Danielle, an early childhood educator by trade, teaches in the Early Learning and Care program at the college, joining the program in 2018 as a term instructor, and becoming continuing in 2021. Her focus and expertise have been on “classroom design and how that facilitates learning for young children and leadership, so I often teach the second-year leadership courses and the environments classes.”
I wondered what brought Danielle to teaching post-secondary teaching from working with children. “I believe that early childhood educators can change the world and that the children we work with are capable, competent, with ideas that need to be shared. After doing a lot of advocacy work in childcare, going into post-secondary, and working with future educators seemed like the next logical step for me, to give back to the field.” And she models those principles with the students in her classes, holding them as capable and competent, and helping them learn how to apply their own ideas. “I see both children and students in my classes as citizens, and if you look at everybody that way, you centre respect and care in your practice, whether you’re teaching adults or children.”
I was particularly interested in an assignment Danielle and the students in her class worked on this last term, an Open Pedagogy assignment which resulted in an amazing artifact and has interesting possibilities for the future. The next several paragraphs are in Danielle’s own words.
“The COVID pandemic offered opportunities to challenge how we think about assignments and to make learning more meaningful in complex situations. One of my focuses during the pandemic for the lab class was to find ways for students to complete assignments during class times to make that work more meaningful for them and for the childcare centers they’re learning to practice in. This assignment emerged from an inquiry assignment on the land. The assignment itself had always worked, but something felt like it was missing.
I had had a powerful experience just before the pandemic with a group of students in a leadership class where we decided the second day of class to scrap one assignment and design another together. As a result of their engagement with the assignment they created, I could clearly see how they were connecting to the course learning outcomes. I then wondered how I could do this in an environment class, and what emerged was a learning outcome around inquiry into the land. In the assignments package for the course, I included information that we were going to design and create a shared resource together (but not what the specific resource would be) along the steps we would be following.
Once we decided what the assignment would look like I invited childcare services out onto the land with the students, explaining that we would be building a collaborative resource, and bringing examples of collaborative resources that have been created in our community to inspire them. In the end, the students decided to create a book on plant knowledge for early learning centers. We discussed formatting to create a cohesive design for the book, we looked at what programs they could use, deciding on Canva, we picked a font and a colour template, and we picked graphics. Then for the assignment itself, we decided we would go out on the land, and each of them would find a plant to get to know.
Students spent a month on the land for three hours a class visiting and learning more about their plants, and educators and children joined us for one full day. Then each of them drafted the story of their relationship with the plant, including information about the plant. The final product was a beautiful book which we planned to present to their practicum mentors. Each page in the book has a photograph of a plant along with student entries, some telling the story of their relationship with the plant, some that are more factual in nature. We included an acknowledgments page to acknowledge the land we were on (including a picture of it) as well as the children and other educators who joined us on the land. I had the book printed in colour and I could see centers taking it out on hikes or out onto the land with children, looking for the plants.”
I wondered how Danielle and the students decided where on the land to find plants for their project. “We spent some time visiting places, and in the end decided to spend our time on a location off the dog walk trail going towards the HCP gardens [near Interurban campus] as well as in the daffodil field. I had a lot of international students in this group who were feeling very burnt out, and the day we went to the daffodil field was a magical day for them.” I also wondered how Danielle chose which outcome(s) would be opened for students to create their own assignment. “There were a couple of outcomes I wanted this assignment to meet and one of them was about being on the land and acknowledging past harms, to build and foster relationships between students and the land, so they then go and foster those same relationships with children and families.”
Danielle knew she was taking a risk, having students build an assignment to meet course outcomes and wondered if it would work out. “I can’t believe we put such a rich resource together in a month. It really felt heart centered and I’m excited to see what happens next.” Which led me to my next question around what is next for this book? “I’m thinking of approaching childcare resource centres to see if they want copies in their lending library, sharing it with childcare centers who spend time on the land with children, and also go to conferences to share this experience.”
Danielle also plans to stick to this assignment in the future. “It’s going to be different every time, and that’s the beauty of it. I am interested to see how this assignment will evolve with each group of students, who will now have some control over their own learning. That can be scary, having a blank page in your assignments package that says, ‘there’s no assignment here – we’re going to design it on March 5.’ But when I’m working with children, I don’t have everything planned out because I look to see where the children’s interests are, and this is an opportunity to take that practice and use it with adult students. I’ll have a story like this every term!”
As we came to the end of our lively conversation, Danielle had a few final words for me, and you “The pandemic helped me embrace what a class would look like where students could complete all their assignments in class rather than having to work for hours outside of class. What a class would look like if we didn’t use a PowerPoint all the time but were more engaging. And what would happen if we were empowered to try something different.”