Transcript

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(transcribed by AI so there maybe some small errors!)

Marina Robb: What if wild, not domesticated, should be our normal instead of factory farmed lives? What if you could cultivate fulfilling lives and contribute to a healthy natural world.

The Wild Minds Podcast is brought to you by me. Marina Robb an author, social entrepreneur, Forest School and nature-based trainer and consultant and pioneer in developing green programs for the health service in the UK.

Join me as I discover new perspectives on what it is to be a human in a more than human world, challenging dominant paradigms, finding ways to be kinder on ourselves and harder on the system. I'm also the founder of the outdoor teacher and creator of practical online for school, outdoor learning and nature-based trainings for people in health, education and business. Tune in for interviews, insights, cutting edge and actionable approaches to help you to improve your relationship with yourself, others and the natural world.

Welcome to Episode 55 reimagining, learning, creativity, attunement and slow pedagogy. This podcast episode is just full of insight and thinking about what matters to children. Today, I'm speaking with Debbie Keats heartland, a passionate early childhood consultant, trainer, author and speaker who's so experienced in developing creative environments that invite rich learning and complex thinking. I so enjoyed the depth of thinking and the permission to reevaluate the image of the child and develop pedagogies of observation, listening and reflection.

In this episode, Debbie pulls together so much of her own creative thinking to enable me and you, as you'll see, to really bring new possibilities to our teaching practice, as well as enabling us to value children's capacity to learn and think for themselves when given the attunement and listening of a supportive adult. Debbie works with educators, managers and leadership teams across the UK and international schools co creating the playful, intentional and relational pedagogies that put children's 100 languages of learning, meaning, making and communicating at the center this conversation has ramifications for the way we teach children, the way we co create spaces and groups in the indoors or outdoors, and the way I think we grow together as a society, as you'll see, she effortlessly introduces me to so many wonderful thinkers of the past and present, so that we can reimagine learning and the value of our relationship with nature and materials as another critically important teacher like me, she believes that wellbeing and learning are deeply interconnected and that we need to move away from approaches that Don't serve the needs of children today.

In this episode, we'll dive into some big questions. What does it really mean to create an education system that nurtures creativity, slow pedagogy, and why is it so valuable? How can we measure the warm data not just measure the ability of children to memorize or reproduce facts that we give them. How can we co create the curriculum and develop our own thinking? So whether you're an educator, health practitioner, a parent, a leader or someone simply interested in shaping a better future? You are in for an inspiring conversation. Let's get started. Welcome Debbie to the wild minds Podcast. I'm really excited to be speaking to you. Thank you for coming.

Debi Keyte-Hartland: Oh, it's an absolute pleasure to be here, pleasure and a privilege. So thank you.

Marina: Thank you so much. So I really want to kick off, as I do, with a bit of gratitude, and then I've got just, you know, I just have reels of paper of possibilities and questions, but just to stay with the gratitude as a practice, I when thinking about this and about this conversation we're going to have. I really am immensely grateful to children and their vitality and enthusiasm, and also to the opportunity to be really working with children and hopefully together as a community, supporting them for their future. So I think if that's a privilege, and I'm incredibly grateful for that, and, yeah, I just wonder if you would join me in some gratitude, whatever occurs to you.

Debi: Oh, absolutely. Do you know what? I'm looking out my window at the moment, and we've got blue skies here at the moment, and it's January and I think I'm just really in gratitude of the blueness of that sky. I think it's a really crisp and it's a cold and it's a bit of a windy day, but I just adore and I'm grateful for that color, really, and that sense of joy and hope that a blue sky brings. And as something, I think there's something there about a metaphor of a blue sky, and blue sky thinking and how it opens us up to new ways of being in the world. So yeah, that's what I mean, gratitude of today, the blueness of a beautiful sky on this cold and crisp and windy day.

Marina: Thank you so much. It makes me think about people who often say, even when it's gray and cloudy, you can imagine that beyond that, it's blue. And that comforts me sometimes.

Debi: Yeah, blue is always there. It's always there. We just got to put our head above the clothes.

Marina: Well, it's probably good that we're thinking about that right now, because I'm sure we're going to dive into education and dive into perhaps what isn't always blue. And you know what we might need to consider to support a bit of color in the curriculum. So with that in mind, I wanted to start actually with thinking about what I read research that, let's say the Economic Forum, that will often say, We want adults to be creative thinkers. We want adults to be emotionally literate. We want adults to be problem solvers and things like that. And I've read some of your thoughts through your writing, and you often say about children's learning and development that, yeah, that you are also really, you know, what's the word? It's so important to you to think about creativity and critical thinking and playful inquiry. And I'd love you to just share with me the link between the early years and perhaps that happening, and how that could support that later on.

