Week 15

Community: Shifting the Perspective

#AdultConversations #52weeks52speaks

Week 15

Katie Sharpe

In her book The Mindfulness in Knitting Rachael Matthews discusses the roles and characters within a craftivist group. She says ‘Mindful curation of group work requires perception of the community as a whole [and] empathy of all the individuals within it.’ (p93)

I would like to extend this concept to adult education, and in particular the privileged role I have in working within a community based organisation. We deliver ESOL classes to and within the local community, which are taught by teachers (on the whole) from that same community. We are like a knitted blanket, joining up and curating not just language skills but confidence, social connections, discussions and relationships that last way beyond the classroom.

And then Covid. It had the potential to unpick years of carefully curated stitches as the physical community shut down and our learning centre was out of bounds for us all, teachers and students alike. Head teachers and community leaders in the other centres that we use understandably had to shut their doors to us as well. We all had to revert to teaching online, with our students who had very little access to IT beyond their mobile phone. It felt a daunting, and at times, impossible task.

However, the blanket did not unravel. It is now the end of May, and I am staring at a set of exam results that I couldn’t have imagined at the start of the pandemic. During remote working, some of our teachers joined an ETF project to discuss and share different ways of teaching on-line. A Joy FE colleague and I ran the sessions as an Ideas Room, following the lead set by Lou Mycroft and her work on Nancy Kline’s Thinking Environment. Through these sessions we became a new type of community, an online one, which enabled a network of thinking and reflecting to take place. Some of the feedback from the teachers is given below:

I always left the meetings feeling self-assured and positive about my teaching.

I….felt that I was not alone in some of the aspects I was struggling with when teaching remotely.

Other CPDs [sic.] grew from the meetings for example [one teacher] and I observed each other's classes after a discussion we had during the EFT meeting.

The meetings allowed us to open up and discuss which then created a trust between the staff we were then happy to work with each other outside of the meetings.

I also felt really reassured and not alone in my struggles which really reduced my mental stress. I feel like I have learnt a lot and was able to implement a lot of that into my own teaching which would not have happened if I didn't participate in the project.

…….what surprised me was that just listening to other teacher's experiences without discussion, helped me to reflect on my own methods and practice.

I feel that my confidence in online teaching has grown and I hope that this has had a positive impact on my learners’ achievement.

It became clear that a new type of community was forming and it didn’t need a physical space in which to exist and flourish. Following the project, at their own request, some of the teachers continued to meet, using the same Ideas Room structure as in the project. This was not something that had been planned for. While the project helped to establish this new community, it has now grown its own wings and continues to meet and reflect without the need for a physical space in which to do so.

Furthermore, all of those who took part in the original project and who have continued to meet have had the most amazing set of exam results. They all achieved this through developing online learning communities while working to the same criteria and exam board expectations that existed pre-Covid. We have formed a new type of supportive blanket; one where learning still happens, where ideas are still shared, where flipped learning is now the norm, where students learn through Whatsapp lessons, where learners are working more independently than they ever did when learning face-to-face in a classroom.

We have remained knitted together through online platforms and our determination to support our students to continue their studies come what may. Our own little bit of craftivism has cast a new perspective on what community and community learning can be and that each individual can succeed within, and as a part of, that community in whatever form it takes.

By Katie Sharpe