I See Squirrels

As my first entry, I'm sharing a bit of who I am & how I arrived at this project. This is a LONG one! It contains some rodent & some academic references (that won't be the norm).

I'm like that dog in the movie Up (Docter, 2009). I can be enthusiastically and deeply

engaged, and then suddenly a squirrel passes by and in a nanosecond I notice:

(read quickly for full effect)

its shiny fur; its curious movements; where it's going; how what it's doing connects with what I'm doing; and what opportunities we could create, if we were to introduce the squirrel to the one I saw an hour ago... So exciting!

My principal finds it amusing that I'll get some teacher version of Bieber Fever over a revelation about assessment, how brilliant my students are when they run the show, or how the math teacher blew my mind with their pedagogical perspective (I don't teach senior math). When I slide into his office, it’s usually with some plan for a field trip, a controversial class visitor, or reason why colleagues and I should be released for some great collaborative opportunity. I can hear this line, in his voice, as I type it: "All right… what are you up to now, Fitznar?"

Unlike that Up dog, I don’t see the occasional squirrel. My days are filled with multitudinous squirrels; but, not in a “I must fumigate the attic” kind of way. It’s more of a "constantly growing and changing interconnectedness of all things" kind of way. Each entity holds its own value, but they can never exist in isolation. There is not person nor concept without a past or a context or a connection. So, if I do try to stare down just one metaphorical squirrel and look deep into his eyes, that moment of thinking “ah, I know who you are”, he jumps out of vision. It’s an impossible task to understand him outside of his context and connectedness. For me, all aspects of education, from pedagogy to the humans involved, are like that. Deleuze & Guatarri metaphorically describe this interconnectedness of learning as rhizomatic (1987), referring to intricately intertwined roots with no definable centre nor limit.

My career has been very squirrely, part by choice and part by necessity. By choice, I left the Cowichan Valley to travel and teach in North Carolina, Belize, and Mexico. I received invaluable gifts from those experiences. I witnessed many beautiful things; plus, I got to see, first-hand, the downsides of relying on obedience and punishment as an approach to management, meaningless documentation practices, and a complete disregard for human connectedness. I had the gift of being in one environment so toxic that I shifted the context for learning numeracy and literacy to the topic of how to deal with toxic adults. Why? Because that’s what my gut told me was most important at that time. I had to let go of the peer pressure of what I was “supposed to do” and ground my practice in my beliefs. That was hard – especially as a newer teacher in another country – but, being backed into that ethical corner was a gift of professional freedom. It took courage, and it felt right. As the year progressed and the students became agents over their own lives and learning, the courage was validated, and it felt good.

A completely different gift was being part of a team at a progressive, socio-constructivist, school, rooted and the Reggio Emilia approach (Edwards, Gandini, & Forman, 1998). Never before had I worked in an environment so deeply rooted in a philosophy that spoke to me. We led students with the intention of actualizing, living the belief system. We constantly reflected on the intention of our language and behaviour, through the lens of well-defined principles. It was engaging, exciting, and solidified my beliefs in learning, teaching, and showed me what school can be. Necessity is the other reason why my career has been quite squirrelly. When I returned to the Cowichan Valley, the district was shrinking. I followed the work, and that went like this (take a deep break and read aloud quickly...): grade 4; Spanish 9-12; grade 1; two years of Art 9-12 and grade 8 socials; grade 5; grades 8-9 humanities, learning assistance, and teacher librarian; blended grades 1 & 2; 2 years as a district helping teacher; grade 7; grade 6; English 11; and, finally, Humanities 8 and Social Justice 12 (...and exhale).

The last few years have given me a keen ability to fit an enormous volume of boxes and furniture in a car (positively affecting my Tetris score) and the gift of seeing that what matters year to year is actually the same. I didn't have the luxury of being able to hit the repeat button on planning. Each year, the “how to” stuff from the year before just wasn't relevant. So, the real gift of bouncing across the district was that I noticed that how I developed community in grade one was the same as how I did it with grade 12 students. It became clear, very quickly, that people’s need for belonging, voice, and acceptance is the same, no matter the age.

Currently, I find myself making a big switch into the role of Secondary District Coordinator of Curriculum & Innovation as I finish my master’s. I wanted to focus my research on something meaningful to me and something helpful to share with others. In my experience, dialogic teaching is a difference that makes a difference in building student agency, safe-spaces, and collaborative communities. It’s what peers ask for my input on, and I love it. So, I set out to deconstruct my process in order to share it. I discovered that K-12, I do have a very intentional, 5 step process.