Debi: Absolutely, I think, yeah, I'm so passionate about creativity, and I truly believe that we are all born with creative capacity. That doesn't mean to say that through education, we can't learn to become more attuned to that creative thinking and process that we can't as educators help children to really grow and develop those skills of creativity. But I fundamentally believe, like Lois Malaguzzi did in the schools of Reggio Emilia, that we are born, we are all born with a rich capacity to think for ourselves. So I think that as a fundamental value and belief, sort of runs traversely through all that I'm doing. And that means that as adults, as educators, we are still with that capacity to be creative. Yet one of the things I often hear when I'm working with educators are educators saying, especially if I'm coming. Into their setting, and they know my background as a creative and sort of arts based practitioner, they will always say, oh, you know, my goodness, you know. Oh, Debbie's coming in. Debbie SAMSA over there. She's the creative one. I'm not. I and people say I'm not creative, and will literally point to the ones who they think are creative. And I think that's really interesting in how we as adults perceive our self efficacy and perceive our creative identities as some thinkers that we do have and that we don't have. And I think that affects them. How we work. We work with children, and I think part of the things that I'm doing in the work that I'm doing is sort of alerting us all, at whatever age that we are, that we all have creative capacity. And it's about unpicking. What do we mean by creativity? What do we mean by creative thinking, and how do we develop the rich and fertile environments for children in which to amplify and generate and activate the creativity that they have that is already inside of them, because I do also fundamentally believe that our attitudes to our own creativity affects children, and that can dampen the experiences for children, it can Cloud it, and it can prevent children's creativity from growing. So I'm really passionate about how we view sort of the I often call it, a mutuality between how we perceive children as learners and children as creative beings and ourselves as adults working with children as well. There's a mutuality between the two, or it's isomorphic. These things go together when we're thinking about it.

Marina: Yeah, that's already food. Food for Thought, because I'm wondering how that gets taken out of our learning experience. Then before we perhaps say, what is creativity, and how can we how and why should we bring it in or learn the skills? How does how is it that I can get to an adult because I also feel often that I'm surrounded by creative people, and I make certain assumptions around that and that I exclude myself from that, so I'm doing exactly what you're saying or How am I playful? You know, well, but so and so playful, and I'm not so playful, you know. So it feels like I'm boxing myself already into something that I'm not and, and I wonder, yeah, I wonder where that started, and how that is happening all the time through our education system. So I wonder whether you'd speak a little bit about that. Why so many adults end up like that? Or what are the seeds that that perhaps help us not to be like that? So it's the kind of same question, but from a different perspective? Yeah, I know

Debi: it's a fascinating question. Actually, I think, you know, so often as adults, we can be almost tricked into thinking about polar opposites and dichotomies and that it's either this or it's that, and never exploring the mess and the complexity actually. And I think how we all learn is a very complex and interdependent and interrelated way look. Going back to Lori smaller goods he, he always used the metaphor of a bowl of spaghetti as being what learning looks like, and that when you dive into a bowl of spaghetti, you're not choosing one strand to follow from beginning to end. You're just diving into the middle of it. You're taking a bit of the sauce with you, and there's no beginning, and there's no end. It's, rhizomatic um, and so learning is comp. You know, we can look at learning as being really complicated, um as multi directional and relational, where there are no linear or set ways in which to learn, make progress or develop. Yet our language, a language of education, forces us almost to think in a very linear way. So when we think about progress in learning, we think of a ladder, and we think, Well, this is what children need at the beginning, and then, if only we follow this. Those steps. You know, we will achieve what we need to do, but it's not it's messiness, and so I think how we think in these sort of dichotomies, which are not in the way that nature thinks at all either um, is part of the problem that we are looking for simple solutions to things, and this is what causes some of the problem. And I think, you know, Gregory Bateson famously said it's the major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think. And I think if we take any kind of living system, and we can say a school is a living system. It's full of liveliness and vitality. It's like an it's an ecosystem of its own, but if we treat that like a machine with mechanisms, then we take that vitality and life away and the messiness of what learning looks like. The natural world is learning from each other all the time. It's making mistakes. It's figuring things out. It's forming relationships. It's constantly interrelating. Yet when we come to view a school and how learning happens, we use the language of linearity of machine learning, and that takes away that, that essentialness of who we are as human beings and how we learn. And I think that's one of the biggest problems in in how we in how we view education, and is one of the biggest stumbling blocks. We've got to embrace the messiness, embrace that complexity, and challenge those fixed notions of education in which children's learning is simply mapped out as a stage or as something that they advance through carefully, and we even use the language in education of having a carefully sequenced, high level plan, you know, but actually, what does that mean? And how does even that language frame? Then, how we think, because the curriculum is something that children, as Ted Aoki talked about, is something that, yes, there is a mandated curriculum and things that we are, you know, asked to look at nationally and really important things there. But Ted Aoki talked about the lived curriculum, how children experience that on a day to day, and you said right at the beginning, you know, where is the color in the curriculum? And I think it's that's where the children bring that color. They bring that sense of vitality and liveliness. And one of the simplest things we can do is to think about, how do we make curriculum with children, rather than thinking of curriculum as being something that sits on a shelf that tells us and instructs us what to do in any given bit of time that we have with children.

