Teach Wonder
Teach Wonder
Agency: Context, Control, and Iceland
On this episode of Teach Wonder, we focus on power and control through the context of our trip to Iceland. Listen to stories about the classrooms and patterns that we saw. Hear us talk about how we experienced control and agency in Iceland and how it has changed and challenged our thinking.
The majority of the music and sounds in our episode today are audio clips from our trip. The artist referenced is Jounsi from Sigur Rós. Clips are from schools in and around Reykjavík. Additional background song from Pixabay.
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Iceland can be like so dark and gloomy and bare in the winter like, but then you have the summer time and where there's like sun 24/7 followed with a lot of rain, and the backyards just come alive. You know, all the weeds and the grass, and it's like, everything is overgrown and and it's very beautiful about downtown. Like all kinds of people live here, like some people take care of their gardens, you know, others don't. And it's just like, especially after rain, when you walk downtown, you're like, there's this green set, which is the Sherwood and the angelica that is ....
Ashley O'Neil:A little over a month ago, Julie and I were with our colleague Tracy in Iceland, and on our first night there, it was dark, and we found ourselves jet lagged and standing in a perfumery owned by this Icelandic musician who's the lead from sigarose. And there's a lot of stories I could share about this trip, but I bring up the perfumery because it captures something that I've been thinking about since I got back at the perfumery. We didn't just smell the scents and move along the family, this singer's family that runs this place gets that context is built of many layers. So we stood in this darkened room lit only with these weird purple lights and small pot lamps. We drink spiced Icelandic tea from these tiny goblets around a decorated table that I don't know for lack of a better phrase, it just captured the vibe, music that the artist had written for this place, and these scents and this time played in the background. Our father
Unknown:was a metalsmith before he stopped working. And then my brother, Yonsei, who was our nose, or a perfumer, he was a teenager, helping him out and and he was often here in the heart of it, our father, helping him fix the ships. So these are kind of like his memories of of old red Julie,
Ashley O'Neil:and we would close our eyes and we would listen to his sister read memories.
Unknown:So let's close our eyes and I'm going to read you our memories, smoke in the air and tart telephone poles, anise seeds and black pepper tail freshly moved grass and tobacco leaves that flowers.
Ashley O'Neil:She talked about the smell of grease motors and wooden bar stools, the flowering plant that gets treated like a dandelion, both flower and weed, and the sounds in the street and the way that it felt to walk home arm in arm, friend with friends and family, and we would breathe in the scent that her brother had built to capture that memory,
Speaker 1:pipe. I don't know if you had that memory or somebody smoking a pipe around you. It's kind of like one of my favorite scent
Ashley O'Neil:Each of the elements of this place was beautiful, lovingly made and curated and really intentional, but together, the elements enhanced and spoke with each other, and it created this experience that was wholly unique and both more than and still made up of its disparate parts. This visit to the perfumery, it was part of our work trip, part of the learning about the people and the place that we were visiting, because things happen in context, and the educators that hosted our trip valued giving us different tastes and smells and views and sites of Iceland to help us root our observation and understanding of the schools there in a community and country that isn't like our own and the parts of the schools that we observed, it was a bit like walking into that perfumery with the lights on, music off. If we didn't think critically about how the other elements that we couldn't see were an integral part, we would miss the bigger picture. Now, 12 days and a visit to a perfumery does not an expert of Iceland make. So in our conversation today, you're going to hear us talk about our trip and what we saw, but with respect and care for the places that we visited and the people that we met. Know that it is just a scratch in the surface of truly knowing or understanding a place and an educational system, but I did leave Iceland with a deeper appreciation of how community, policy, parenting, healthcare, geography, weather and more shape a place and a lot, I know, but understanding that the way we think about kids inside of a school is affected by and often starts outside of the school, it's important, and all of these pieces fit together and get layered to create the school setting that we see. And it's not one protocol or one strategy that make a system, but it's all of the parts together. Fun fact. Today I thought that I would add some sensory layers for our listening experience, the sounds that you have already heard and the sounds that you're going to continue to hear. They're clips from our trip, so you can listen for the sounds of the school and the place and the children and the teachers as we share more of the things that we saw and the things. Things that we're still thinking about,
Speaker 1:whether the garden chairs stacked against the wall, a flower pot filled with rain and cigarette butts sits on the uprooted pavement now swallowed by chervil echoes of a nearby party fingers digging up sorrow and dandelions freshly fallen snow on a forgotten trampoline. Black currents fall from bare branches one by one,
Julie Cunningham:the experience we had was with a number of other educators, probably just over 20 of us in total, a very diverse group. Many were from the United Kingdom, but also there was educators, really, from all over the world, and although that we came from a number of different backgrounds, many had early childhood as their focus, and worked in preschools, or worked with children in those types of settings. And I would say we found some other commonalities that we probably will discuss here. And the number one and probably most refreshing commonality we have was it just sort of didn't matter what our like first language was, or what country we lived in, or anything like that. Everybody had the lens that children. Everybody who was there on this trip had the lens that children were the most important resource that existed. And we never had to explain. Never had to have it explained to us, or never had to explain to others that decisions that were being made were being made with children's best interest in mind.
