BC’s Path to Universal Child Care
BC’s Path to Universal Child Care
Finding Connection and Meaning through Communities of Practice
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In this episode, we explore how we find and sustain professional connections and meaning through communities of practice. We talk with Jacqueline Ewonus, Jen Vanderberg, Lisa Nicholson, and Nicky Byres who are working as community of practice mentors with the ECE Professional Development Bursary Program. They share their powerful stories about participating in and leading communities of practice and the transformation that happens. Follow up with Jacqueline, Jen, Lisa, and Nicky through Instagram or Twitter @bc_communities_of_practice. Find out how to get funding for a community of practice at eceprodbursary.org
Welcome to episode two of BC's Path to Universal Childcare Podcast. My name is Katherine Riel and I am the Bursary Manager for the ECE Professional Development Bursary Program. The Bursary Program is a partnership initiative between the Government of Canada and the Government of British Columbia through the Ministry of Education and Childcare. The funding is administered by the West Coast Childcare Resource Center. Today, I'm interviewing four educators who have been involved in leading communities of practice and mentoring other people in the early year sector who are interested in starting a community of practice in their region. In the last two years, in collaboration with the Bursary program, these fabulous four women have mentored over 40 people to facilitate communities of practice in over 30 places in British Columbia. Just who are these fabulous four educators? Well, first, let me introduce to you Jacqueline Awanas. She is the program director at Simon Fraser University Childcare. She is inspired by over 100 educators who work in one of 20 programs for 400 children between the ages of 0 and 12 years. She has worked in the childcare field in different capacities for over 32 years. Along with her is Jen Vanderberg. Jen's practice is grounded in the ethic of care. Jen has worked in a variety of roles supporting children, families, and educators for also over 30 years. She serves as an educator, an instructor for early childhood education, and a coordinator for student practicums. She is also a child care advocate and a community of practice facilitator and consultant. Along with her is Lisa Nicholson. Lisa is the ECE program coordinator, instructor, and practicum mentor for Delta School District. This is in Continuing Education, and she's also a member of ROW, which stands for Reimagining Our Work. This is an international early childhood education publishing team. She's a proud early childhood educator and over 35 years experience. She has been strongly influenced by her mentor who spoke of love, courage, and teaching. And finally, to round off this fabulous four, Nikki Byers. She is the person who brought this group together. She reached out to these three people and said to them, is there something more? Is there something more to our practice and our thinking? And she invited Jacqueline, Jen, and Lisa to come together to form a community practice with her. Nikki is also the executive director of the Society of Richmond Children's Centers. She's an ECE instructor and a communities of practice consultant. And you can follow all these people on Instagram through BC Communities of Practice or on Twitter. Same name, BC Communities of Practice. To start us off, we're going to hear from Jacqueline Iwanis, who's going to offer the land acknowledgement.
SPEAKER_01As we begin this time together, we want to pause and reverently acknowledge the ancestral, traditional, and unceded Aboriginal territories of the Lower Mainland Coast Salish peoples.
SPEAKER_02Hello, ladies. Hello. Hi, everyone. Hi. We've been working together since about 2020 when the ECE Bursary program was and continues to support ongoing professional development for early years professionals. And we have been working with communities of practice. In the communities of practice that you have been leading and participating in, one of the common books that you have used as a foundation for exploration is the book by Anne Pellow and Margie Carter called From Teaching to Thinking. And I read that book alongside of you a couple of years ago, and I found it an extraordinary book because it really gets at the deeper issues of the profession and the work that you do. And one of the ongoing themes throughout the book was what is it that you long for? And that theme is a question that I would like to base my very first question to all of you on. What is your? There must be something more question right now. And Jen, I'd like to start with you. What is your something more?
SPEAKER_04Well, I think that for all of us and and for myself in particular, I remember so vividly the day that Nikki leaned over and said she had an idea. And when we started unpacking what that looked like and really thinking about um supporting educators beyond a workshop of uh let's meet once a year kind of thing, um, it it connected so strongly to what I hope for for educators is that they feel connected, they feel seen and heard um and supported within their work. I mean, the days are are long and busy, and that connection is such a valuable piece of of the work that we do. So connection and belonging is something that really resonated with me with the communities of practice.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, Jen, I can really appreciate that. If ever there was a time in our lives, if not our history, it's the need for connection and belonging. And our perceptions of that are so important and how we can cultivate connections and longing is really at the core of a lot of work that we do. Jacqueline, how about you? What is your there must be something more in your profession right now?