Marina: So when I talk to head teachers, they're talking about medium and long term planning. So they've already fixed their curriculum in in a certain way, and they are measuring certain data, I assume, from what they think the children should be achieving at a certain point. And that's what I've understood a lot of sort of mainstream, a lot to do with I understand primary, perhaps a little bit more than early years, but there's something you've talked about linear thinking, and I understand the current pedagogy being much more about didactic teaching and this kind of linear thinking, and yet you started already talking about that. That isn't how learning happens. It isn't one thing after the next in this consecutive direction, but it's much more complex. So part of me wants to understand, well, how is it that all these theorists, these people, you've just touched on, a few have explained and described learning as something far more colorful, far more complex, far more active, far more mutual. And yet here we are. I Across the board, seemingly teaching in a very linear way. And I kind of want to understand that, because it doesn't make sense to me when teachers, and let's say pedagogs, are the experts, I am confused. Why we have to have this conversation? Debbie, when it seems to me that all the writing, I mean, not in the way that you write, because you do have a particularly wonderful, in my view on these things. But nevertheless, it's like, Why is it that we're so stuck on this linear way when we've talked about a little bit about creativity already and the value of that? So what's going on and we and then let's speak to some different pedagogy. Then, absolutely, I think

Debi: there's so much I wonder whether, in what we are doing, that we are often measuring the wrong things, and in measuring the wrong things and observing and attuning to the wrong things, like, what do children know and remember is a huge focus at the moment. You know, what do they hold on to? And it feels like if we're measuring that and attuning and responding to that, then we are, of course, going to see education in a very narrow way. And I think curriculum and how we're working with children. Curriculum, for me, is about the relationship that we have with children. It's about building that sustainable and relational educational paradigm where we're thinking about the wellbeing of all children, but where we're not seeing them as like little units. And Ken Robbington speaks so powerfully about how the education system has sort of set up for sort of, you know, sort of an industrial unit of a child that falls off the end of a production line, that they're all neatly boxed up as something that's been sort of manufactured that doesn't see them as connected as part of a whole web of ways of thinking together that include thinking with the world. And so we need to think about what matters to this group of children who are in front of me now, what matters to them, as opposed to, well, what does I work in the early years? For example, you know, what does, in general, a four a group of four and five year olds need to think about, we need to think about what matters to the children in front of us. See their liveliness, see their vitality. We need to be able to activate those children who are before us, not a generalized picture. We need to activate their curiosity that they bring with them, and we need to see those children as Loris Malagasy said, having 100 languages or 100 different ways of relating to and developing understanding of the world around them and their relationships with them, rather than, as He says in that wonderful poem, stealing the 99 languages of children and just concentrating on academic subjects that we as adults consider to be important. So being responsive to those children are tuning to children, listening and observing closely to how those particular children play and inquire into the world and reflect on what is seen and done. That's how you construct curriculum with children. It's about engaging with what's important to them now as well as what's going to be important to them in the future as well.

