Community: the Cornerstone of Innovation

Source: Lisa Domeier Crescent Beach, White Rock, BC

We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been — a place half-remembered and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.

                       - Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark

How many times have we heard that relationships are the foundation of education? When I returned from 12 years working in small Prairie and Latin American communities to work as a high school teacher, my Vice Principal and mentor Bob Emerson told me, “start with relationships and then sneak in some curriculum”. This matched what I have seen throughout my life, that relationships and community matter. On the Canadian prairies, when a family suffers the loss of a barn in a fire, they experience the love of their community with a barn raising that always features amazing food and fellowship. In Ecuador, I experienced Indigenous Andean communities practicing minga, cooperative work parties, that build roads, community buildings and repair storm damage. As educators, we participate in countless examples of collective cooperation as part of a community and this very community is the cornerstone of innovation. 

In early July, I had the great fortune to participate in an ADE Academy in Montebello, Quebec with my fellow Apple Distinguished Educators and Apple staff. The last time I went to an Academy was in 2017 and what kept me away from this community of gentle and convivial folk? Deaths in our family, health challenges and COVID. Even though I haven’t attended a national or global ADE Apple event for several years, I still have the joy of being part of a large and generous community of makers, designers, educators, and storytellers. This community propels me to be a better educator and person and challenges me to be more innovative. 

What this week in the Outaouais reminded me about community:

You are going to miss it when it’s gone, so protect it, nourish it and take care of it. 

Don’t think that you get a free ride in a community or that a community is created by the fairies. Think about what our role is in our community and mentor others to embrace their role and be ready to be mentored by others as well. Last December, I had a conversation with our Youth Care Worker that turned me around and transformed the way that I was looking at my role as a Teacher Librarian and an educational leader. Watch for these seminal moments in our lives as coaching and mentoring can come from students, custodial staff, friends and family and other colleagues. Sometimes when I am feeling frustrated or overwhelmed, I write thank you letters to my colleagues for their contributions to myself and our school and this puts into perspective for me our primary objective: teach students, help them to become good and responsible people, and protect our collective and individual well-being.

Share your brilliance with our community. 

Educators are by nature are very humble. When I first met Anna Crosland, an exemplar Surrey Schools Teacher Librarian, she told me, “Everyone is doing what I am doing”. I told her that was not the case and encouraged her to start presenting at a local and provincial level and to share her brilliance with others. Learn what your superpower is and share it generously with your community. I’m lucky that I can call up my ADE colleagues and ask them for help, advice, council and they can request the same of me. The unconditional support of a community buoys us in times of turmoil and supports us when we need a sounding board before we launch a crazy idea or initiative. Nelson Henderson states that, ‘the true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit”. Have the guts to share your talents with your community as you might never know how your ideas or actions will positively affect a student or a colleague. 

Source: Lisa Domeier

Learn from your mentors. Listen. Pack up your ego.

During a workshop at the ADE Academy in Montebello, I had an illuminating conversation about beauty and the importance of art in education and our lives with the the art educator and ADE Andrée-Caroline Boucher @ACBoucherPhd. Later on that week, she presented a workshop on augmented reality with us creating art collage inspired by the work of Quebecois painter and sculptor Jean Paul Riopelle and using the apps Halo AR and Motionleap to create interactive digital postcards. Mentors appear from no where and positively affect us with just one conversation.

I attended this workshop with ADEs Petra Willemse and Bryan Hughes and we were all challenged by creating art through collage and learning new apps. When I learn a new app, I really need time to experiment and try things out but with the time restraint of the workshop, I got help from both Petra and Bryan. I have learned so much from these educators and I love how we all help each other out with a good dose of teasing.

In May, I did a keynote about how we use cellphones in our classrooms for learning and I’m currently re-working this presentation after a crucial conversation with Rob Policicchio, the Education Marketing Programs Manager at Apple Canada, at the ADE Academy in Montebello. This conversation helped me to reframe, redefine, and deepen my why for the keynote that I’m giving again this month. Instead of just an exploration of how teachers should manage cell phones in the classroom, I’d like to challenge educators to examine how they are designing and shaping learning in their classrooms with the use of technology. I was already leaning this way but my conversation with Rob helped to further analyze what is really at stake. The larger issue of the how student engagement in learning diminishes greatly in high schools needs to be researched more in our schools.. 

Steven Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (2011) talks about how innovation happens when one person’s “slow hunch” collides with another’s “slow hunch”. We need to have cognitive or intellectual humility to abandon or shift our idea/s that we hold dear to recognize when another idea or approach is a better solution. Are we really accepting of feedback from others? Do we listen deeply to others or do we just impatiently wait for our moment to share our ideas? Buddhism contends that there is no I, me or mine so how do we learn how to pack up our ego and get the work done?

