inching towards readiness

The past bunch of months have been busy ones. I have been snowed under with, starting last semester:

• big, giant assignments in each of my courses
• and then exams
• and then ridiculously busy holidays
• and then the start of school all over again for the new semester

I was barely able to get a breath in there, but things are now coasting in a way where I can reflect and research again, and that feels great. But whoops! Did the bottom ever fall out of this blog for a while.

So, this semester is also busy. I am taking the second half of our research class, and doing a wonderful project on perceptions of safety and how they affect kids' outdoor play, with some stellar group-mates. There is the assessment course where we are focusing on authentic assessment, tools, and critiquing "standardized" testing - it's awesome. I start the week off with a 3 hour class on children and learning with technology, very fun and very profound - with the prof that I'm working on the research project(s) with (thank you Jason), where we are writing our own blog with all the whole class of 40-odd ECE students. It isn't public (yet) but there is some REALLY interesting thinking coming out of there.

I got kicked out of a class due to timetable conflicts (not rabble-rousing) on children in society, and the only class that worked was a class about health promotion and community development on Mondays at 6.30pm, making that day super-long. I was dreading that class a bit, but then it turns out to be absolutely dynamic, interesting and thought provoking filled with great people and a great prof. SURPRISE!

And last but certainly not least - its placement time. I am spending two days a week this semester at the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care - an advocacy group working to secure real, necessary funding for child care in  the province. It is REALLY CRAZY AWESOME, and I harken back to my activisty days in Montreal and Seattle etc. I'm 4 weeks in to placement and have already written a Student Outreach and info guide, edited a booklet on greening child care centres, presented to other ECE students about the role of advocacy, taken on the organizations publications, and helped a bit with coordinating the province wide community forum tour that the OCBCC is conducting to get people revved up - it's a provincial election year, and we need to make sure that the government starts REALLY funding child care. It's just ridiculous, the state we're in. More on that maybe later - ELP, the new Early Learning Program that gets all 4-5 year olds in the province into kindergarten (sweet!) is gutting child care, as a lot of those kids used to be in child care centres, and without the support of their fees centres are freaking out. It's pretty nuts.

Back at school, I have a seminar once a week for that too. On Mondays. It's silly.

Work at the lab is also fun, but I'm not going to write about that now, because this is already long enough and no pictures. That's too bad.

Here's one of Conan, that I used in my post on our class blog about children, the internet, hacking and safety.

protect us, conan

So...that's what's been keeping me busy. It feels really great to put words up here again. Hope all is well with anyone who might read this - best to all those awesome friends I made oh so long ago when I was posting more regularly! Hooray for blogging!

Nerd out!

oh dear bloggy mcbloggersons...

I have neglected this poor ole bloggy in the face of a giant tidal wave of SCHOOL. Exhaustimacating and awesome in equal parts - work school and life have been keeping me super busy.

Things are still interesting - have discovered the work of Kieran Egan and his merry band of Imaginative Educators. That was super exciting, and I was staying up late into the nights reading his revisioning of schools and cognitive tools and super cool school transformation instead of reading politics and literacy and families textbooks...well that came back to bite me in the butt, as midterms crashed down up me, and I scrambled to prepare. Truth be told, I did pretty good, juggling assignments, scholarship applications, exams and meetings with the research team, as well as handling an incredibly festive Canadian thanksgiving where we made our yearly Mount Vesuvius tofu volcano. This year, my dearest friend Andrea was here and we took it up a notch and did a whole diorama, with the tofu volcano erupting mashed potato lava covered in cranberry sauce, flowing down onto a forest of steamed broccoli with raisin people fleeing the destruction.

So - I've been a little busy. Our sweet friend Nicole took a bunch of photos for us, which are pretty wonderful.

I must say, school this year is a crazy rollercoaster of onslaught compared to the last two years. However, I'm eating it up like dessert, because I am a nutbar.
I wanted to show you this. 
Little posts of teacher inspiration.

I have been thinking a lot about engagement recently - how to foster it, what are the key ingredients...kind of exciting as it feels like something I want to sink my teeth into and think about for a good long time.

Ok. I will post more regularly - things should quiet down a little bit. It's time to say goodnight, as I've been wrestling with a paper about private money in public schools all day. Enough - sleep sweet and see you soon again.

Nerd out!

gifts and wrestling

These days, I am consistently amazed and grateful at the wonderful incredible quality of my life. I am head-over-heels with my crazy, human situation.