Marina: I can't help but think that we started the conversation as an adult. You know me as an adult, saying, Well, you know, maybe I don't always feel creative, or I decide that I'm not something and how that links to perhaps my own experience of going through the school system, and I'm just wondering whether so many of us as adults just didn't have that attention, didn't have that experience, didn't have that experimentation, that inquiry, because it seems to me that I. Yeah. I mean, I understand that's why you need consultants. You need people to come in and to kind of give people different opportunities, give teachers different opportunities. Because I was a primary school teacher, and I trained as a primary school teacher, and I don't ever remember there being a sense of experimentation or play or, I mean, it wasn't early as I was primary, but nevertheless, the sort of experience that you're giving me, the kind of imagination into, I just don't think many teachers are having and as you said at the beginning, well, if we don't have those experiences, it's very hard for us to value them. And I'm also wondering around about like, you know, my sense of how I learn my own individual experience, of how I learn through relationships, from what other another person might say or do, or what I might observe or and it not just being about humans, it also being about something that might occur because of the smell, or something that I've just smelled so I'm kind of trying to make these links, because it don't I don't Think that's happening very easily in our school, schools and yet, the theory says, look, let's do that and yet. And yet, we're not so I am. I think there's something about the head needing to know the educators needing to know the value of this, needing you know, like, if we can tick the box in our head saying, Why is play good? I hear it so much I can't believe that. I mean, I'm involved in, you know, play in Forest School, but I'm still hearing that schools struggle for to educate parents, to educate themselves, to say, well, play matters, or I'm going to add into that creativity matters, time, space to explore matters. Why does it matter? Debbie, can you help us understand, for those that are going, Oh, it sounds wonderful, but they're not learning anything.

Debi: Oh, there's two things. There's for me, I'm going to come back to the why it matters, yeah. But I think, you know, in schools, there are so many there is so much to read, so much to do, so many consultants coming in telling people what they should be doing. And yet, everything, as Nancy Klein says, everything that we do depends on the quality of the thinking that we do first. And I think part of the problem is that it's not about needing to know. It's about needing time to think through for ourselves and valuing thinking and creativity is a process of thinking, and that's why it's really valuable, because creativity enables us to see what's possible, to explore possibilities, to experiment, to stop, keep doing something. Because, you know, it's the way that we've always done it. It's the thing that helps us grow and expand. It enables us to imagine, um, other ways of being in the world, and we need that more than ever. We are facing, you know, meta and multi, multiple and meta crisis in the world, and our thinking needs to grow in order to think wisely about our future as human beings and our relationship with The world. And that's why creativity is really fundamentally important, because it helps us to think. It helps us to think about our relationships with the world, our relationships with each other, and how we work and collaborate together. And I think when I'm talking about creativity, I'm not just talking about the kind of creativity that is about that idea of a genius. You know your Einsteins of the world who have these like amazing, world shattering ideas. I'm talking about the kind of relational creativity that exists within groups of people, I often, when I'm talking with students, get them to think about a band, not a band who's been constructed and put together, but a band who have been messing around with sound and music. Music and Rhythm and harmonies and balance that, you know, they've got relationships with one another, and they're putting together a song about something you know, it's like, Where does that creativity lie in that band? Is it in the lead singer, who might be the one who's coming up with the lyrics, is it with the drummer who's really thinking about the rhythm, you know, who, where, whose creativity is it? And actually it's coming out of their collective experiences of being together, and that creativity is coming from the spaces in between of each of those people, and that, for me, is really a powerful thing to hold on to, because we in being creative, we create things that weren't possible before, and we are creating things when we are working together that we couldn't do when we're on our own. And that, for me, why creativity, creative thinking and teaching for creativity is just so is so valuable.

Marina: So that could lead me on to talking about participatory pedagogy and pedagogy of listening, which I do hope we get a chance to talk about. But if not, I will signpost people to some of your writing, but when you said about the collective organism, if you like, and the potential of creativity, I couldn't help but think about the natural world, because both of us care deeply about our relationship to the natural world and the future of outcomes for ourselves and the wellbeing of the planet as well. So I know that you've spent a lot of time thinking and considering the agency of materials, of water, of clay and I'd love to hear more about that, because when you said about togetherness, of course, it isn't just togetherness of humans, is it?

