Pursuing Questions
Welcome to Pursuing Questions: Imprints of inquiry, possibilities for play, and provocations for living. This is a podcast, formerly known as The Playful Podcast, is for those cultivating an ethos towards mutual flourishing, healing, learning and living well throughout the human experience; and that is the vision for this space. Guided by 5 values and 3 intentions, what might be encounter? Intentions: Imprints of inquiry: I wish to capture traces of my journey, because I believe it is worthy of being studied. critiqued, and expanded upon. I aim to cultivate my own awareness, reflection, and empowerment in moving my practice. What I say here is a landmark in time; not meant to be absolute truth, rather, to be interpreted within the context discussed. Podcasting is a tool for collecting and archiving pedagogical moments, thought, decisions, and practice. Possibilities for play: I strive to expand the potential of parallel practices, by "going public" with incomplete ideas to seek feedback, to embrace questioning and being questioned, and to practice sharing knowledge generously. I believe that through knowledge sharing we are nudged towards improvising and playing with new ideas. Much of what I share is in a light-hearted spirit of saying "yes" to what is offered my way, and responding as best I can from a playful place. Provocations for living: I take up long-term inquiries about fostering playful dispositions, pursuing human and more-than-human well-being, mutual flourishing, reflecting on practice as a facilitator, broadening relationships with knowledge, highlighting the value to revisiting experiences, playing with ideas, and unraveling pedagogy to inspect its ideals, protagonists, and assumptions. What I share is meant to be generative, to activate possibility and life itself by provoking, expanding, and spiralling that which is most compelling within a pursuit. Values: Curiousity: curiousity is my compass. I ask questions and work from a place of pursuing curiosity over compliance, normalcy, or or acceptance. I believe in living the questions, now. Interconnection: Although I often prefer the term interdependence, my value of interconnection is what guides me towards pursuing connection, always, and lead through connection. I value serendipity, linking ideas, relationships, knowing that we are all connected in multitudes. Reciprocity: I believe in sharing knowledge generously, making thinking available and accessible, and aiming to live in a world where we receive and give openly. I believe in modelling the kind of offerings I hope others to generate as well. Wisdom: I believe in entering into embodied relationship with wisdom, as lived, rather than consuming and producing facts or information. I consider lived experience and generational knowledge to be as valued as reliable data, and as such, this podcast is not trying to elevate my work to a hard science; rather, declare its legitimacy as living wisdom and insight. Upwards Spirals: Joy. Flow. Play. Revisiting. Repetition. Deepening. "Again"....I believe in pursuing the paths towards, and ingredients that, sustain upwards spirals of flourishing, passion, pursuit, and drive. Our nervous systems are hard-wired to detect threat and our instinct is to survive, and as a society we have put so many resources into correcting the undesirable. To compensate for some of these patterns, I believe we need intentional rituals of gratitude and generativity, and a practice of studying what "works". To do so, I believe in starting from a place of what "is," which is so often what "was" and what "will be": the patterns in our thought, behaviour, and emotion that cause us to wonder, repeat, and pursue. Noticing and attuning to our own spirals can support deepened intention, awareness, and joyful pursuit grounded in what we already know, value, and have affinity for.
Episodes
How would you describe pedagogical leadership? What does the daily experience of pedagogical leadership look like and feel like? While our guiding documents and emerging literature attempts to define this role, there is so much value in exploring how pedagogical leaders describe and document their work. This episode aims to capture some raw thoughts and descriptions of pedagogical leadership - in order to better understand it as a ...
This episode was recorded on a walk home, where I ponder how we could shift our understanding of pedagogy towards a study of subtle systems and relations? What would that conceptualization invite of us? Join me as I ponder this question in this first episode of season 3.
Why do we document? How do we document? What do we document? When do we document? When does documentation become pedagogical? What activates pedagogical documentation? What about pedagogy inherently documents? What routines and rituals facilitate and sustain my reflective, responsive, relational documentation practice? What are the precursors to creating stories about our practice that can reveal and illuminate our communal think...
I've spiralled my way back to this question with a desire to unpack why I feel some tension around the terminology of "emergent" curriculum. Is curriculum the active agent? Does it reveal itself? If so, what role do educators play in taking up the passively emerging information? How do we use our interpretations of our experiences with children to respond and expand upon their learning? And what the heck do ukuleles ...
In response to questions about celebrating Halloween, I noticed an opportunity to explore why and how we celebrate in early learning communities. From thinking about relationships with families, to upholding integral rituals, to fostering cultural competency, to honouring what a seasons invites, and creating a community protocol for making decisions, this episode documents my journey of reading literature, taking questions to our s...
