Playful Pedagogies and Podcastings

In this solo pilot episode, I introduce myself and my orientations toward play, share some ideas about my intentions for this podcast, and try my hand at defining 'pedagogy' from the ECE perspective. After disclosing some of own playful journey into podcasting, I try answering the rapid fire questions I created for future guests. Let's hope my dream list of guests will manifest! For more show notes check out https://www.playfulpedagogies.ca. 

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the playful podcast where we discuss lifelong learning by lingering at the intersection of recreation education and occupation. I'm your host, kim Barton, Welcome to the journey! I'm excited to play and learn along with you. Okay, so before I begin this pilot episode and I introduce myself, I wanted to start off by briefly explaining what this solo episode and the purpose of starting this podcast is all about. In this podcast I aim to honor many ways of knowing being and doing and I aim to listen to and lead from multiple sources of wisdom. I hope that between myself and my guests, we actively experiment with ideas through generative conversation, rejuvenating reflection and even at times some invigorating improvisation. Part of my purpose for doing this is documenting some of my own learning journey the way that we might use pedagogical documentation in early learning. Now I know it might sound strange because I'm using audio and typically, we see pedagogical documentation used very visually and with visual art in mind. And part of this podcast is challenging that norm little bit. Not that I don't love the way that we display pedagogical documentation. However, I think that one of the next steps that we could take is learning into some more audio experiences such as recording and also the use of things like music. So with all that in mind, I would like to introduce myself and kind of disclose some of my own positionality and my interest on this topic and kind of explain why I even wanted to start a podcast in the first place. So like I said, my name is kim I'm a current masters student and I'm a registered early childhood educator, I just became registered last year. So although I'm fairly new to working in the field, I've challenged myself to really refine my pedagogical commitments and think deeply about early childhood development and early learning and child care in Ontario. You heard me right, I live in Ontario Canada and more specifically as a white settler, I reflect upon and acknowledge with respect that I work play and live on Treaty Three lands and territory of the Mississaugas of the credit and the ancestral lands of the Attawandaron people. I also recognize that the city currently known as Two Rivers is situated within the dish with one spoon covenant, which is an agreement that I reflect upon within my own relationships. I extend my reflections and respect to our Anishinabek, Haudenosaunee and Métis neighbors and respect their historical and current relationships with this land. My action item from saying all of this is to learn more about what it means to live on Treaty three. I'm hoping to learn a bit more about that and then to bring it to the next podcast. So I'm hoping with respect that I can play in this space and kind of bring to light some insights and ideas that I've had about pedagogy and play through lifelong learning and so hopefully I can explain that in this podcast a little bit. And then in my upcoming podcast with guests, you will definitely see some of these things embodied. Or should I say hear. Next I just wanted to say up front that as an early childhood educator, I know that I bring a little bit of bias to this conversation already. I already understand how learning happens through play. I will be talking about that, but I also wanted to mention that just because I'm an ECE doesn't mean that this podcast is just about children. I'm really hoping to stretch the knowledge that I have about early learning across the lifespan to recognize and honor how it's not just children who can benefit from play and it's not just children's play that should be respected as work. So one of my goals in starting this podcast is to better understand how play happens throughout our lives and how we continue to learn from it in this way. I'm really hoping to begin a conversation with many different types of educators definitely ECEs, but also elementary and secondary educators, postsecondary instructors, researchers, learning specialists, resource consultants, pedagogical leaders, outdoor educators, educational psychologists and educational assistance. And then I want to stretch it beyond education. So I'm interested in things like play therapy, music therapy, experiential learning, people who are professional players like gamers or athletes and even how people pick up new hobbies throughout their lives. So really anything that connects to lifelong learning or play. And like I said in my intro, I'm really interested in kind of this intersection of education, recreation, and occupation. And so I kind of want to break these boundaries between different disciplines and see what happens if we kind of mush them all together because in reality we don't necessarily like learn in separate ways or spaces, then we play and that also being separate from where and how we work. So yeah, I'm really interested in higher education, early childhood education and kind of bringing those two together and then inviting in other individuals who are thinking outside the box and using things like experiential learning in new ways. I have to recognize that I will definitely be sharing some ideas that may or may not be feasible, that's kind of my thing. Um and so this podcast is meant to be a source of inspiration and it's meant to kind of challenge some of the dominant discourses related to education and how people learn. 