Debi: Absolutely it's about the more than human. It's about relationships with everything here. Um, it's, you know when I'm watching a group of young children exploring um clay, for example, um, that clay has as much agency as those children have on how it changes and transforms the children. We could observe children and think that they are just, you know, that they are exploring that clay, that they're developing understanding about what that clay can do, and then using that understanding, they are then transforming it, they're doing something with it. And that is one way of looking at creativity. And Anna crafts work talks about POS, you know, moving from that, you know, not knowing what something is a material is like clay, to that shift in understanding it, and then being able to think about what I can possibly do with that now. But there's also, for me, that agency, and we can call that a liveliness, too, that exists within that clay, because that clay isn't neutral, that clay has come from a place it's well, you can have different sorts of clay. You can have the kind of clay that's got plastic threaded through it, for starters, which is awful, which is absolutely awful, and isn't a natural material. But we've also got, you know, clay as a material that has such history. It's a material that comes from the earth and that has a responsibility to think about as well. I remember one of my students decided, with her young children to dig up some clay that was in those it's an outdoors set in Millie's garden in Bristol, and she dug up some clay for the children to explore. The children were digging it up in in the garden. There's a lot of clay within, within Bristol, and the children asked if the garden thought it was okay to dig up that clay, and what could they give back to that garden if they were going to take that clay away and do something with it? So I think. We can look at any material, and I can give you a link to read more about those stories of wild clay. Um, but I think there is just so much in thinking about the possibilities of how we learn with and how we think in the world together, that it's not just something that happens in our heads. We creativity and thinking happens outside of the brain too. So it's happening, I've said, you know, with other people, in our relationships with other people. But it's also happening with our surroundings, to our environment where we are, those materials that are within that too, as well as that with our relationships too. And Anna Murphy Paul often talks about this in terms of the extended mind and the power of thinking outside of the brain, that it's about how we think through our bodies, our environments and surroundings and our relationships. And for me, that really pulls into what we might call, you know, a new materialist or post humanist way of sort of viewing, learning and the world is that we are not just interacting with one thing, but we are intra acting. And this really challenges how we do education, when we think that we are not the only teachers of children, when we think that clay will teach the children something too, when we think about how we curate that clay, how we've put it out, where that clay has come From, when we start thinking in a much more complex way about the materials and those interactions, the histories that the messiness and the complexity of all that is going on at play. Then then we begin to see, then we start getting out of these boxes of ways of thinking, which I think are really detrimental to how we learn and develop.

Marina: There's something about the world view that everything's alive and that you can learn from multiple interactions, multiple beings, and that has a really valid place. And it's not just about, you know, the human interaction, because I'll often read about indigenous thinking, and they often talk about animism, that, you know, they actually believe that the plants and the land is imbued with a spirit, and that's quite hard for the modern mind to understand, and also it veers into something that might be a bit more uncomfortable. Am I now taking on a kind of religious idea? But I really appreciate that, regardless of that, and that might just be a cultural perspective of where you've grown up, rather than actually saying, Well, hang on a second, we can learn from the more than human, you know, whether they're it like, is it right to say inert, like a kind of a clay or, or whether it's a, it's a woodlow crawling around, you know? And what we could learn from that, and you said intra action, active, I think that's another pedagogy, isn't it? Interactive pedagogy, different ways of learning. And it seems to me that then we move away from being the center of the universe, because when I think about the future and how we may hopefully move to be a culture, a people, that is more understanding about our relationship to the natural world. And I think that we have to stop being the center of everything somehow. And, you know, and it sounds to me that the, yeah, new materialism, the pedagogy that you're immersed in and teach, or if it is teach, is it teaching, you know, brings a different set of values and fosters a different world view.

Debi: I think so. I think it is about a world view in where we're seeing ourselves as part of something bigger than ourselves, a world view that is seeing us as not separate from nature, but one and with it and not just connected to it, that we are, and that to separate things out are just mechanisms that don't allow us to think. Think in the way that we are naturally born to do, I think we are teaching. But there are so many different ways of looking at what that word means, and who teaches. And last mile ago, see, said the environment is the third teacher. And it the question there is, well, who's the first and the second teacher, and what does, and how does an environment actually teach? So for me, you know, I think going back into his writings, his words on that were that the first teachers of children are, of course, the their families who where they are born into those first really, really important attachments that they are way making in the world, that the second teacher Are the people that they encounter in the world, other children being teachers, and ourselves as educators, we are the second teachers, but that the environment is also a teacher of children, and it's everything within that environment. It's the climate, the emotional climate of that environment, as well as the physicality and all of those materials within it, but it's how then we view that environment and whether we see that as something that is really affecting children. And I love how in the schools in Reggio Emilia in Italy, and that's a place that has been sort of a real sort of way of it's enabled me to think so differently about the possibilities of education, because Lari Simone, the gutsy who was the sort of the founding, sort of teacher and sort of philosopher of the approach there really makes us think about how we are creating the fertile conditions for children to grow and develop, and how that environment can make a difference to that how it amplifies how it general, and these words amplify how it amplifies how it generates how it creates possibility for children to learn and to think and make discoveries. And that's very different from an environment that is about instruction, that is about telling you what you need to know. And I think that's a fundamental attitude to sort of grasp and to identify where your professional identity as an educator is, and I think for many people who I encounter is that they haven't had the time or the opportunity to even think about that. They've just been told this is how it happens. This is how you teach. This is what you need to know. This is what you need to do. There is no time to develop your own thinking around that.