To clarify: Robin Alexander coined the term dialogic teaching as an approach to “harnesses the power of talk to engage interest, stimulate thinking, advance understanding, expand ideas, and build and evaluate arguments, empowering students for lifelong learning and democratic engagement” (2019). In times when there seems to be a substantial amount of empty talk floating around, I want to be clear that this isn’t debate nor “disguised monologue” (Hoggan, 2016, p. 9), but learning through reciprocal exchanges and critical thinking (Moir-Bussy, 2010, p.167).

With days of writing behind me, I saw a squirrel -a really big squirrel- and it was scratching. It scratched right through the wall and that scratch became a crack in the whole thing. The problem was that I was communicating about dialogic teaching a non-dialogic way. Like Socrates, this became a block because my text could “neither defend itself nor come to its own support” (Plato in Palmer, 1998, pp. 551-552). It was starting to feel like a “how to”. I realized that – depending on the reader – my most sacred process of implementing Socratic discussion and group dialogues could easily be received as a “how to” instruction manual. That’s good too, but not really transformative. Something was missing and it was in the way. My gut was feeling the sentiment of Brené Brown’s reflective observation that the gains in her work have been about “the things that get in the way” (2010, p. 35). The researcher says she has “never seen any evidence of ‘how to’ working without talking about the things that get in the way” (p. 35).

So, on one hand, I abandoned my plan... I had to. It didn’t feel right anymore. On the other hand, the light came in. Leonard Cohen’s line “there is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in” has caused me to abandon plans so many times (Cohen, 1997). Squirrel moment: this connects to what I heard on CBC radio the other day about Buddhist “enlightenment” being a lifelong process of process, authentic engagement, and openness, not a destination (Mahoney, 2020).

Anyway, just as Eve couldn’t regurgitate the fruit of knowledge, I can’t un-see the light. … and, why would we want to?

By reflecting back to those sweet moments of student engagement and empowerment in safe spaces, I imagined the environment, the learners, the feeling, the conversations. Then I did what I always do: called my critical friend to rant through whatever has me stuck and somewhere during the rant, it emerges. Squirrel moment: I think this process works because she just holds space for me to figure it out for myself, which -spoiler- is the whole point of this project! Well, that’s my experience of those calls. I’m pretty sure she mutes the phone and talks to her dog.

So, mid-rant, I unceremoniously hung up and started a new project. What was the one thing, the difference that made a difference? What had I missed in previous reflections? Me. What was I doing? Dialogic teaching is a reciprocal process but within that, there’s still an imbalance of power. How do I use that power? That was the light that came on. How was I seeing them? How was I creating and holding space for this learning? How was I listening? Not just their words but carefully observing their speech, behaviour, writing… My mantra, borrowed form Steven Covey, is to “seek first to understand, then to be understood” (Covey, 1990, p. 235) is exactly my intention as a teacher.

It makes sense. I know I can’t change anyone’s behaviour but my own. But by changing my behaviour as a leader, I can affect the environment around me. So simple. I know that my shining teaching moments are those when I am listening deeply to understand and holding space for their critical thinking and learning. When I researched the language of my purpose and intentions, I discovered that I needed to shift and to narrow the focus of dialogic teaching to the intentional practice of generative listening.

So simple; yet, so terrifying. First, the topic and how to implement it is complex. How will I wade through that scurry of rhizomatic squirrels? Second, when it is time for the “how to”, research shows that self-reflection is the key in shifting practice (Dewey, 1933; Mezirow, 1981; Scharmer & Yukelson, 2015). That means, that in order to share this with others in a practical way, I knew I was going to have to invite people to look at themselves. I collaborate in open, vulnerable ways with colleagues all the time; but this is next level. As a district coordinator, I need to open the invitation: “Hey colleagues who don’t know me, want to take a deep dive into how you listen to students?”

Burrowing with your squirrels in critical self-reflection is the key to deepening understanding and transforming thought and action. Knowing this, and witnessing the value of self-reflection, is why it is an integral part of my students’ learning. Throughout this project, I’ve done the same. Honestly, it’s been powerful. We develop what we give attention to and I’m noticing changes in my consciousness and awareness during my dialogic interactions. I also know that my invitation for colleagues to explore generative listening with me will include a process of (private) self-reflection. So, in my desire to walk the walk, the terrifying act that feels right for this project is to embrace the freedom of vulnerability and openly share some of my reflections, in the form of a blog.

Ack!

Yes, Brené, I hear you.

“Integrity is choosing courage over comfort; choosing what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy; and choosing to practice our values rather than simply professing them.”

(Brown, 2018, p. 220)

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