Okay, so I've said the word pedagogy without explaining it. So, if you're still with me and haven't googled it yet, or you're a pedagogy junkie like myself … when I say the word pedagogy, what I usually mean is how learning happens. I think of it as a mix of teaching strategies, environmental setup, learner-instructor relationships, beliefs about how knowledge moves between people and environments and both the intentional and unintentional assumptions that we have about learning and knowledge. I think that sort of formally the definition of pedagogy might be something like the theory and practice of teaching, but I am specifically not really further defining it because I'm going to have a few episodes coming up that really dig into sort of what pedagogy is and different types of pedagogical approaches, whether you're an educator or not, you're probably aware that there are many, many approaches to teaching and therefore many types of pedagogies. And even though this sounds a little bit introductory, this podcast is really meant to be geared towards educators and those who are looking for an opportunity to really think more deeply about what it means to work alongside our learners or even adults. And like I'll say a million times I want to think beyond that, to really learn from educators who work in non-traditional spaces. You'll notice in the title of this podcast that I chose to include the plural form of pedagogies, and I did this on purpose because I wanted to kind of honor that even within one type of pedagogy, there still may be many types of approaches that people use. I'm not somebody who thinks of pedagogy as being synonymous with teaching strategies. I'm not interested in proven teaching strategies. I think that my approach to working alongside children and students and adults is much more based on like a human connection and an intuitive process than like sort of these individual teaching strategies and sort of while I'm ranting about teaching strategies, I also think that when we read about teaching strategies in the, in the literature about (whether it's) school age teaching or scholarship of teaching and learning for higher education, I firmly believe at this point in time that these teaching strategies are very contextual. I don't feel like I can just extract a strategy from a study and then just inject it in my own teaching context. I just don't, that goes against so many of my sort of responsive and place-based education as I might say. I know I'm not really using that term in the correct way, but for myself, I know that my teaching strategies are contextual and the responsive as well. Anyway. I don't know if I did the word pedagogy justice, but you can think of it as I guess a blend of teaching strategies and beliefs about how learning happens.