I'm embedded within the September welcoming routines and rituals, and it's caused me to reflect on building relationships through the lens of parallel practice. As a pedagogical leader and course instructor, I wonder about the experiences afforded to educators and students that foster or erode connection, and how these experiences mirror that which we hope children and families experience. Play along with me here if you&...
I've been curious about mentorship for several years, and I'm only just starting to connect my histories and futures of mentorship with the role(s) of healing, learning, and living well throughout the human experience. Wonder with me, here...
In this episode, I capture an ah-ha moment where I challenge the all-knowing assumptions of research by claiming its limitations, and instead leaning into the potential of pedagogical inquiry. I reflect on the constraints I sense as a researcher, and the freedom I can embrace within pedagogy. I briefly reflect on my graduate school research to highlight how research feels close-ended, contained and methodological (in order to be re...
What does communal growth require? What questions will we pursue together? Why? And what impact do we notice our pursuits have on our community?
From literally exploring movement across our program to being moved emotionally, and to reflecting on how movement during the spring of 2023 is very timely, this episode stretches the question "what moves us?" to its edges. The episode captures my interpretations of children and educators exploring movement and what led us to generating this question as the title for our art exhibit this year. A link to this episode was p...
Sometimes we are moved into shifts. And that is what happened here. In this bonus episode I discuss how, in the process of refining my values, vision, intentions, and ethos within this space, I was moved to reconsider the name of the this podcast/journey. While play is embedded within my values, I realized I required a new name that opened me towards new possibilities and propelled me to take up the quest within the questions. Wel...
Pauses appear to be the opposite of so many scripts we hold as a collective society. They may counteract efficiency, fail to demonstration meaningful progression towards a goal, are sometimes viewed as stagnation, and often are difficult to represent within outcome-driven agendas. Here, I offer that pause can offer possibility, and aim to describe how a pause can be extremely generative to our well-being and pedagogically. Pauses c...
In this mini-episode I capture several thoughts I've had over the past several years that have led me to absolutely revere spirals as metaphors in my personal and professional life.
I'd like to give a generous shout-out to the content creators of the music in this episode.
For show notes and transcript, visit: https://playfulpedagogies.ca/2023/04/04/spiralized-experiences-what-can-the-shape-of-a-spiral...
Welcome to my version of "season 2" of this playful podcast. I took a long, playful, pedagogical, and personal pause and now I'm here again to revisit many of the topics discussed in the first 10 episodes. I'm excited to offer these ideas here, but even more excited to hear your thoughts on these topics... so reach out! Let's generously share our wonderings, questions, ideas, pursuits, intentions, dreams, a...
Victoria, owner of Side by Side Consulting Services, is a skilled thinking partner for early childhood educators and brings many rich experiences and wisdom to this 2-part conversation. In this episode, and part 1, we engage is an authentic, reflective, and open conversation to explore our experience with, and our ideas about young children's experiences with art, music, and dance. We discuss parallel practices of play, the im...
Welcome back to a playful episode about play! While I intended for this episode to be about play theorists, the benefits of play, and how play and learning are interconnected, I ended up taking a walk and capturing some recent reflections from my own practice and experience about how I value and notice play, lately. Here, I share my hot takes on keeping play alive in our language and observations, what I've been learning about...
What happens when a Human Resources manager (mom), a student teacher (middle sibling), and a grad student (eldest sibling) FaceTime for 5 minutes? Well, when it's my family, we start theorizing about inclusion. What started as a spontaneous video call, turned into a deep conversation that challenged what we thought about inclusion, and called us to rethink how we have experienced inclusion of disability. This prompted us to h...
This is not so much an episode but 'going public' with this piece is a growing part of my documentation practice. This 'episode' is a spoken word poem that I wrote over a year ago that marks a particular place in a learning journey. I wrote this under the mentorship of Andrea Breen during my the first semester of my graduate studies at the University of Guelph, and it captures and explores how I felt about knowl...
In this episode, I had the great pleasure of chatting with outdoor education 'guru' Bob Henderson. As an experienced educator, guide and writer, Bob exudes wisdom when discussing of ways being with people outdoors. Through this conversation Bob and I find many not-so-surprising connections between my own experience as a student and Bob's experience as an educator, despite Bob never teaching me. We cover everything fr...
In this solo episode I reflect on my experience attending the fall conference held by the Council of Outdoor Educators of Ontario (COEO). I wander through reflections and realizations that I had during the conference and since, covering themes of what 'belonging' means and to whom, the limits of the English language, and my obsession with spirals. Note: this episode was recorded at the beginning of October 2021.
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