Showing posts with label children. Show all posts
Showing posts with label children. Show all posts

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Smile... the world is good.

flickr image via ephotography

"Always smile back at little children.
To ignore them is to destroy their belief that the world is good." ~ Pam Brown 

This fall I began teaching at a new school. I am also the new vice-principal of my school. My old school and my new school are very different in many ways... different enough that they are almost incomparable. For the most part, the two schools side by side represent totally different educational contexts. I have been asked by many this fall to make comparisons between them, but I can't; they're like apples and oranges. They are both great schools doing great things but in most different ways. There is one way, however, that the two schools are identical. 

When I get asked to compare my old school to my new school, I simply say, "kids are kids." No matter where I've taught, or whatever context I was teaching in, I have always kept this notion at the forefront of my practice. Remembering that kids are kids no matter where in the world reminds me to make sure I help them preserve their innocent perspectives as long as they can. The world will happen soon enough... for now they're just kids, and they deserve to live in the world they dream of... the one that's good and happy and safe; the one that makes them smile just because they are excited to be a part of it.

When I walk down the halls, around our campus, and into classrooms every day, I remember to smile at kids, even before they smile at me. I greet them and take the time to speak with them as often as I can about anything they want to talk about. This is the best thing I can do as a teacher and school administrator to help kids feel a sense of welcome and belonging at my new school. I did this at my old school too, and every school I taught at before that.

The more I do it, the more I'm convinced that the kids are right. The world is good, and they are going to make it even better.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

There are no borders in the mind of a child...

flickr photo via satguru

"What if" ... I love to say these words. Saying these words takes me back to the days of carefree childhood where everything was possible, limited only by the bounds of my creativity. These two words, and whatever they are followed with, make up every bit of future we create; good and bad. This is the most creativity inspiring phrase I know.

A child's mind is a world without borders where all is shared... kids are so mindful, so attuned to their limitless imagination... sharing their thoughts with each other seems an automatic response. Kids just blurt out whatever is on their mind when they play their 'make believe' games. Just watch a group of kids playing sometime so they don't notice you... every bit of good, and every bit of bad is ultimately shared with the group; it's brilliant. They all benefit from each other's wonderment, but also by sharing their pain, frustration, confusion or any other negative element of their thoughts. The bad stuff ultimately gets distributed to the point of dilution... each member of the group takes on a bit of the pain so nobody has to endure it all, and then, with their minds in overdrive, they begin to construct the next bit of fun.

Imagine this... what if there were no borders in the real world? Perceive a world where we all benefit from good, and where bad is diluted through shared distribution so nobody has to tackle it alone... a world without borders. Some may dismiss this as pie-in-the-sky ideology, but at the risk of altruism, just think about it for a bit.

I have thought about this so many times. We could share all the good, all the richness of each other's newly exposed wonders. At the same time we could dilute those debilitating elements of the real world like poverty, conflict, hunger etc, understanding that sharing the bad allows us to take collective responsibility for all of it... to spread it so thin that its effect is neutralized.... increase good, dilute bad. 

If the adult citizens of the world could tap into their childhood mentality (something we seem so sadly to lose as we get older and begin to believe we can control things by creating limits and borders) the entire human race would benefit from a consciousness that produces a mindful distribution of all that is good, and a willful watering down of all that is bad. It seems to me that when we draw lines in our mind, we are immediately stifled; possibilities are lost. When we draw lines on a map, the same thing happens... we become geographically stifled, less willing to learn from others; to experience their culture and everything good within it, and less confronted by the ills that plague others until we become comfortably ignorant inside our own teflon-wrapped section of our world.

The world is growing and shrinking at the same time. Through technology advances and our growing ability to access every corner of the divided-up world, we are presented with glorious opportunities to harvest consciousness and be more attuned to each other's purpose, which ultimately reduces the perceived distance between us. The cyber-world is much more child-like than I think we even realize... open-source technology is very much like the open-source thinking of children- it's natural; it's an automatic response to the world's desire to know and share information, challenges and ideas... and it's limited only by the bounds of our imagination.

The only thing holding us back from an open-source world are the borders we've created to close it... arguably an act of human nature that has precipitated a lion's share of our world's conflict and pain since the beginning of time. Like so many other lessons we become blind to with age, if we could reacquire the unfettered and border-less nature of children's thought, perhaps the borders of our adult world would become more open, and far less damaging.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Hybrid Thinking- Why We Shouldn't Care Where Good Ideas Come From

flickr CC image via M 93

Our human tendency to debate opposing ideologies without apology until one is accepted by a majority resulting in a "winning" idea or concept is counter-intuitive to progress. On the contrary, the integrative mind understands that within the current change climate we find ourselves immersed in, our viability as a global society will depend on a synthesis of ideas that should not be considered dichotomous, but rather complementary to one another. In the context of supporting effective child development, this form of hybrid thinking will ensure that we don't miss the boat on any developing idea's potential.

