Re-Imagining Education
Schedules as teachers and other thoughts
Note: There are so many links in this post. I hope you will check them out!
One of my favorite events of the year is approaching: The Ecoversities Alliance’s Re-Imagining Education Conference, a global gathering of dreamers, educators, activists, artists, parents, students, poets, farmers, and freedom seekers who bring our minds and hearts together to practice, experience, and imagine our way towards a world that generates thriving conditions for all of life. This year, it takes place online from April 27-30, and is offered in the spirit of gift economy (pay what you can from a place of reciprocity and abundance). I invite and encourage you to join us! We need a pluriverse of hearts, minds, ideas, dreams, images, and songs to re-imagine the present and future of lifelong learning and unlearning.
I will be joining the Ecoversities publishing panel on Thursday, April 27th at 11:15am ET (full schedule here), sharing about the article I wrote about my dissertation. The process of writing the piece was, for me, as significant as the dissertation itself, and allowed the heart of the dissertation to reach a wider and different audience than the nearly-400 page published final product would. It allowed me to reflect on the process of writing the dissertation, and allowed for a more reflective and poetic style of writing.
Recently, some Ecoverse friends turned the Findings poem from my dissertation and the article into an Instagram reel, which was deeply moving to me and feels like the distillation of the dissertation into a visually and acoustically beautiful, succinct, digestible, accessible format, for which I am infinitely grateful. The reel will reach more eyes, ears, and hearts than a dissertation published on Proquest (even open access) ever will. It took 400 pages, many humans and more-than-humans, and nearly 3 years to arrive to this distilled 4-minute reel, and I find infinite beauty and amazement in that.
My dissertation was deeply inspired and nourished by the Ecoversities Alliance and the Re-imagining Education conferences specifically. Two of my three committee members (Bayo Akomolafe and Four Arrows) are part of the Alliance and speakers at the REC conferences, and I was introduced to several of my research participants through REC. The article was a humble way of returning the gifts of the dissertation to one of the communities from which it sprouted and grew. I am looking forward to further extending, entangling, and playing with this work through the panel at the upcoming REC conference.
In my own re-imagining around education at the moment, I have been thinking a lot about schedules and structures. To be clear, I am always thinking about this, and my master’s thesis about UPEACE and my doctoral dissertation were both very much about the institutional structures, containers, cultures, and practices that we create for radical, transformative learning. Containers can be liberating, and containers can perpetuate structures of violence and domination, and often some combination of both.
In a recent episode of one of my favorite podcasts, The Way Out Is In, Brother Phap Huu of Plum Village monastery was discussing how the monastery schedule, which follows a very regular, reliable pattern and structure, is a teacher. He said:
Sometimes we think support is verbal, but what I discover, support can be just presence and true silence and true stability where I can tap into that strength that is there. And this is when the schedule helps bring the collectiveness together. And that is why a schedule is so key to our community. Where do we spend a lot of our meetings? The schedule. How do we generate a schedule that is balanced for everyone? How do we create a schedule that brings harmony to everyone and offers space? And that’s why the schedule is a teacher for us.
I highly recommend listening to the whole episode, as they have a lot more to say about this topic (and more!). But I have been thinking of this line over and over again:
The schedule is a teacher.
I have experienced this myself in practicing at Deer Park monastery, where you can truly take refuge in the schedule, in its repetitiveness and reliability. You might be uncertain about a lot of things in life, but you can be quite sure there will be oatmeal available at 6:30am in the dining hall. There is a balance of scheduled activities and spaces between, that allow for slowness, emergence, and flow. The schedule is a teacher, and it is teaching us to take our time, to focus on the given activity of the moment, and to just do one thing at a time. Among many other things!
I am thinking a lot about our schedule at UPEACE, which involves 3-week intensive blocks of classes, which I have now experienced as both a student (in 2009-2010) and professor. The schedule is intense, in part, to allow students to take part in a one-year masters program. When I was a student, there were long weekends (3-5 days) between each block of classes, which allowed for some processing and downtime between classes. Now, classes mostly move back-to-back, which is intense for everyone -students, professors, staff - and the schedule does not allow much space for processing, integration, rest.
What is the schedule teaching us?
In educational circles, we talk a lot about the “hidden curriculum,” or what is being taught implicitly through the way we do things, what is included and excluded, who is considered a teacher, and more - through the seemingly simple yet very important minute details of the learning environment.
The question of who we regard as teachers, as noted in the image heading this article, is a core question of the Re-imagining Education Conference and the Ecoversities Alliance. As I prepare for the panel next week, I am reviewing the article I wrote, and was struck as I re-read the poem at the end of the article (which is also included in the final chapter of the dissertation):
This dissertation – this learning journey – has been a pilgrimage. I bow to the altar of learning and unlearning. I arrive to the last pages exhausted, crawling, thirsty, bloody, reaching. Just. Stop. Dear Pilgrim, there is no destination. You arrive with each step. You will keep walking, stumbling, falling, failing, leaping, dancing. Don’t forget to twirl. Let your child teach you, remind you how. The steps can be fun and playful and joyful and filled with beauty. When you meet puddles, splash in them. Don’t jump over hurdles – dance through them. Your steps need not be a slog. Take off your shoes and dance on the Earth. Let yourself get dirty, and return.
When I read this now - over a year after I initially wrote it, which feels so much longer than that - I see so clearly my daughter Daphne’s role as teacher. When I wrote this, I was completing the final mile of the marathon that is writing a dissertation, which I wrote during the pandemic while largely solo parenting a toddler while grieving the loss of my mother. It felt like a marathon laced with snare traps, hurdles, mud pits, alligators, and zombies that I was having to evade. It was not for the faint of heart. It was beautiful and excruciating. It was so damn hard. And I did it, and this poem was written in those last gasps of breath before I crossed the finish line*, before I finished the final of the 400 pages.
When I read it now - the twirling, the splashing in puddles - that is Daphne. Those were Daphne’s daily reminders during that excruciatingly painful time of grief and loss and hardship, to dance. To splash. There might be mud puddles, so what? Make the most of them. Get dirty. You can frown at them or you can splash. You can throw yourself over the finish line or you can dance and twirl across. That choice is actually up to you.
That was one of the great teachings of my mother, who I will be honoring at the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor Conference in Mesa, AZ (also April 27-30. It is going to be a busy week! And I am sure I will have a lot to write about afterwards :). My mom was always trying to make everything fun. I heard her voice come through Daphne recently when she told me, “Mom, you always gotta put a little funny in it!” She is her Gaga’s continuation.
So please join me at REC and/or Mesa, and let’s continue to ask these questions and re-imagine, dream, laugh, and play our way to a more livable world together!
Invitations to reflect:
What is your schedule teaching you? What parts of it can you influence, and what parts of it are fixed? How can you find freedom within the boundaries of your schedule?
Who are your teachers? Make a mind map of your teaching and learning ecosystem. What can you do to honor them?
Is there anything in your life right now that feels like a slog that you can add some laughter, dance, or puddle splashing to?
How can you “put a little funny” in your day today? :)
*I will be crossing the literal finish line on May 27 for my graduation ceremony in Santa Barbara, CA. If you are in SoCal, come see me!