Dear fellow educators and learners! Happy New Year from Snail Academy!
What do you want to learn – or unlearn in 2022? We are wondering: what are your goals for learning in the year to come? Where would you like to create more local knowledge for yourself? And where can you best pass along your knowledge(s) either through formal teaching or guiding or in other ways?
How are you walking the path that you want to inspire in others? Drop us a message in the comments section!
We’ve been quiet for the past several months; Maria has had to focus on work and Karen has run full tilt at her master’s degree. Both adding value to our Snail Academy work.
But we’ve kept working in the background, and we hope to share some of this work with you in the year to come.
In the last minutes of the year, beset by covid from all sides, we engaged in our own future workshop to uncover our goals for the year to come, both personal and professional. The themes that emerged were not surprising, yet still they feel important to share. This is because we realized that even our personal goals resonate at a time like this, with schools struggling to hold it together, covid rampant through our societies, and climate change nipping at our heels.
For Karen, the theme of balance crept in and superceded the focus on sustainability that has been so important to her for so long. Balance in care for self and other, balance in learning and teaching, even balance in indoor and outdoor activities. As an indoor person, it’s a big step to take to vow to simply spend more time outdoors, period.
For Maria, the most important theme to emerge is excellence both as a headline for her own learning and in her facilitation activities. In a Danish context aiming for excellence is almost taboo, which made articulating this goal as much a question about an inner development as an objective in itself.
One theme that emerged for both of us was the importance of continuing all our learning works. To us this means both learning from others in formal settings, but also consciously and purposefully creating our own local knowledge. It means unlearning the knowledge that no longer serves us well, or even stands in our way (here’s looking at you, critical internal censor that always focuses too much on spelling and grammar). And it means continuing to share our knowledge and our knowledge-creating processes: to pass along what we know as best we can and as widely as we can.
Best wishes for a peaceful and prosperous 2022 from both of us at Snail Academy!