When we invite others to innovation, professional development, and other opportunities even before they think they are ready, this gives educators the space and the permission to grow. We all were once in that space….unsure of ourselves and just getting through the school day.

Nip gossip in the bud. 

One of our standards as educators as members of British Columbia Teachers Federation (BCTF) in B.C., Canada, is Code 5. This obligates us to address professional concerns directly with our colleagues in private. In the book The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz explains that the Yaqui People in Western Mexico call gossip, mitote, a thousand screams in your head. Sometimes, we need to seek counsel or get things off our chest, but it is fundamentally different than gossip. Ruiz also talks about being authentic with your word. A community is just like a classroom as it needs reglas de juego, rules of the game, standards that shape our conduct. Each community needs to shape and define those standards as they are our North Star, our ethical centre, that guide us when we have circumstances that shift us from our ethical axis. 

If you falter, your community will catch you.

Monica Palmer, one of my master's professors, told our class to “shift our judgement to curiousity” and I repeat this to myself several times a day. It shifts thinking and helps us to ask questions of others instead of instantly issuing a judgment. In my leadership role as a Teacher Librarian, I know our staff and we work on shifting our collective judgment of others to curiousity. We are only as strong as our community. If you don’t have a community to support you, look to someone in your school and cultivate that relationship or look to others outside of your school to fill your cup.

In a circle meeting at our school, Nick Brown, the Racial Equity Manager at Surrey Schools, stated that to do the work of racial equity “we have to Invite people to community”. Forming and maintaining a community requires challenging conversations and everyone needs a seat at the table. Canada is an interesting social experiment and we have a lot of work to do around reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples and radicalized communities. I have seen classroom communities transformed when students are invited into ceremony sitting in a circle. No one can hide behind a laptop, everyone has equal presence and we need to look at each other when we share ideas. We collectively establish the ground rules for the circle and the educator models facilitation for students and then hands off facilitation to students. Why don’t we have more meetings as staff in circles? Don’t let the naysayers who don’t want to ‘get together to sing Kumbaya’ stop you from building community. Indigenous Peoples have been calling each other into ceremony in circles for generations, try it out! Charles Leadbeater, states that, ‘we have to invite others to innovation” as it takes guts to try something new or look at something in a different way and sometimes educators just need an invitation to join an initiative or project.  

Teachers in the Trenches

My Great Aunt Marion Fargey Brooker wrote a book about my Great Great uncle Jim Farley called Hold the Oxo!: A Teenage Soldier Writes Home. He went to fight for Canada in the First World War when he was 17, got injured at 18 and died at the Battle of the Somme. Jim found solace in writing home about bringing in the harvest, and the price of hogs and not about the horrors of war. Fargey Brooker fills in the gaps to illustrate the challenges of being a young soldier in wartime. We often use the metaphor of teachers being in the trenches and I guess this comes from the brutal reality of teaching. Perhaps we need to challenge our practice of always being the ones who take up the slack of meeting the needs of an education system that requires more and more of us. We need to be able to tell our community our limits and to establish our personal and professional boundaries. My Great Great Uncle died in the trenches of World War One and we should do our best as educators to not suffer from being in a community but rather thrive in a community. 

Make the space and tell your story!

Stories are the medicine that fill in the gaps of the self and show us who we are.

- Catherine Richardson, Belonging Metis

In my TEDx talk, I did a call to action to educators to make the space for students to have a Makerspace where they tinker, build, and experiment and I would like to echo this now with a new call to action, to make the space to build community in our schools and communities. 

• Don’t wait for your principal or someone else to lead in your school, we are all leaders. 

• Find your tribe, your allies, and your accomplices.

• Lift up women, Indigenous, racialized and LGBTQ+ educators. 

• Mentor others and let yourself be mentored. Invite feedback and learn how to accept it.

• Normalize that we all experience Imposter Syndrome and demystify this phenomena for others. Make it normal that we all are perpetual learners with strengths and weaknesses. 

• Value introvert and quiet leaders as they have a super power. They observe, evaluate, listen and take the time to make decisions. We need them as touch stones to guide us on the right path. We need everyone’s voices in the room so identify strategies in meetings to allow everyone to have a say with adequate wait time.

• Promote joy and fun in your school as an antidote for stress and frustration.

What stories are we telling about our community to build and sustain our community? We create narratives about all sorts of things that either lift up or breakdown people. Are we good storytellers? What skills do we need to work on to become better storytellers? Are we using story for the good of our community? Are we impeccable with our word? 

Austin Klein in Steal Like an Artist, talks about surrounding ourselves with good content and ideas to be a better artist and storyteller. Also, he talks about our ability to re-cycle and transform things to make them better than before. Invest in your community with good thoughts, deeds and efforts and you will jumpstart innovation. My work is fuelled by the kind people that I have conversations and relationships with. So, make the space of community with others in our schools and watch what innovation happens.