As you might guess by the title for the purposes of this podcast, I'm really curious about exploring play-based pedagogy is and I really wanted to honor the plurality of various types of both play and types of playful pedagogy is. I didn't want to just limit this podcast to play based pedagogies because I see play happening in nature-based pedagogy and arts-based pedagogy. Um and I think that even critical pedagogies and sort of culturally responsive or relational pedagogies uphold play, and they really also consider these systemic factors that influence our learning environment and opportunities for play. So as you'll see in upcoming episodes and as you might have guessed if you know anything about early childhood education, my belief is that individuals very much construct their own knowledge by following their curiosities by finding meaning in their interactions, by noticing influences on their environment, and tuning into various sources of knowledge, including our senses and in my role as an educator. I also tend to act as a bit of a researcher, a co-learner for sure, but more of kind of a companion and somebody to think with. And I often will say the words like think with thank you for thinking with me and it sounds really obscure and like I don't know what I'm talking about, but I mean it quite intentionally, because I know my own teaching philosophy holds this idea that learning happens in encounters together. Of course, it can happen individually as well. But I think I think true transformation and true sort of change from learning new knowledge comes from community. Um so that will be a thing that probably comes up in this podcast. I was just listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and there was this section that was describing how knowledge can't just be separated from caring. I think she said “what good is knowledge without caring”. And then she went on to make this comparison that separating knowledge from reciprocal responsibility is basically just doing everything and injustice. I guess the way that I worked with that quotation was like kind of blurring this dichotomy between quantitative and qualitative research or like sort of like objectivism and then subjectivism, and like in reality, which is really redundant because that's what those things are targeting, but, I think and our lives in our experience, the objective and subjective are blurred, and science and experience aren't so separate. Neither is science and art. And I recently wrote a blog post a little bit about this. So it's so serendipitous that I read that quotation today and it's I probably wrote about it because I've been reading this book over time and it's been sort of percolating in my brain anyway, I've been on this very intimate journey in terms of trying to understand what knowledge even is and why some kinds of knowledge are valued in parts of society and academia within education, even within some types of play, there's certain knowledge that is valued more in those spaces. And I'm really, I sort of have this huge cognitive knot about the concept of knowledge. And I figured that while I'm untangling what's in my mind, I might as well document it, while I'm feeling really messy and unsettled in terms of how I engage with knowledge. I think that all of that mess has come from a quotation. It well, it came from a graduate course, but it also definitely came from a book that I read in that course, which is called Research and Reconciliation, Unsettling Ways of Knowing Through Indigenous Relationships. I'm going to read one quotation from the book. So it says “Indigenous epistemology, or ways of knowing, is also relational and emergent. Indigenous knowledge is alive, it has agency, it moves. Therefore knowledge can't be discovered or owned, but instead it reveals itself is experienced is shared. As researchers, we aren't separate from the process, but rather participate in relationship with what we are learning”. Um every time I read that quotation, I am shook, I'm literally unsettled in terms of what I know knowledge to be because of course in my colonial mind, knowledge is a thing that I hoard and that I consume and that I produce. It's my scholarly duty to find information and synthesize it, make it digestible and interesting and I'm supposed to learn from other people who do really good jobs at doing the same kind of thing. And then this quotation completely shattered that concept because if I think about knowledge as a being or an entity that I enter into relationship with, then I no longer can operate in the same way anymore. And really this idea of being able to enter into a relationship with knowledge is driving me to continue to ask questions about what knowledge is, how learning happens, and how to start deep conversations with educators and therapists, instructors and my peers to really challenge the kinds of knowledge that is valued in educational institutions. This quotation also reminds me that knowledge, you know, that knowledge is rooted in context and what kind of a disservice am I doing? If I extract what I want from a larger conversation? Even taking that quotation from the book, which is part of the chapter in itself, is a literal conversation and the whole book is such a journey. So what does it mean to like sort of dissolve the context and just take a quotation? Am I mobilizing knowledge in a in a just way or am I reverse engineering what I really want to say by using particular quotations? And so in this way, if I think about decolonizing my understanding of knowledge, I come back to the journey that is the many journeys that is braiding Sweetgrass because it does this excellent job- she does this excellent job navigating the western ways of hard sciences and then bringing visibility to Indigenous wisdom that both competes and compliments and transcends the boundaries of scientific and research processes. That book is so poetic. And I think for me, reading that book has prompted me to not only push the boundaries between disciplines, but push the boundaries between um sort of academic knowledge and other kinds of knowledge mobilization, but make it like a poetic podcast, I'm purposely designing it to be this more long term journey, but really it's meant to be um a larger conversation. I just feel this like calling within me that my path forward is through disrupting these dominant discourses of play, learning education and knowledge. And I feel called to do it in a way that is not very linear, let’s say that.