Marina: But I want to say, jump in there. Because again, we're we seem to be mirroring our own experience that because me or the adult teacher hasn't had time, well, then we create systems where the child doesn't have time and I feel really strongly that it's in the spaces in between, as you've said, and it's in the timelessness moments where we start to have this sense of connection. It's very hard to feel connected to yourself or to another or even to the natural world if you have to keep moving on in a hurry. And it feels very, very important that all the kind of well being and nourishment on both sides, on multiple sides, comes from this slowing down. I mean, people talk about slow pedagogy as well, don't they, but that's where this kind of, let's say magic of connection happens. And it can be an intellectual connection, it can be an emotional connection, it can be a physical connection, it can be a mysterious connection. But we need space and time. I need it. As an adult, I find myself being, you know, so much information to take on, and I'm beginning to realize that I just can't, you know, there's just no way I'm going to be able to know, to have knowledge of all this stuff. It's just impossible. So what I need is. Time to digest, time to let the I like the cooking pot. You know that I can stir the pot and just to let whatever percolate is what wants to arise so that I can notice it and think about it like you say, creatively, think about it. And I do, spend quite a lot of time trying to not separate my child self from my adult self. Because, like you said, and have said, and many times, at what point do we suddenly stop from being the three year old and suddenly become the seven year old? You know, like suddenly, we have to suddenly sit in desks and perform in a different way? And I I'm not sure we do. Maybe we just become disconnected.

Debi: Well, I think that's exactly what happens. I think there is so much about slowing down that is so fundamental to think about. And of course, Alison Clark's work has really helped us to think about the power of slowing down in order to do more ironically, in order to learn more ironically. And I think this is when I think about, well, what does this actually look like, you know, I can imagine somebody saying, Yes, this is all very well and good, but what does this actually look like in a in a busy setting, in a busy school. And I think for me, you know, an example that has come to mind is how, and it's an example about the natural world that we can, you know, we can think that we're doing a topic where we're going to teach children about mini beasts, whatever a mini beast is, you know, they've got proper names, so let's, first of all, think about what those are. And they're not beasts. But, you know, we can, but that's a conversation for another day maybe. But you know, we could. We could sit down with a limited amount of time and say, right, you know, we've got half a term. We're going to we need to cram as much information into the children's heads that they can remember about different insects, mollusks, different things, right? And we just want them to know what the names are and what they look like, and what they identify with. And we can do that, but that for me, you know. And there will be worksheets, there will be plastic animal, you know, things to look at, and it will be done very efficiently, and Bish bash basher at the end. And children can regurgitate and say, This is what a wood lice is. This is what a spider is. This is what a worm is, wonderful, or we can slow down and think about what matters to the, you know, going back to this idea of what matters to the children who are in front of us today. And I've worked with educators at Madeleine nursery in Telford for many years. And I'd like to share an example that they did there, and mainly nurseries, is situated right, you know, not far from the river Severn, it often floods. There are in the town along the river that you know, there will be times when the flood defenses are put up to, you know, and all of that. And it was a time where the children had been hearing on the local news and from families and from within the local community, they could see these flood defenses going up. So it was in their mind that something could happen. And, you know, I don't know. Maybe they're thinking of floods like, you know, really, you know that taking their homes and that they were going to lose everything. You know that the people might be hurt. No, the children were thinking about the wood lice that they had in their garden, in their garden space, the children were worried and concerned that these wood lice that that they would dig and find and look at and pick up and notice. They worried about what would happen to these little wood lice in the garden. And slowing down for me, is about responding and attuning to what's important to the children. And that's what the educators did. They said, Well, what do you what do you think? And giving them the children space to think, what do you think these would lice need? Is there anything that we can do to help this community of woodlace? You're concerned about them being hurt in the flood So what do we do? And the children were creative that that opened up discussion amongst this group of three and four year. Old children, and they started thinking about they needed to get these wood lice up and out the way that they needed ladders. And so that started this whole six month project about building ladders for wood lice. Oh, love it. Which, you know, which tapped into so many different areas of the curriculum, because children were collectively sharing their ideas with each other. They were having to exchange their points of view, if that's not communication and language and development, then then what is it they were drawing their designs and thinking about what kind of ladder and what if you were a wood lice that couldn't see in the dark? If you were an elderly wood lice, if you were a disabled wood lice, how you know, what kind of ladder would you need? And would a ladder be good enough? So there's your creativity being activated there, and that's also your expressive arts and design, because they are building models and refining these models in terms of what makes a good ladder. The mathematics that was involved in thinking about that too was there, so we can see how something as and that grew, you know, it wasn't just the wood lice, but it was like, well, actually, who lives with the wood lice in this ecosystem of the garden, and what else do we need to do? So you know this and all of this, you know that they by the end of this time that they spent together, thinking about what mattered to children and thinking about those wood lice and the very precarious situation that the children thought that they had faced, they had developed so much more understanding about what a wood lice was. And what was phenomenal for me was their drawings, because these are three and four year old children who are just trying to, you know, figure out how to hold a pencil or a piece of charcoal and make marks. And then knowledge and their deep thinking came through their drawings, and you could see this evolution from just drawing a round shape with some legs sticking out of it, to children, then thinking about how those legs are articulated, um, you know, how those legs came from underneath the shell, and how do you draw that when a piece of paper is flat and two dimensional? And these are the conversations that these children were having. And that, for me, that is phenomenal, and these weren't super special, super articulate, super intelligent children. These were children who were being who had educators who were responsive and attuned, and thinking about how the what mattered to those children and constructing curriculum with them, and it was really quite simple.