By taking two or more perspectives on effective and positive child development and combining their best elements into a synthesized hybrid of all of them, a new paradigm is born, and those who brought each perspective to the process no longer operate independently and in defense of their point of view, but rather interdependently in support of each other and the best possible course of action. Don't our sons and daughters deserve our absolute best objective thinking relative to the care we provide them?

 To that end I make two suggestions... read The Opposable Mind by Roger Martin,
 and next time you find yourself in a heated debate defensively stating your
 opinion, simply stop doing it and do something very different. Instead of
 defending your position and fighting to win the battle, take a breath, think deeply
 and objectively about the issue, and then take a serious critical perspective toward
 the opposing argument, looking for any shred of a good idea or element that you
 can live with, and that may even synergize with your position. You may even want
 to suggest to your opponent that he/she does the same with your 'side' so both of
 you can see the middle ground you were both previously blind to.

 You'll be amazed at the results this strategy produces; trust me, I've tried it. You
 can do this when involved in debate over any issue, but when it comes to doing
 our best thinking relative to providing every possible outside-the-box opportunity
 for our kids to learn and grow, we can't afford to do anything less.

Thursday, January 7, 2010

The Brilliant Words of Prof. Herbert W. Vilakazi

flickr CC image via Dave_B_

Unifying values and practice in child and youth care programmes:

"The problems of children and of youth, giving rise to child and youth care programs, can only begin to be solved in that society of humankind’s dream; a more collective-oriented society than at present, when the father of the child shall be every man as old as the child’s father; when the mother of the child shall be every woman as old as the child’s mother; a society of responsibility of the entire community; a society without poverty; without the inequalities of society members, based upon race, class, or sex; a society without the use of violence against other members of society; a society without any exploitation and oppression of any group by any other group; a society of equals; a thoroughly democratic society; last, but not least a society that shall have, once more, incorporated productive labour into the educational process."

The notion that children are our future is undeniable. It is from the minds and souls of children that every future discovery, every idea, every solution and all hope will come. Herbert Vilakazi's opening address to the National Association of Child Care Workers 1991 Biennial Conference (http://tinyurl.com/yfxzdwn) in South Africa provides brilliant insight to how we need to think and act if we are to support today's children as our gifts to the future.

We cannot know where the next Beethoven, Einstein or Mother Teresa will come from. Great things are possible, and probable as human history has proven. Educators today need to support children's natural curiosity and spirit to learn in ways that don't stifle or restrict their potential to do these great things. The world we know is changing, and it always has, but not at the rate or in the manner we are witnessing today. Today, in the midst of what amounts to a perfect storm within the social, political, geographical, technological and economic realms of the new global society, transformational change is inevitable. To deny this would be ridiculous. To deny that we as citizens of the emerging global society must be proactive to ensure the transformation is managed effectively, and results in an improved society, would be even more ridiculous. 

Within his 1991 address, Professor Vilakazi touches on what I believe to be the key to managing the transformation of our world. With respect to the issue of caring for children he states that,
We are not further along, than peasant culture, in our knowledge of child psychology. What we should do, in our efforts to increase and improve our knowledge of child psychology, is not only to study what our specialists child psychologists have written, but also to go out to learn, and collect, and record, and collate carefully, the psychological and psychoanalytic theory of childhood contained in peasant cultures, and to integrate or synthesize the two. This applies to all spheres of knowledge.
I believe Vilakazi is saying that there is contemporary wisdom to be gained through modern scientific processes that will help us continue to learn and develop insight into how to maximize our support for children, but also that there exists timeless wisdom yet to be acknowledged by contemporaries about how caregivers have effectively supported children since the beginning of mankind. It is the integrative nature of combining the two spheres of wisdom that would allow us the largest capacity to package our 'gifts to the future' so the promises we intend them to offer will be fully realized.

Our human tendency to debate opposing ideologies without apology until one is accepted by a majority resulting in a "winning" idea or concept is counter-intuitive to progress. On the contrary, the integrative mind understands that within the current change climate we find ourselves immersed in, our viability as a global society will depend on a synthesis of ideas that should not be considered dichotomous, but rather complementary to one another. By taking two or more perspectives on effective and positive child development and combining their best elements into a synthesized hybrid of all of them, a new paradigm is born, and those who brought each perspective to the process no longer operate independently and in defense of their point of view, but rather interdependently in support of each other and the best possible course of action.

I believe that our children will be best prepared for the future when we as KARE-givers are able to move to an interdependent and proactive paradigm of child development that acknowledges and celebrates diverse thoughts and theories no matter where, and from what point in history they originate.
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