This brings me back to what I had said early on about this being kind of like a pedagogical documentation of my journey. This really is meant to spark ongoing conversation by going public with this knowledge, but also offering kind of like a landmark in time. Okay, so now I wanted to tell a little story. It's kind of a journey of my own like hobbies and play, I guess in that way basically tells the story of why I ended up starting a podcast. So it starts with 12 year old Kim who was learning to play the guitar and I wasn't somebody who listened to a lot of music. I think this frustrated my guitar teacher because he was trying to teach me like smoke on the water and I literally didn't even know the song. Um and at one point he basically just said like, okay, what do you want to learn? And I was like, oh, I want to learn like Avril Lavigne, the song, Things I'll Never Say. I'm pretty sure he literally said that song is too advanced, it has bar chords and you're not even playing smoke on the water. So like, it's not going to work. And something in me changed. I was like, yeah, but I want to learn this song. I learned how to play the song early in my guitar playing days and it was difficult. I often think back to that time in my life because I do a lot of songwriting and improvising in terms of creating songs now. And I tend to kind of reject this idea that you have to practice things over and over again to be good at them. And I instead think that it's much more about being curious and inquisitive about what you're trying to accomplish. So when it comes to playing guitar and writing songs today, I kind of forget that I kind of have the prerequisites to be able to do that. I think in my next podcast I might talk about what some prerequisites are to play and hopefully bring in a bit of an intersectional lens to that because I do want this podcast to not just focus on play as a privilege. Anyway, so back to my bar chords. So I learned this song on guitar and at the time I didn't do any singing. Like I wasn't at all like a singer, but instead I would, I would like sing along when I was playing a song like that just because that's the only way that other people would recognize the song. So a few years went by and then by chance in high school I was really interested in writing poetry and I sort of would spend hours like trying to find rhyming words and make things flow nicely. And so naturally I ended up merging my poetry with playing guitar into songwriting. I ended up being able to complement this by taking a vocal class in high school and doing a lot of singing. So now we have like 17 year old Kim who write some songs for fun and does a lot of singing that still doesn't explain why I did the podcast and the journey takes a few more turns before I get there. So the next thing that happened was I took a 10 year hiatus from writing songs. I didn't write a single song until I was working with Children when I was in my later 20's. For one of the classes I was working with, I helped them write a song with their words about these trees that they were doing a project on. And this song like sort of wrote itself so quickly and I was like, oh what have I been doing? Like I used to write songs all the all the time, used to pump them out. So I kind of picked up the guitar a few times just here and there for the next two years, at the end of 2019, I was living alone for the first time and I pumped out like 30 songs in three months. Okay, maybe not that much, maybe like maybe 20. That brings us up to the beginning of the pandemic. And so my plan when I had been writing these songs was that in the summer of 2020 I would go to local open mics and play my songs. Um and it would be it would be a good time. And so with the pandemic, obviously that didn't happen. So I had to look for a Plan B, but I wasn't one to really do like live streams either. So then this led me to thinking about getting some home recording equipment to record my songs and then release them on Spotify. I have never recorded anything in my life before this. I literally didn't even know how to properly use a microphone. I didn't know how to mix or master music And I certainly didn't know anything about production, but I firmly believed that I was going to record and produce my own ep in the summer of 2021 and release it into the universe. So I had this very clear vision and very huge motivation to use this recording equipment, even though I had only just started playing music again a few months prior. But everything kind of got suspended again because I started my master's program in the fall of 2020 and it was all online. I truly had no idea what a master's program entailed. So it was a lot more work than anticipated. And I absolutely loved it and it's the whole reason I've transformed and even got to this place of doing a podcast, but it meant that I wasn't producing my EP. So there I was doing my Master's, not writing music, I had a few opportunities to use the equipment in my classes, where I was asked to produce a single episode of the podcast, my podcast partner and I went on this fabulous journey of having these back and forth conversations ahead of time during and then I absolutely fell in love with editing the audio and sort of like finding the little intro. This is a process that I actually really liked and I want to kind of engage in it again. So that prompted me to think about doing a podcast in general, but I was like, well what would I even do have a podcast about, like, I'm not really an expert on anything. Um sure I'm a registered early childhood educator, but there are some fabulous podcast that exists already about early childhood education, even especially within Ontario and I didn't really have a lot to bring to that, especially because I'm not working as an early childhood educator at this time during the pandemic. But then I just so happened to think about all the things I've been writing in my blog, which I've been using for the ECE training program just to kind of reflect on my, my learning personal experiences and kind of really think about my intentions, then I really just sort of let my mind do its thing, like you know, and then I was like, oh I really want to do something about outdoor education, but I'm not really an outdoor educator. Oh, I could do it about higher ed, but there are so many fabulous higher ed podcast out there. Oh yeah, I would love to do a podcast more about pedagogy and then it was through this conversation with my advisor where she brought the Early learning pedagogy is sort of in conversation with adult education and post-secondary education pedagogy and I was like, oh my gosh. That really prompted me to see some strong connections between what's happening in early learning and how adults learn and then I took it a step further or maybe two steps further because I was like, okay, I don't want to just be comparing early learning and adult education. I want to also specifically talk about outdoor and experiential education. I want to be talking about the role of art and music in learning and I want to do this in a playful way, like voluntary improvised. Um it's probably not going to be improvised because I have so many ideas that I end up writing this document is like six pages long right now…