Marina: I absolutely love so many things of what you've just said from the backlinking kind of aspect of look, there it is all. The curriculum is just there in front of you. Two important things that I want to draw out. And I just can't believe we were coming almost to the end of this podcast, because I could just carry on, you know, learning with you and from you. But the two things that come out for me are the vision of children and warm data. Again, I want to come back to warm data and the vision of children, because there's something here about how we view children, and actually, I would link how we view the natural world as well, because there's something about the people that can't speak, you know, the things that don't speak articulately, we seem to esteem language so much, you know, especially academic language, most of which I find really hard to understand most of the time, right?

Debi: So I'm thinking about that, and I'm thinking, What is this warm data? And in a way, when we're thinking together about building a sustainable, ecological educational paradigm, perhaps it starts with something around vision and different measurement. And I wonder whether you could speak to that. And that's a huge subject. We could talk about even just that for another hour, but would you speak to that? Because it does seem you've said so many times what matters to children, and you've given examples of their complex creativity and thinking and understanding of the world. So yeah, those two things, vision of children and measuring something different than what we're always measuring, that would be wonderful. And then with that, maybe we'll be almost there, absolutely. You know, I go back to Loris Malaga here, and he said, our image of the child is where teaching begins. And if our image of the child is one of an empty vessel, then our teaching becomes one in which we are filling up that empty vessel. If our image of the child is one that doesn't need any adults within the life just let them be, then we will be a very laissez faire, hands off kind of educator, not wanting to interact or interact and not seeing those possibilities, and if we see that child as being born as rich and competent in their own way, with ideas of their own, with thoughts and capabilities that will come out. Their capabilities are within them, but they will only come out if the environment is supportive and activating for that, then our teaching will respond to that image, and we will see that environment as something so powerful. We will see our relationship with children as being something that has to be responsive to their liveliness. And I think that, for me, is what connects these ideas about warm data. And Nora Bateson is the one to look to there in terms of warm data. And I think, you know, in conversations with her, and things that I've read, she's always talked about, you know, the way in which we measure the world, the way in which we measure the value of education, or the value of learning, or, you know, what progress looks like, can be very clinical, And we do so with these very specific lenses. So we are measuring Children Now in terms of what they remember, and that's an extremely narrow lens which doesn't leave room for creativity and creative thinking. Because why would you need to look at that if all you need to do is remember stuff. So for me, that's very much that image of the child who is that empty vessel and warm data for me, and from what I've read and how I perceive that, and how I use that is about the relationships and the multiple perspectives that we can have. So we can take anything, we can take those, and I think it's what warm data is, what the children were doing to those wood lice. It's like seeing them as holistic and connected beings. That's into it, you know, that's part of a much bigger picture. And I think, you know, we need to stop measuring children with these very narrow lenses. We need to build multiple perspectives. We need to think about, you know, we it's about talking with families and carers about the children. And so, what do you know about them? And this is what we know about them. It's about seeing how those children are with other children and how they interact with the environment. And it's about seeing difference as and not conforming. It's about seeing those differences as something that we can learn from, where there's a real possibility to learn something and to think in a different way than what we did before, and that, for me is what is, what growth is? That for me is what evolution is. And I can't believe sometimes, why? Going back to that, that quote of Gregory Bateson, is why we would think different to that?