Ashley O'Neil:Yes, absolutely. And I think we're bringing this up, and we're specifically talking about Iceland and our trip, because a lot of you know that we went because we learned a lot of really important things, but primarily because it fits really well in our topic this semester, which is all about agency, because so many of the decisions and the structures, the learning environment, the posture that the educators take, is all very much rooted and children are valuable, children are capable, and that is very much the conversation that we're having here about agency. So the topic of our podcast today, we're really focusing on two terms and how they show up in classrooms and with students and with adults. And those terms are power and control. And one of the things that I kept coming back to when we were in school. So Julie had an opportunity to visit two schools on her own with a small group of teachers. I had an opportunity to visit two different schools on my own with a small group of teachers, just so that we didn't have this overwhelm of 20 people kind of wandering through and we spent the entire morning there. So we had a decent chunk of time with the teachers we had. We were able to explore the entire school. And so maybe even if we were focusing in a classroom with five year olds, we were able to see older grades and younger grades, to see the entire building, to get a real feel for what the school was like. And I think for me, one of the things that I noticed over and over and over again was how equal everything felt, and I don't mean equal like everyone had the exact same thing, but that there was not the sense of hierarchy or power dynamics that I may have expected to see or would see in a different school setting. I was in a school where it was bilingual, so the children were learning and speaking Icelandic and then also speaking Icelandic sign language, and so everybody was signing and speaking at the same time. Some of the children had hearing impairments or were deaf or were COVID as children of deaf adults, but many of them were just a bilingual school, and as we were observing, it was impossible to tell who was the administrator, who was a teacher, who was a ParaPRO, who was an interpreter, who was a parent that had come in because children were encouraged to have their parents join them for the first day or so, We had a couple parents in there with us, and just the fact that everybody had this very calm, respectful approach to children with each other, and that there was no clear hierarchy, was interesting to me and feels relevant to the conversation Today.
Julie Cunningham:And just to add to that, Ashley's right, I saw two different schools, and I would agree that although there were teachers who were more or less guiding us on our experience, that we were allowed to and encouraged to interact with. Uh, a lot of different educators who are working with the children, and that we did get to see many parts of the school and the school day, including maybe more what we would maybe consider, like more downtime, like the the way the children got lunch and the seating arrangements there. But just to add to what Ashley said, so both of the schools that I went to, we went on nature walks with children, and so outdoor walks to some other space that was off the school ground. And in both instances, we traveled on community paths, meaning that there would be other people out walking their dogs or generally using those paths, and potentially in one situation, we sort of walked through a neighborhood, so that was not problematic for the children or the community or the educators, like no one was worried about, you know, keeping the kids holding hands or in a line or wondering. I mean, people were doing head counts. No one's interested in losing a child, no matter what country you're in. But also, they were not so risk averse as to not allow the children some space and some agency over what they got to do with their bodies while they were outside. So you could run ahead to the next lamppost. Or you could run ahead as far as the teacher could see you. You could climb a tree as far as you thought that you could get up, as long as you still could get yourself down. You could play with a stick and carry a stick and investigate a stick, or you could eat snow or, I mean, really, there was a lot of autonomy for the children over what they got to do with themselves and their bodies on these in this time that was outdoors, they really got to investigate How they saw fit to investigate.