First - school is awesome. I have 5 full-time fascinating courses, all with really engaging instructors and thoroughly interesting and challenging material. Second - my new job as a research assistant is kind of like the coolest amusement park ride, mixed with a collaborative project and some fabulous philosophy. The project that I'm involved with is part of a much larger one called the Experiential Design and Gaming Environments Lab, a cross-disciplinary collaboration involving folks from three different universities, from a whack of different sectors (technology, DIY, social economics, gaming, new media, early childhood ed & development, hacking, disabilities studies, etc, etc, etc). Everytime I go to work I hang out with exceedingly smart people and have wicked-cool, INSPIRING conversations. My work there is hilarious, and has so far involved learning to play Farmville (to explore social media), having in-depth conversations about co-construction and autonomous learning (to work out what our themes are for the project I was hired to work on), organizing cardboard (for the adaptive design lab and workshops), and playing with (learning how to use) an off-the-shelf brainwave monitoring device that Dr. Jason (the prof who hired me and a pretty awesome amazing guy) got off the internet to study biomapping. So many brackets in that last paragraph!

It feels like there are so many situations and conversations and people who are like gifts in my life right now! So, my brain and heart are being regularly kicked into overdrive, but in a good way. I have noticed that my critical thinking has picked up it's pace, too. I have started to wonder about school and teaching and the edu-crisis that is smacking North America upside the heads. I have thought about teaching styles and why I love direct instruction (it's like candy to me) but don't think it's an effective way of helping folks learn...and that's just it. I have started to think about helping people learn, instead of teaching people. That's a wonderful, fundamental change that feels really good.

Anyways - I wish I could post the gazillion things that are rushing around in my head right now - things like:
- how can we create learning environments that foster autonomous learning in a school system that is so authoritarian you have to ask to go to the bathroom?
- what is the role of technology in learning, now that technology is becoming more and more inseperable from everyday life for a lot of people on the planet?
- who has access to good educational opportunities, and what can we do about the folks who don't?
- do schools work? Teachers sure do - HARD! So what's creating the oncoming educational crisis?
- imagine teaching kids in early learning environments that asking questions was one of the most important things they could do - how would that change a lot of things about school, society, inequality etc?
- with technology becoming so prevalent - what are schools going to look like in the future?
- how can I make the greatest playground in the world?
- games and learning - bringing play back into education, don't just stop playing once school starts...
- does there have to be a struggle between 'natural' and 'technological'?
- authentic learning, collaborative innovation, asking questions - how do you inspire people do deeply engage with these things?

These and another million things are pummeling my brain. I feel so lucky to be wrestling with it all...

Nerd out for now

groooooaan...and twinkle. time for tired.

We are almost there.

My fellow students and I can really see an end to the academic year close at hand. Only a couple more major assignments - finish my paper on sharing and negotiation for my social-emotional intelligence course, and put together my portfolios for interpersonal communication, creative arts, and field education. Oh my...I hadn't written it all out like that yet...yikes.

But considering I've worked through a good two thirds of the majorness, I feel good about it all.

That's not really what I want to be writing about. I want to write about the gazillion new thoughts that firefly through my heart and mind, even when I'm brain crushingly exhausted from working non-stop on final assignments and never hanging out with my loved ones. I want to write about the amazing feeling of watching tulips sprout up with young children. I want to write about the amazing free feeling of playing outside after a cold-weather climate winter. I want to write about reflective practice, and new thoughts on how we can encourage children to talk and plan with each other, and how we can guide and encourage a lot of learning with stories and narrative, or some new picture books I found at the bookstore, or the amazing feeling of the springtime sun on my back as I ride my bike to placement or class. Or the wonderful, warm, exuberant and inspiring community of thinkers and writers spinning threads of connection through the internet to inform and make community. The early learning and education bloggers are doing a wonderful job of weaving a feeling of togetherness right now...very awesome.



But I won't write about that now. The 'soft animal of my body'(thank you universe, for Mary Oliver) needs to rest, and not look at screens for a while. I will write about all of that soon.

nerd out, friends. let's rest.

wow the amazingness of the early childhood education blog

In honour of the total amazingness that is the early childhood educational presence out there in blog-o-land, I've connected the folks who are really inspiring me these days out there on the internet to this blog. Over on the right there's a list of blogs written by thoughtful, insightful educators all over.

Really really amazing thinkers out there. Thanks folks - it's really inspiring and affirming.

Nerd Out!