If you're still with me, the final sort of capstone on wanting to start a podcast was realizing that there are so many people that I want to learn from and have conversations with related to pedagogy, there's so many outdoor educators that I am sort of loosely connected with. That I would love to have a reason to like interview them. And I was like, what's the point in having this conversation privately when we could share our sort of shared wisdom with the world and we could not only our shared wisdom but share things that might inspire people to have their own wisdom to. Ultimately I have 12 year old Kim to thank, who wanted so badly to learn about Avril Lavigne, for ending up in a place where I wanted to start a podcast and let me just tell you, I am so excited for the episodes to come. I have over 100 ideas in mind. I've sourced out all of these people for the 100 podcasts and they may or may not know that I am going to call on them and ask for their wisdom for the ending of each podcast. 

I would like to borrow a little trick from Brené Brown and asked some rapid fire questions. My first question that I would ask is what's your favorite way to play for myself. My answer to this is through a conversation, I love good conversation. I love improvising connections between ideas being open to new insights. Being convinced of something or having to sort of convince someone else of something and really, I think it's that I like listening to the beauty of someone else's words and mind and language and finding a way to respond to that in a in a relational way, I would say that that's my favorite way to play, but also it would probably be through writing songs. Um that's what I tend to do for fun. My next question is how would you say learning happens? So I've already touched on my answer to this, but I would say that learning happens in encounters together. It happens in relationships and community. Like I said earlier, I truly think that transformation and change happens when we are supported, when we feel like we belong and when we engage in ways that are meaningful to us and connected to our own identities and experiences. What does good pedagogy look like? I think that good pedagogy supports individual meaning making because I know and I've seen so many times that people can experience the same event and they come away with so many different and diverging insights and experiences ultimately. So I think that there's room for the individual when there's good pedagogy, so that means that it includes things like choice and choice leads me to think that um there's an element of it being voluntary and as soon as something that is a little bit voluntary, I tend to think that it connects to play whether or not you agree with this? I think that good pedagogy often includes an element of play. And actually, now that I said that I think that good pedagogy also counters systemic barriers. So good pedagogy is equitable back to this idea of it being like individual, it's not standardized. Good pedagogy is accessible. Good pedagogy is inclusive. And at the end of the day, I think good pedagogy is based on human connection and being responsive to each other as humans. 

All right. So I want to end off my podcast with some expectations for upcoming conversations. Part of this I've alluded to already, but I'm really hoping to kind of break down some of these institutional and systemic barriers to education through the conversations that we're having. Um, and through this idea of challenging what knowledge is. I'm really hoping to build some connections with leaders in education, recreation and occupation as it relates to play and learning and make some connections to how learning happens across the lifespan. And finally, this podcast is very much a learning journey for myself. It's a way for me to grow and to be challenged in my own thoughts related to play and learning and I hope that you learn along with me as we go. Thanks so much for listening. I'll see you next time. Yeah.

Hey folks, it's kim again, back to say a few things that I forgot to say during this episode. Um, so firstly, just a disclaimer that at this time this podcast is not affiliated or associated with authorized or endorsed

Speaker 2:  by any organization or individual other than myself and my guests. The views expressed here are our own. Next up, I take full responsibility for any mistakes, inaccuracies, omissions or oversights I've made in this episode, um and this podcast in general, due to my own ignorance and privilege. Um, I very much welcome any feedback on these things and will do my best to rectify my misunderstandings and or edit the episode where appropriate. Um, so for example, something that I wish I had more explicitly said, um, rather than systemic influences or barriers could have explicitly named racism and oppression, marginalization and psychiatrization as negative influences that are at play within the ECE field. If you notice anything that you'd like me to follow up on, you can find me on instagram @playfulpedagogies, or you can check out my website at playfulpedagogies.ca You can also shoot me an email at kem@playfulpedagogies.ca. Um, so this super exciting. I am thrilled to have email set up. Um, so please take advantage. Give me all the feedback. Um or let me know if you want to collab!  Take care