SPEAKER_01I think, you know, in in my role as uh a program director in a large organization with a number of uh educators and then teaching, you can't continue to do this work if you're coming from an empty bucket. And so to start, it was it was that it was that connection. It was being in relationship, um, finding people who had shared values, um, and people who could uh support you through difficult decisions as you are supporting people that you work alongside. So really needing to find that that connection and and coming into community did that um for me and made my role in in the work that I do um feel much more meaningful and intentional, and there was a level of accountability that was was really important. So couldn't do for others if I couldn't do for me. And so finding my community with with Jen, Nikki, and Lisa um really supported uh that work. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02How about you, Nikki? What is your wow, there must be something more.
SPEAKER_00My there must be something more really was rooted in the daily experiences of early childhood educators. I really believed that they weren't being best served by seeing professional learning as something that was episodic, haphazard, occasional, and outside of their classroom. And so my longing was for genuine contextual opportunities to grow practice in ways that made sense for early childhood educators. And like uh my colleagues have said, I believe that was rooted in connection and community and relationship. And um that's what I was longing for.
SPEAKER_02There seems to be an ongoing theme here. How about you, Lisa? What is your there must be something more for me?
SPEAKER_03It's um again rooted in community, that longing to be together, to be with like-minded um educators who who want more than right, just the the status quo. And and for me, my longing has always been in um bringing our whole health to our community as well, right? And so that we are not only filling our minds being together, but we are also embracing our own humanity, right? So we not only become as educators, but we also become as human beings, and those two are separate, and the importance of honoring that and honoring who we are and honoring our voices and seeing that there's value in that, right? And that we all have something to share, and we all have something to offer to the community.
SPEAKER_02Thank you. It's it's so interesting in that as I listen to all four of you about your something more. I didn't hear anything about, well, I need to improve my skill set, I need to acquire more information and knowledge, I need to fill my bucket, as you mentioned, with more strategies or more coping mechanisms. It seems to me that you are thinking about your something more as connection, uh, belonging, relationship, intention, accountability.
SPEAKER_01Even though you know you work with some wonderful people and managers and all that kind of stuff, there's still a level of needing that other piece. And, you know, I mean, how many times do we, you know, call or check in on WhatsApp about, you know, this is happening? And it's just reassuring, or or it's just like, am I on the right page? Because you need those people who are going to tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear, because there's enough of those.
SPEAKER_00Um, and especially when you're at the top, like you know, that's it's so hard to get real honest responses.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. I think this leads into our next question. So, how then do communities of practice differ from the traditional and possibly more recognized formats of learning, such as a workshop or a conference? Nikki, we'll start with you.
SPEAKER_00Uh, the difference at the heart of it is that connection we were just talking about. We have all of us presented workshops and gone to conferences. And increasingly and repeatedly, as people left those one-off events, we were left standing at the front wondering if there was really any impact in changing people's practice. If really we had let these educators go with this obviously engaging workshop we had just presented, but did they have any way of operationalizing that new knowledge, that new thought? Did they have anyone to talk to? Was there anything that was going to be really impactful beyond this one moment in time? And we really began to feel that there wasn't. And for those of us who were working in programs, we were spending money on workshops and conferences, but not really seeing growth in practice. And we longed for a way for educators to see themselves as competent in their classrooms and not feel they had to leave those classrooms to gain more knowledge. That in fact, what we wanted was for them to have time to think and practice things that they were learning. And so, a community of practice, because it's over such a long period of time of several months, and because there is time in between every session to practice to connect with other educators who are having the same experience as you, communities of practice allow educators to fully explore the concepts that they want to learn about.
SPEAKER_02And so, how do new participants adjust to this new format of learning and connecting?
SPEAKER_01Some people will sit very strongly in their yeah, but right? Yeah, but this won't work. Yeah, but I can't do that, yeah, but, and so when we try to come at it from a place of this is someone who has no control, they have, they do not feel valued, they do not feel seen and heard. So they're coming into this space with yeah, but because they don't have any of that where in their in their workplace or in their life. Um, and so when someone wants to dig, you know, really wants to dig into that, I mean, helping folks to go, but what if? Um, you know, not you have to change your mind, not you're wrong and I'm right, but just what if? What if there was something else that was possible? What if? And and Katherine, we had this conversation week, it's like, where is the joy? Do in this yeah but place that you're in, do you feel joy in your job? Do you look 20 years ahead going, this is the decisions that I'm going to be making for the next 20 years? And you feel fulfilled, you feel that you have done good work, you feel that you have um honored the the children that are in the families that are in your care, you if you feel all those things, you know, but if you're feeling like that, if that feels tiring to you and onerous, and you know, then what if? What if something else were possible? What if we just put this down for a minute and just sat in this place of if I tried something different?
