Sometimes we are moved into shifts. And that is what happened here. 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. 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. Welcome to Pursuing Questions, formerly known as The Playful Podcast: Imprints of Inquiry. Possibilities for Play. Provocations for Living. Welcome to the quest within the questions.
Transcript
Welcome to pursuing questions. Imprints of inquiry, possibilities for play, and provocations for living. This 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. Here we linger at the intersections of reflection and revisiting in hopes of nudging ourselves into intentional, innovative, and reclaimed ways of being, thinking and imagining. Within our lifelong learning journeys, we transcend predetermined scripts and boundaries by harnessing the interdisciplinary wisdom of early childhood educators and really, anyone who facilitates experiences with humans, big or small. I’m your host, Kim Barton, and I am living, loving, learning, and playing in Guelph ON the city known as two. Rivers and the lands traditionally governed by the dish with one spoon Covenant. Join me in the quest within the questions. I’m excited to wonder, Wonder, Marvel and play alongside you.
Welcome to another mini episode. This felt necessary to share, and I kind of feel vulnerable in doing it at the same time because. What I’m going to claim here is a shift for me that happened in this podcast and the reason I feel vulnerable is because I already just did some shifting. I have a new logo. I sort of regenerated or re energized this podcast after a long pause and so sort of shifting or evolving. Again, feels a bit whimsical or noncommittal or a bit. I don’t know. Like I might lose something that I started perhaps. And at the same time the shift feels so aligned with my values. And that’s something I’ll actually talk about a little bit more in this episode. But, um, I guess what I’m saying is I just need to claim this shift that’s happening internally for me and through this podcast so that you know what to expect. And also that I can get clear on my vision for this space because clearly it’s evolved over the past two years. And I I kind of wanted to start with a little reintroduction of myself. And if you know me, this might feel funny, but also it might be a good time for me to kind of, I don’t know, like reacquaint myself with you. And I’d invite you to do the same next time we encounter each other.
I guess to start, my name is Kim. I am a proud, passionate and very privileged early childhood educator. I am one of those people who has worked with children and humans since I was, like, allowed to, since I, like, completed my babysitting course. But the interesting thing for me is that as I became. An adult and participating in professional. Accreditation. I guess I became more and more curious about adults who work with young children, and I’m starting to think that this is kind of my. Thing, at least for the next few years. And it makes sense because I. Have worked in the several different leadership capacities, I would say I’m still very much an emerging leader. I am still fully finding my footing. I often say I feel like a toddler. I’m like stumbling around figuring out how to move in this role. In my current role, I am like four months old, I think, and so grateful. I’ve so much gratitude for the support I have in my role and to be in a position where I get to talk with adults about what they’re experiencing. Um, for the past two years I’ve worked as a pedagogical leader in a couple different organizations. I worked for a college and then a municipality, and now for an individual childcare program. And I guess the point in me talking about my role is that it’s really allowed me to become even more curious about how educators learn and play and flourish, particularly when working in relationship based fields like early childhood education, but also social work or anyone who’s designing experiences or programming for other humans. And initially I started this podcast, I think when I started in my role as a pedagogical leader, or around the same time at least. And I’ve been thinking about a podcast for a while and I’ve been blogging and things like that. And in all honesty, when I first started the podcast I had hopes and dreams that it would become a source of professional learning for other adults. And yet would I discovered, is that it became a reflective practice tool and a pedagogical documentation practice for myself. At the same time I also stumbled into some really big ideas and some. Really huge questions. That I felt like, couldn’t really be pursued when calling it the playful podcast or by suggesting that it was sort of a place to find professional learning.
In order to kind of follow these ideas, I felt like I needed to shift away from this being a place to find tools or strategies or sort of how to type of answers and instead shift towards being a space of generating questions. And really listening to the nuances of ideas and knowledge and questions and reflections and the capturing of moments, all of those things. And I guess as somebody who is so deeply curious, almost to a fault. I found that I really needed a space to marinate in some ideas and to kind of generate new possibilities. Consider how different ideas or theories or concepts connect and where their edges are the edges of what we know and what we don’t know yet. I think there’s so much out there that we don’t know enough about, and I think children are really good at asking us questions that the world has never really heard before and certainly never asked before.
So I guess to stay aligned with all of these sort of ideas, I started changing my logo about a year ago. I wanted something that reflected this idea of revisiting my obsession with spirals. The logo with the footprint. It was really just me trying to play around with the spiral imagery, and I wanted something that reflected sort of like topography lines and the layering, kind of insinuating, like a map or the process of mapping. And I also wanted something that resembled kind of like a fingerprint, an imprint. Something that kind of signals that each episode is merely like one trace of where I have been at one point in time, and kind of marking the landscape and geography of my thinking. There are some larger threads being explored throughout the seasons of Inquiry, for sure. All of this really is to say that the process of generating a new logo actually and and thinking about spirals got me thinking about like, well, what is my vision here? Like, where are my guiding values? What’s my ethos in this podcast? Because I’ve dabbled in having some guests on and I’ve really sort of let that go as a priority because I wanted to be clear on what I was really wanting to do and say and pursue here. So let me just share a few of the values that I’m working from at this moment in time.
