COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE - CULTIVATING SPACES FOR CO-GENERATION

Anne and I were recently invited to share an online conversation to explore the practices, perceptions and challenges associated with early childhood documentation. A topic that always draws lots of attention and often raises shared tensions. 

This conversation was like many others we have shared over the years; rigorous and roaming, full of stories and connections, a chance to stretch our thinking and learning together. It reminded me of the way, as teachers, we often talk about the need to give children uninterrupted time with one another as they generate hypotheses, tease out theories and come to new understandings and avenues for inquiry in response to the ideas of others. I wonder... how regularly do we allow this sort of uninterrupted and co-generative time for ourselves with colleagues? 

Finding time to pull apart ideas with others is a critical part of our work, and can be a true joy when you find that colleague with whom you can really wrestle with ideas, explore sticky tensions and open opportunities for new meaning to emerge. This is the space where courageous innovators congregate and where communities of practice are born. Time and listening are all that we need. Adopting a listening stance asks us to be courageous, to expect the unexpected, to move beyond anticipated answers and regurgitated knowledge... it entices new perspectives. 

A while back, in a previous post, we wrote about the importance of developing a 'lens for listening', to help frame our intentionality in the process of gathering and creating documentation. Since then, much of the world has become all too familiar with the 'zoom lens' being the most prevalent frame for our listening to children. In Australia we have been more fortunate, oscillating between periods of online learning and then returning to school, yet in many other contexts and for many children around the world, the only learning context they have faced for the past 12 months is the online one. 

In dialogue with Anne and other colleagues in faraway places, I have been reminded of how this new vista also offers opportunities to come to know our work differently. Not so long ago, for both Anne and I, most of our work alongside schools and educators involved a passport and an ever-ready suitcase full of ideas and materials, as we worked our way through transit lounges and train stations to meet educators in their own context and cultivate new thinking together. The current reality has shifted, not just for children and their learning processes but for teachers and our learning too. The ease of the online platform has allowed our relationships and conversations to continue, but it is also true that it leaves us with some challenges, for rigorous co-generative learning, for relationships and meaning making, for understanding the way context and culture infuse everything that we do.

We owe it to ourselves to seek the opportunities that lie within these challenges... 

How does this new paradigm change our relationships, our responsibilities? 

How does this change the way we listen to each other and ourselves? 

What new 'lenses' does this context offer us? 

What have we learned about children, learning and relationships, that perhaps was not possible before? 

What have we learned about the role of the context in learning, when the material, relational and physical contexts that we find ourselves in are so different?

With the realm of online teaching and learning comes a new audience and new participants in our precious spaces of co-construction with children - the families! We have welcomed children and their families in ways that were not previously possible. Never before have we had so many opportunities where parents have been 'invited' to the daily conversations of learning. There is no doubt that parents have been thrust into the role of ‘partners in learning’, yet I wonder what have we learned? I hear many colleagues explaining that 'going online' has ensured greater parent involvement and closer family connections to the process of schooling... they can hear and see learning happening. Does this new digital realm for learning ensure greater parent participation... or not? How can we engage the families we work with in our research processes alongside children? What can they bring that offers new possibilities for shared meaning making? 

In order to engage in this way, we need to be brave and have the courage to step towards the unfamiliar. Whilst it is much easier to put up a range of 'set and forget’ style activities for children and families to do. We owe it to our children and their families to find the nuances between their busy online lives and cultivating meaningful moments of engagement. There is no recipe, no one way, just courage to open a different invitation to learning in direct relationship with the home context.

There are also some very courageous examples of online learning that have emerged. These are stories of radicalism and risk taking, stories that flip the narrative from teachers as deliverers and moderators, to families as listeners and co-researchers, documenting children and their learning journeys. In these stories, communities have been drawn closer together, through participatory action research, as they explore what it means to be apart and separate, yet closer and more connected.

 

One such example comes from a clever colleague who asked her children to illustrate and share a story with their classmates online which explored the 'secret lives of things' in their own home contexts. The responses were incredible: a building that breathed through its air-conditioning unit, a plant that read children's books to other plants in the house at night, a millipede that left tiny footprints all over the house, a clothes dryer that snored, and TV remote controls that played hide and seek when no one was looking. Such is the incredible capacity of children’s imaginations, always in relation to their context, their quest for meaning making never stops.

 

Perhaps the most important question we are left with is focused on our responsibility… 

What will we do differently, in collaboration with children, colleagues and families, now that our collective acts of listening have changed?

Fiona