SPEAKER_02Who is the expert then in a community of practice? And how is expertise or knowledge then translated? How does that work?
SPEAKER_00You know, in our field, we talk about something called parallel practice. That is, we believe that children come competent and curious and creative to the classroom. And our work as educators is to unleash that potential in children. And in exactly the same way, as facilitators of communities of practice, we come alongside educators who are curious and competent and creative and who have such rich lived experience. And we just facilitate the connection, we facilitate the content, but we really are co-creating the sessions as we go in response to what educators tell us as we're going along that really lands for them, or that is really impactful, or that they really don't understand and really want to know more about. And so it's an iterative process, a community of practice. It changes as we go based on what we are hearing and seeing from educators and from their feedback to the whole process. We hold shared values as a community, and we come back into those uh repeatedly so that we can be sure that we are walking alongside educators as they put into practice the things that make sense in their classrooms.
SPEAKER_01There isn't an expert. The experts are in are in the group. It's their lived experiences, it's their everyday experiences that are being shared. They're real, you know, they're leaning on each other and relying on each other. And we're just honoring, you know, the the experience in the group and and giving space for that. And I think that just becomes so in important that they see that they have knowledge.
SPEAKER_02So, what other aspects in a community of practice are different?
SPEAKER_04One of the things that we've taken away from this is the importance of time to um rethink concepts, ideas, wonderings, just really sit with the ideas that we are talking about and in conversation with during our times together. Those in-between periods, so instead of coming weekly for uh maybe a traditional, you know, kind of workshop series, we tend to leave about six weeks in between our sessions, which gives the participants time to really dig into some of those concepts, really put into action some of the um wonderings that they might have. We often send them away with a task or a to-do in terms of doing a little bit of research and looking for evidence of that within their practice. So that time in between is is really key. And we really encourage them to be talking to a thinking partner, to be in conversation with the educators that they work with, see kind of what they're bumping up against. Like what doesn't feel good, what's uncomfortable, what's causing you the challenge or inspiring the joy? Like what's where is all of the tension coming from within these conversations? And then they bring that back to us, you know, six weeks later, where we can have a deeper conversation about that.
SPEAKER_02So it's it sounds like it's an ongoing experience of learning that you do come together as a group to share, as Jacqueline said, that lived experience and honor the experience and the identity of the educator that you're not necessarily having to fill a vessel, but that they already come with the knowledge, they already come with the skills and the experience. And it's a matter of giving them an opportunity to share it. Is that what it's really more about?
SPEAKER_04Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Holding that strongest image of the educator right at the forefront of everything that we do.
SPEAKER_02And tell me then, what is the difference between a community of practice and a book club?
SPEAKER_00I think one of the things that distinguishes community of practice is that each one, as it is forming, comes to some agreement on the brave space agreements and the values that that particular group at that particular time will hold as they make the exploration of a topic. It might be a book, but it might be a topic. And so I believe that they're very specifically unique to the group of educators that are in the room, which can make it a little bit tricky sometimes to facilitate, because as educators be become familiar and connected, they start to voice what it is they really are grappling with. And then as as facilitators, we need to adapt the content to make sure that it is serving the needs of the people that are in the room at that time. So communities of practice are a broad category, but each one is very unique to the people that are in it.
SPEAKER_02I get a sense then that coming together to discuss ideas, to discuss experiences is really more about uncovering what's already there. You're there to commit to an experience with a body of principles and values as a group that you will be accountable to, and that it's through the experience of coming together to, as you say, honor or see. When I hear the word honor, I'm not quite sure, but it sounds like it's to see and listen to one another as that whole person. And in doing so, these learnings emerge.
SPEAKER_00It comes from the participants because in we give enough time to build the relationships to really let the people in the group know that everybody's experience is valid and that everybody has an opportunity to shape what happens next. And so educators start to really grapple with over a long period of time those things that matter to them. And they bring forward those things that matter deeply to them in their practice with all the constraints that they face on a daily basis. And it's that sustained thinking that really separates a community of practice from a one-off event. Because you might really want to think about something even from a workshop. But as soon as you get back to the busyness of your classroom, it's gone. But when you have the accountability of coming back into community over and over again with the research, with the traces of your practice and with your big questions, and your voice is honored, that's where the true growth happens. And that's where the transformative work happens.