The first is interconnection. Um, although I often prefer the term interdependence, I have known for many years that I have a value of interconnection and that it guides me to pursue connection always and leading through connection. And so this shows up as me sort of me being very mobilized by serendipity and the linking of different ideas, those edges and boundaries of where concepts connect, and also connection in the form of relationships. We are all connected in multitudes. My next value here is curiosity. I truly view curiosity as my compass. I ask questions and work from a place of pursuing curiosity over compliance, normalcy, or acceptance, and I believe in living the questions now, hence the new title Pursuing questions. Another value I have is reciprocity. I believe in sharing knowledge generously. I believe in making thinking available and accessible to others, which is similar to making learning visible. Through the practice of pedagogical documentation. And this is because I aim to live in a world where we receive and give openly. So here is a place where I’m model generous knowledge, sharing not only knowledge that I have, but also bringing forward knowledge that I have been gifted or entered into relationship with. Another value I hold is wisdom. I believe in entering into embodied relationship with wisdom as lived, rather than consuming or producing facts or information. And you’ll see this in one of my upcoming episodes at least, where I talk about sort of the limits of research and sort of the expansiveness of pedagogy. So in that regard, I consider lived experience and generational knowledge to be as valued as reliable and reproducible data. And then finally, my last value is kind of a quirky one. It’s upwards spirals and this really just means joy, flow and purpose, I believe in pursuing the paths towards and the ingredients to sustain upward spirals of flourishing and passion. So those are my values.
When it comes to my sort of vision and ethos, I want to say it’s what I’ve started to include in my introductions. So basically, it’s the pursuit towards mutual flourishing, healing, living and learning well throughout the human experience. And I often say how we do this, and it’s through lingering in dialogue and sort of generating new ways of thinking and reflecting on our world. And then interestingly, the process of sort of writing that vision and reflecting on my values led me to, I don’t really know what to call this. I don’t know if it’s like I’m, I don’t think it’s a mission either way. I just sort of have three other guideposts that I’m working from and that’s this idea of imprints of inquiry, possibilities for play and provocations for living and. And so Imprints of Inquiry is just this idea that. This is like that moment in time that sort of trace, and it’s because I believe that these traces are worthy of being studied through revisiting. And I guess the purpose of this is really just to cultivate my own awareness, reflection, and empowerment in being able to move my practice from feedback to myself. And then Possibilities for Play is really just here because I strive to expand the potential of parallel practices. I think that it’s through this sharing of knowledge, half knowledges, half thoughts, whatever. That’s how we sort of become nudged within our journeys, whether that’s forwards or towards something new or back to something to revisit and and reclaim it. And I think it’s this movement that allows us to be improvisational and nimble and to be moved by what we experience and reflect on and hear from others. And then finally provocations for living. This reflects that I about fostering our dispositions, pursuing multi species flourishing, really wanting to broaden relationships across humans but also across and between them more than human world. And I also want to unravel this word pedagogy and inspect its ideals, protagonists and assumptions. This, to me, is not just about learning in the way that we’ve learned about it, but it’s also a reflection of living throughout the human experience. So in the spirit of sharing knowledge generously, I also just wanted to be clear on a few of the things that have inspired me, and I can’t remember at this moment in time what I’ve shared on here already and what I haven’t.
So I’m just going to read a few poems that that really speak to me. The 1st and the reason behind the name change is a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. Without further ado, here’s the poem. Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart. And try to love the questions themselves, as if they are locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now, perhaps then, someday, far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
And there you have it, pursuing questions.
The other segment I wanted to read is by Carolina Rinaldi, and I might have read this in an old episode, but it’s about the pedagogy of listening. So Carlina Rinaldi says. What is listening? Listening should be sensitive to the patterns that connect us to others. Our understanding in our own being are a small part of a broader integrated knowledge that holds the universe together. Listening should be open and sensitive to the need to listen and be listened to and the need to listen with all our senses, not just our ears. Listening should recognize the many languages, symbols, and codes that people use to express themselves and communicate. Listening to ourselves. Internal listening encourages us to listen to others, but in turn is generated when others listen to us. Listening takes time. When you really listen, you get into the time of dialogue and interior reflection and interior time but also past and future time, and is therefore outside chronological time. It is a time full of silences. Listening is generated by curiosity, desire, doubt and uncertainty. It is not insecurity but the reassurance that every truth is so only if we are aware of its limits and its possible falsification. And here’s the bit that I love listening produces questions, not answers. Listening is emotion. It is generated by emotions, is influenced by the emotions of others, and it stimulates emotions. Listening should welcome and be open to differences, recognizing the values of others, interpretations and places. Listening is an active. Gloves. Reputation giving meaning to the message and valuing those who are. Listening is not. It requires a deep awareness and a suspension of our judgments and prejudices. It requires openness to change. It demands that we value the unknown and overcome the feelings of emptiness and precariousness that we experience when our certainties are questioned. Thus, the pedagogy of listening is not only a pedagogy for school, but also an attitude for life.
And there you have it. The intersection of questions and listening and sharing knowledge. I hope this helps to clarify why I felt the shift in the name was so essential and necessary. I guess I typically end the episodes by saying stay playful, which I will continue, but I also want to say keep taking up the quest within the questions.
Pursuing Questions 