Ashley O'Neil:I think the other thing it makes me think about is it just felt like everyone was holding things very loosely. There was not this tight feeling of control, the sense of what was going on. And a lot of the things that you're talking about, which are boundaries, right? Like you can go as far as I can see, you can run ahead two light rolls. A lot of those were grounded and still grounded in like students abilities and capability, right? Like on the one of the walks that I went on forest teachers, or having a special that was a hike or an outdoor time was really common, I think, amongst a lot of schools. So I also went on a hike with their forest teacher. And the there was never like the you can't go here, you can't go here, you can't go here. The kids had kind of set up for themselves this scaffolded approach to what was safe and possible. And so they first mastered walking down the steps. We walked under this kind of culvert tunnel, and we had to go down some concrete stairs. So they mastered that. And once they mastered that, they had these interesting, like, staggered steps that had a ramp along the side that looks like it would have been for, like a skateboard or something. And the kids would master going down these kind of jagged alternate steps and or, like, sliding down this ramp. And once they'd mastered that, and they felt comfortable in their body, and the teacher talked a lot about that, like, once they feel comfortable in their body and feel like they can do this, really, do this really well, then they graduated, or leveled up to they could walk on these huge boulders and, like, jump off of them, and it was a six or seven foot jump. It was taller than me, and or they could kind of traverse those big rocks and then fireman down the big light pole. And it was something everybody looked forward to. Was kind of this, this gaining of like mine, strong enough, I'm capable enough I practice this. I'm feeling ready and confident to do that. And so that was a really interesting flip, because I think at a time in my career, I could have seen myself saying, everybody has to walk down the stairs. I need you all going to line. You can't go over there. That's not safe. And there was, instead of that, there was this kind of loose hold on children and a trust in their abilities, and this focus on Yeah, you want to go in the boulders. Let's see how strong you are. Let's see if you can go down these things carefully, like show me how you can go down these steps and master this. And once you feel capable and ready, then yeah, let's go in the boulders. And it was something that the kids all looked forward to. And that's just that's a really big shift, and it reminds me of the children had a lot of control and power and say, in what that looked like. And that's different.
Julie Cunningham:I also think something that I noticed was, instead of teaching children or telling children don't hit each other with the stick, or don't break branches off of a live tree. There's just a general like, here's how we treat other living organisms, and I don't have to remind you, like, don't hit your friend with a stick, because. You've already accepted that there's this general like through line of we just treat living organisms a certain way, and so there isn't this like because of that, and maybe because they had a lot of agency over what they were allowed to do while they were outside. There didn't seem to be, like this constant, like picking at, well don't pick that, stick up, because you might hit somebody, or don't do this, or don't do that. This constant, like redirection of behavior, because in general, students understood that, yes, there were going to be some boundaries, but that they had a lot of control over what to do with themselves within those boundaries, and that's One of those words that We're coming back to today.
Ashley O'Neil:Get to trip the head. So when I think about I think more of our examples from our trip will come up, but when I think about why we use the words power and control, and what does it have to do with agency, a thing I think of is who gets to make decisions and whose voice carries the most weight in a classroom? I think those are the questions I ask, and oftentimes the natural response, I think, from everybody, will say, Well, yeah, the teacher makes most of the decisions, and the teacher's voice is the one that carries the most weight. And what are some of the impacts of that? You know,
Julie Cunningham:so then, and we haven't answered either those two questions yet, but my follow up, like, response questions are like, Okay, well, what would happen if it wasn't the teacher? Like, what? Really terrible thing would happen if we took some of those decisions and gave them to kids? So almost like, so what or what if. And then also, like, Who benefits, right? Who benefits from the teacher having all of the decision making, power, all of the control, and who benefits when some of that is given back to children? And what, like, what are the I always come back to this sort of, like, cost benefit ratio, right? Like, it seems like the benefits could be really large if some of that decision making power was giving back and control given back to the students for very little cost to the teacher. Yeah, and
