or not at least as we had understood schools to be, ‘in the flesh’ so to speak. 

Watching it all unfold, I have noticed how planning with caution and consideration has suddenly become a critical part of our daily work. Alongside this space of observation, I have been engaged with a deeply personal struggle… to blog or not to blog? It seems trivial and inconsequential given that so many are genuinely suffering right now. It appears to me that the transmission of the virus has moved well beyond the flesh, it has cross-pollinated our thinking, our writing, our ways of working and our everyday routines and relationships. It is hard to move through an hour in a day where the virus and its reach hasn't totally changed the landscape of our experience. 

Anne and I communicated recently, sharing a viewpoint that we were both keen to blog but didn't want to add to the ‘viral chorus’. With so much already out there about learning online, learning at home, learning at a distance, so many perspectives, ideas, videos... it felt counter intuitive to both of us to ‘fan the flames’ and offer up yet another piece of COVID contaminated writing while we are still so uncertain about the way forward in this new reality. 

We both resisted and resisted … until now. (Sorry Anne!)

Yes, times like the ones we are facing are rare, not completely unprecedented, but definitely rare. Go back far enough in time and we know we will find moments that most definitely felt, to citizens of the times, as challenging, as frightening and as ‘unprecedented’ as these ones probably feel to us right now. 

One of the interesting things for us is… that each one of us has a ringside seat to the show, but not all those seats have the same view. I can’t help but wonder, were we meant to? How does it enhance understanding if we all share the same view? When did we decide that the same view was a good thing? (This isn’t what we tell parents and their children about learning!) Sure, alignment of values and strategy would be of great benefit to most of us right now, but is there anything to be gained if we completely ignored the differences of opinion that exist, the different knowledge systems, perspectives and expertise that each contribute to our collective understanding? If we did, wouldn’t we be also ignoring the importance of the diversity of the human race? Each learning community is richly nuanced with their own knowledge, abilities and in understanding of their own learning context - there is no one path forward.

As Lara Lowentheil suggests, we are a ‘human ecosystem in flux’ and the fact that we are in flux means that there are multiple forces at play. Multiple ways forward, especially for understanding the true value of education, as Malaguzzi declared: a system of relationships.

Perhaps this is the greatest challenge we face in education amongst the pandemic, the changing identity of education and the challenge of staying connected. The important task of not losing sight of one another, not losing sight of ourselves, our pedagogy and our purpose. Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary, Psychologists known for their research on the essential human urge to belong, emphasised our need to connect through meaningful and sustained relationships over time. They argued that we need social bonds inside prolonged committed relationships to experience genuine life satisfaction and wellbeing.

There is no doubt in my mind that the sands are shifting, that we are in a rare moment of revelation as we begin to see relationships, human connection and interconnection quite differently. During the transition to ‘distance learning’ or ‘learning at home’ (or whatever label your system has decided to adopt), we are seeing ourselves and each other anew. In recent weeks I have watched clever colleagues spring forth with hidden talents and new capacities, parents suddenly seeing their children differently, teachers seeing families differently, society seeing itself differently… all of which reveals the deeply interconnected web of relationships. Maybe, this reveals a hidden gem in all of the uncertainty; remembering the true value of relationships arms us with both hope and optimism.

The poet, Pablo Neruda, seemed to know this acutely, when he acknowledged that ‘the poet must learn through other people’. Perhaps the ultimate value of relationship is to come know ourselves more deeply.

“There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song — but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.”  
Neruda, 1971

It’s not just the relationships we have with each other, it is also revealing the relationships we have with our own identity as learners, the relationship society has with certainty, the relationship between creativity and isolation, between health and the economy, between politics and education, the between the four walls of the classroom and our own sense of pedagogy. This new visibility has declared important relationships between listening and teaching, between buildings and experiences, between food and human connections, between love, distance and appreciation. 

It’s all there, every bit seen, felt and heard. 

So what now? What next? Will we ride out the storm, and resume the transmission of education just as it was before? Or will we take stock, value the gift of this epoch, a different view, and choose a different path for re-entry? Not something for the feint hearted, or for the (quite displaced) fans of ‘certainty’.

How will we seize this opportunity for what Positive Psychologists (and generations of thinkers before them) refer to as post-traumatic growth? 

How will we move forward on the other side of the pandemic... leveraging this new learning about ourselves, our children and our communities?

Lots to think about… albeit at a distance.

Fiona