Marina: Yeah, I really agree, and I am wondering about this idea of being a participant in our lives and in our schooling and in our world and in our culture, and how these ideas that you've been speaking about often happen in certain pockets or within my work, you know, we'll often talk about it within Forest School. And yet, I feel like all of these threads and all of these. Is the whole of these conversation really, it needs, it feels important for life, you know, for the education that we have, from early years through to primary, through to secondary, through to our life, that we can actually be who we are and be valued for who we are as being different with different ideas, and that we have the tolerance and the capacity to listen to each other and to not assume, as you said at the beginning, this kind of binary thinking that we seem so locked into, except instead of this kind of more experimental research, open ended, exploratory wonder of this life that we have, you know, and I speak and you know, we often think about when you see an older person, maybe somebody that's coming to the end of their life, and they've Got that sparkle, and I don't know about you, Debbie, but I really hope to have that sparkle, you know, and continue to have that and to be and that people have that. Because I don't know if you can measure that.

Debi: I don't, but you know what, you can feel it. And I think for me, this is about the wholeness. And so often what we try to do is to fix a problem. We say, you know, we could say, oh, you know, children aren't connected to the natural world, so let's do, so let's take, let's do forestry school, even. And that's just part, you know, that's like. So we do furry school on a Monday afternoon, whatever that means. So we do that, but then something else is altered and dropped off. So we have to think about the whole, the whole system. And I think I remember listening to, I don't know who it was, it was one of the astronauts. And they said, how for so many who get that opportunity to go into space and to see the wholeness of the planet Earth and to see it in the context of the vastness of space is something that is, you know, only a few of us can have and they come back. So many of them come back so changed. And this conversation that I read was how when looking back at the earth, you don't see the separation between countries. You don't see barriers. You don't see walls. You don't see you know, the human buildings and impact. You just see the wholeness. And I think you know you said about tolerance, about learning from differences. And I think you know, any of us can think about our current you know, what's going on in the world, how we resort to wars and killing each other over land grabs, how we see borders as being Will you keep to your side and we'll keep to ourselves? There is no tolerance, and these are really important things for us to grapple with and to trouble. And I think that you know that the sparkle that people have at the end of life, I think they've learned something, oh, they've learned something about the world. And interestingly, I started working with people, Simon, I'm, you know, in working with early years now, but I started working with elderly people at the end of life, often with dementia of different kinds. And I learned so much from their sparkle, from their way of being in the world, in terms of what they had had learnt and understood. And I think it's that which we have to hold on to, the wholeness we are. We are part of something, and we have to stop these individualistic ways of seeing not just education, but how we how we live together on this wonderful planet.

Marina: Debbie, my heart is full. So thank you so much. We will absolutely be linking to your website to things that you've written to. To so many things on the show notes, so please know that, and thank you again for this wonderful, wonderful exploration.

Debi: Oh, it's been a privilege and an absolute pleasure.

Marina: Well, I don't know about you, but I am left with such a sense of possibility and really excited about developing all these ideas and putting them into practice. This conversation has been such a rich exploration of how we can rethink learning, nurture creativity, value creativity, and truly listen to children in meaningful ways. Next week is the final episode of this season. So join me for more reflection, deeper thinking and responses to the insights we've gathered over the last eight weeks. I'd love to hear your thoughts, what's resonated with you, what questions you're still holding, and how these ideas are shaping your own practice. So if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. Share the episode with others who might find it inspiring, and let's keep the conversation going. See you next week.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Wild Minds Podcast. If you enjoyed it and want to help support this podcast, please subscribe, share and leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts. Your review will help others find the show. To stay updated with the wild mines podcast and get all the behind the scenes content. You can visit theoutdoorteacher.com or follow me on Facebook at the outdoor teacher UK and LinkedIn. Marina Robb,

The music was written and performed by Geoff Robb.

See you next week. Same time, same place