Ashley O'Neil:it makes me think also, as we start to answer, like, pose our answers to these questions. I think also about how you ask those questions. Because when I think of power and control, a lot of times, I think people grab or hold on to power a little bit out of fear or concern of what if I let go, right? So if you say, like, what will happen if the person who has all the control might say, yeah, what will happen if something bad might happen if. And Iceland was a really great example for me of what would happen if, and the answer most times was nothing bad, nothing that you're thinking of. There was no chaos. We went and visited. Both of us went to visit a school. The students weren't there, but we were able to speak to the administrator and ask a lot of great questions. And in that particular school, they had choice time, I think, would be the best way to say it. And they'd have, you know, eight kind of areas that the children could choose from, and they had to stay there for a full 50 minutes. Outside was always a choice. The other choices included clay and paper, some building materials, some kind of social play, baby dolls and kitchens and that type of thing. And the children got to decide. And the children came to the adult and said, hey, when you tell us, when you call on, you know, Josie, and then Jonah, and then so and so and so and so, it feels like I'm always going to be last. And the children were able to articulate that by the teacher making all of those decisions right, like they would stand up in front of the room and say, okay, where would you like to go? And the children had choice. They could pick where they went, but they didn't get to pick when they were chosen. And they talked about how it made them feel to not know when their name was going to be called, how it felt that some students may have been called first more often. And so they had top pick that it was difficult to be the last kid called, because some of the stations were full and you didn't have as many choices. And so the students asked that they all sit on the rug. The rug had, I don't remember if it was letters or numbers, but there was a spot for every kid, and that the kids would sit on the same spot every day, but the teacher would rotate predictive. Through and would start on the first letter or the first number, and that kid got to pick first, so everybody knew when their turn was coming. And there was this really structured way, and that came from the students all the way. And so from that teacher's perspective, they were giving a lot of choice. The kids got to choose what station they went to. They got to choose, you know, who they got to be there with. Outside was always a choice. There was a lot of choice, but the fundamental thing that the students were craving was a little bit of the predictability and decision making behind the whole structure. Like, when do I get chosen and when does my turn come? And so when I think about what will happen, if we ask kids what they think, what will happen, if we let them decide in that situation, it was a really organized democratic process that actually solved a problem where maybe the teacher had been seeing behaviors and nothing, nothing bad happened. Like, I just think, I just want to say, like, it might be okay. You might give them control, and it might be okay.
Julie Cunningham:And then that actually allowed for some interesting discussions, follow up discussions too, right about what, what's fair, and even if I don't like the outcome of the decisions today, I know when next I will have more influence over it, because I will be further ahead in The queue, choice line and the queue, yeah? And so therefore I see that I can accept the decisions that occurred today, because I know those aren't going to be the decisions every day. And I know when I will have, like, a larger choice, or I will my choice will be first, yeah. So yeah, the discussions that could come out of that where I think it sounded like really rich as well.
Ashley O'Neil:And I think that, you know, one of the things that that school particularly focused on was helping kids work through and tolerate disappointment. So this isn't a situation sometimes, I think when we say, give the students a choice, let them have the control, it sounds like a free for all. And it sounds like, well, then the kids always going to take the easiest path. They always get their way. They never learn how to tolerate disappointment, and that's not the case. But in this case, what happened was the children were a part of the process in the way that they were going to be disappointed, and they had some predictability around it, right? And so I think that sharing the decision making, sharing the choice, kind of spreading the power amongst all of the children, then you're right, right? They knew, they knew when the next part was coming. They had a say in how that looked, and then they were much more invested in, well, we made this decision together. We agreed that this is the protocol. I'm still sad that I didn't get to go to clay today, but this like I'm part of this situation. And how much of our students stress comes from not knowing the plan, not having any control over the plan, and not really understanding the why behind the decision making that's happening because they're not participating in that at all.
