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Playful Pedagogies

Playful Pedagogies

Possibilities, ponderings and podcasting to share reflections on lifelong learning and leisure.

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  • The Playing with Sound Project

The Playing with Sound Project

My next endeavour as an educator-research is pursuing an inquiry into the tangles of sound, music, and musicality in young children and their educators.

Read my blog posts on this topic here:

“As Music” – A Spoken Word Poem
Music in Early Education and Care: A Call to Find Our Voices and Reimagine Music Within Pedagogy

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The Playful Podcast

The Playful Podcast
You can barely see it, but there is a hawk in the tree branches here. I experienced many changes over the past year, and this was the year I started noticing hawks. This photo was taken the day I decided to take on a new role, and step off the path of a journey I was on. I leave nothing behind, for I am too wise to know that learning is ever complete, and that I will re-visit that path eventually. I was uncertain about this decision, and my colleague told me to look up the meaning of seeing a hawk. If you see one, I encourage you to also look into the meaning. They are powerful creatures, with so much guidance. I randomly created this footprint a year ago, when trying to think about a more meaningful logo. I love the spiral imagery, but also the layering of topography lines and the finger-print-ness of it. It's meant to signify that each episode really is just a landmark in time and entirely dependent on the context, time, thinking, experience of when I did the recording. Like Carlina Rinaldi says, "observation, documentation and interpretation are woven together in what I would define as a "spiral movement," in which none of these actions can be separated from the others." "...what comes out are... the steps and the traces of the learning processes of the teacher... and can be shared with other teachers". Each episode is like a footprint, an imprint along my journey, showing traces of where I have been at one point in time along the winding paths of where ever I may go. A recent experience with Anne Marie Coughlin & Lorrie McGee Baird has me thinking about pedagogical documentation as a way to study was we experience. They mentioned that when we document (capture a moment) that we believe it was important enough, worthy enough, of being studied. But further, what we've captured and our reflection on it then has potential to give birth to new ideas, to burst us into new lines of flight, to take us to places we never would have been without the initial capturing of a moment. Once we open up multitudes - possibilities, ideas, or lines of flight, we are then able to choose with awareness about where we want to go, and what we want to respond to, how we want to respond to it and why. 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. Available across all streaming platforms. I’ve been noticing how complex human-water relationships are over the past several months (and years), and a recent winter camping experience in Algonquin is certainly the place to highlight that. Water is such an incredible force. We were tentative about walking across the frozen lakes, but gradually became more confident. I was humbled by the vast, open “white space”. (There is so much we don’t know about how viewing and visiting frozen bodies of water are connected to our well-being.) As awe-struck as I was, I was also extremely protective over my gear on the “floor” of our tent around the melting ice from the stove. Hence a little mid-night redesign. I want frozen water to walk across but not melted water flooding my home. I need melted water to consume and don’t want it freezing overnight. Some of us have access to endless clean water, and others do not. We are made from water, initially grow in water, and need it to survive. Some even say the next war may be over water. Children know our connection to water and remind us with every puddle and snow pile we encounter. Most of us love a good beach in the summer but groan about the icy conditions and slushy trails. So I guess I’m wondering... what does winter has to teach us about being in relation with water? After a long and moderately intentional pause, a new "season" of The Playful Podcast has launched. As part of a commitment to forming structures for openness, this season is less linear, more expansive, less edited, more spontaneous, less contained to the format of "episodes", and more reflective of authentic learning. Grounded in an ethos towards mutual flourishing, healing, learning, and living well, join me cultivating curiousity about humanity, both within and beyond being mentors to others in the human experience. I will never forget the day that I was scouring our early learning documents looking for what they had to say about joy, and I stumbled upon this line from Think, Feel, Act, empowering children in the middle years. “How might you open up tight scripts for action that determine activity too rigidly… [by] watching for a “windhorse effect” (Wien, 2014), that is, activities that generate a whirlwind of positive, excited energy in which children cannot wait to create, participate, and be part of their community, as in the 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 importance of building relationships with high quality materials, and the influence of time in getting to know materials such as clay or a guitar. If you're curious about how you can support and honour children's expression through various art forms, this episode is for you! “Home is created and recreated when I pick up and move unearth my roots maybe I’m meant to pass through. I see where I’ve harvested exploded in marketing and places that I am not native to“ (Barton, 2021).
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