Unknown:So if someone were to start down this path and thinking about their school day or their classroom, it might a place to start might be, where could I easily give up control? Where I know it wouldn't, it wouldn't matter to me, like I know it wouldn't affect I wouldn't have to rework my school day or my lesson plans, but I could easily give this up, right? That might be a place to start. And then, what kind of outcomes do I see? Does that change the my classroom dynamics? Does that change the investment in the students? And then maybe the next step is okay, now I'm prepared to give up something that I control, that is a little more that I hold a little more dear to myself, right? That I could see why the students could have control of this, or I could see how they could have more control over this, but it would take me a little bit more of an investment to give it up myself. But what would happen if I I, like to call them pilots. What would happen if I piloted that right? Like, does it mean I could never go back, or does it mean I tried something and I I did, like, this little research in my own classroom, and I noticed the results. And hey, that went pretty well. I bet if I just tweaked this, we could keep doing that. Or does it mean my students weren't ready because we weren't quite there yet? We need to scaffold it a little bit differently. But like, How could someone get started and just say, I don't think it's an all or nothing, I guess is what I'm saying. I don't I think there would be some steps along the way. I think if we all think about our days or ways in which we interact with students, then there would be some things that would be pretty easy to let go. And then there'd be some sort of a hierarchy to how, how difficult it would be, or how many other players are involved in your school day might Yeah. And
Ashley O'Neil:I think the other framing that I heard a lot from teachers while we were there, both from the teachers from the UK and Australia, some of the other teachers, not just from the Icelandic ones, was that it was like, You. Whose is it to give away in the first place? Right? Like there was a real honoring of this is this child's childhood. This is their fifth year. This is their first grade. This is their whatever. And so they should have a say in their own experience, because nobody understands their experience as well as they do. And so yes, it's a giving back, but also, I think it's an honest conversation about, Was it yours to like have in the first place, right? The other thing i The other thing I think matters as to your point about, how would I get started with this, is it comes from really honest reflection about why you do the thing you do in the first place, like what systems are in your classroom? Why are they there? Who do they serve? Right? Because then you understand where your hard boundary is. This teacher was really clear to say, like, we didn't want more than four kids at the station, so when we started the conversation, we were concerned that they just their solution was going to be, we'll just let as many kids go to the table as wants to go. And she's like, that was a hard line for us, because it's no longer small group work if it's this number of kids. And she had her reasons laid out for that, right? And she was transparent with the staff and with the students to say, it matters to us that we keep the numbers small at the table, so that everyone has resources and no one feels crowded. And that was their hard line, right? So the students agreed, and that wasn't even the end issue, but because it only, I think works well if you're clear on what you're willing to give up and why, right? Like, does the volume matter to you? Is this time constraint, like the thing that you can't let go of? Does it stress you out to have this thing here and not here? If you don't, if you're not clear about those reasons, why? Then you're going to feel challenged when kids offer solutions, are asked to change things up in a way that you didn't anticipate or that you didn't come up with on your own.
Unknown:And that, I think two things that play into that a little bit are one, if we think we're dealing with behaviors in our classroom, that I don't know are difficult for us. I'll just say that right, like we tend, I think, as adults, to look for more ways to control that situation, when oftentimes looking at it from a different perspective, or one in which you yourself give some control back to the students, is really the solution to the behavior or to what we as adults perceive as the problem. So I think that's one, one thing that it's difficult to maybe evaluate for yourself or difficult to reflect on. That's a better way of thinking about it. But often I think that's a tendency that we have as adults. And then a second tendency that I hear us as adults articulate often, or that I see us lean into, is that we think that very young children, or that children in general, can't handle these decisions, or can't handle the freedom, or can't handle the agency we're giving them. And we saw very young children, I mean, like two year olds taking themselves, deciding that it was time for them to go to lunch in this big lunch window, walking themselves down to where they knew lunch was, getting themselves as much food as they thought they wanted to eat that day, helping themselves so that they could decide when they were full and not being served too little or too much, right? And then clearing their plates and going back to their classroom all like very like two year olds, like very young children, right? And I think that we often adults, often sell children short in that respect. Yeah.
Ashley O'Neil:Sometimes it feels like the longer I'm in this profession, the less I'm sure of when someone asks me, hey, what would you do if more and more often my answer is, Well, that depends. Obviously, I'm not talking about situations and student safety, but so much depends on the nuances of a particular situation, the kid is an individual, the parenting they experienced that day, my capacity, the weather, and while my answers are less decisive than they used to be, my reasoning is clearer than ever. I try more and more to ground my decisions and those that honor individual needs and the strength of the child. So context matters. We split this episode into two parts. Julie and I had too much to share from our trip and too much to say on this topic to fit it into a reasonable time frame next time, we're wrapping up our conversation about our own experiences, and we're talking about some of those What if moments, but not in the way we talk about power dynamics, and we talk about how those compare to Iceland. Here and we share some exciting information about who you're going to hear from next in this series, teach wonder is brought to you by the Center for Excellence in STEM education. Thank you for listening. You