SPEAKER_03I think that's the thing, is their voice, their thinking, that they matter. Their thinking matters in our gathering together, and their contributions are really vital to the community. You know, we always say that we need them to be a part of this. They need to commit to that and to offer their thinking and offer their lived experiences. Even in that discomfort, because a lot of times there is that those places of an unknowing or being uncomfortable. And we do ask them to sit with that because that through that, that is where the growth happens. Through that, that's where we challenge ourselves even more so to grow. Grow with not only as educators, but also you know, as human beings.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. So really then it's co-construction. It's not listening to a body of knowledge, it's not hearing from the expert in the room or in the group. It's actually positioning every single person who chooses to join a community of practice as an expert in themselves, just for the work that they do on a daily basis with children, and that coming together, the jewels are already there. It's a matter of uncovering where those gems of information and what really matters to the educator, uncovering what really matters, what they're really grappling with can happen over time. How has being involved in a community of practice personally and professionally influenced you?
SPEAKER_03It's definitely challenged me. Well, first of all, I want to say it's fantastic. You know, that sense of community is quite strong. And the connections and friendships that are made along the way are amazing. And for me, it's it's that feeling that I'm not alone, right? It's that feeling that there's other people out there who, you know, personally may struggle with something or may need to have this deep longing and need that connection. But I think for me, the biggest um influence for me is is honoring my voice because I always I say this all the time, I always feel that I'm not brave and that I'm not comfortable sharing my thinking. Um, but this has really invited me to lean into that uncomfortable place of not knowing. And so that for me is the biggest growth for me, and I take that, and I I try to create that environment in my practice now, right? In the classroom environment where um and I can hear my voice quivering because it is emotional for me, right? That's probably my biggest growth in this, and so I want others to experience that too. I want them to bring themselves to the, you know, to the learning environment, to the classroom environment, to our communities. So practice where they have an opportunity to bring who they are and know that their voice matters and for them to lean into that discomfort and know that through that um that unknowing hopefully there there's growth for them as well. And and I mean to be in a community with these these three others. I mean, you know, we always say in our community of practice that we are ourselves a community of practice, we hold each other accountable, right? We challenge each other, we are each other's thinking partners, which is an amazing experience to have.
SPEAKER_02What you said, Lisa, is really powerful in that it really brings up the sense of how many spaces in life we really have to bring our whole selves. And you know, this notion of feeling vulnerable, and and I did hear your voice quiver, it's because if we're really honest with ourselves, how many places in our lives, even in our homes, do we get to bring the our whole selves, the entire self? And that means those knowings, those doubts, those sense of the longings. And so we have the opportunity to say, and it's okay, and it's okay. In fact, that discomfort can become your strength. How about you, Jacqueline? What has a community of practice meant to you?
SPEAKER_01I, you know, when I think uh about my context of of at work uh with educators, you're in a role, um things can be quite hierarchical in terms of who job titles and positions and what people do. But when you come into community and there is, I'm not giving a workshop, I'm not there as the expert to share with the educators everything that I know or how I feel about certain topics or practice, uh, but they were coming together as as equals, as colleagues, as you know, as thinking partners. And it changes the relationship. It changes the way that we think about our roles and that that we are all a part of something very important. You know, we have a set of shared values in our workplace and uh core values and a mission statement, but what does that look like in practice? So it gives us an opportunity to sort of unpack these ideas of what does it mean to have a strong image of children? What does it mean to have a strong image of the educator? And and how is that reflected in our practice rather than just the words that are on the paper? So it's it's it's had a significant impact on my work and I think the relationships that I have with those who I work alongside.
SPEAKER_02How about you, Nikki? What has being involved in a community of practice meant for you?
SPEAKER_00Um, I think one of the things that I've really loved is being able to see educators as fully human and really taking care of their spirit, their heart, their intellect, their desire to be excellent at what they do, and to really integrate that into the whole of the experience in a community of practice, actually caring for people in tangible ways, whether it's a meal or whether it's a care package or a note or a connection that we have with someone, as and helping myself see that that the whole thing is integrated, that we shouldn't separate out the intellect from the heart and the heart from the spirit, that we can be fully human and fully ourselves as educators in all aspects of our work. I tend to favor the intellectual side. You know, my colleagues' voices here, they've all been so helpful at really keeping me grounded in that notion of wholeness and wholeheartedness that we come to our work with. It's incredibly hard work to be an early childhood educator, and the demands are crazy. But it's it's a space, a community of practice. We have really worked hard to make it a space where people can be fully themselves.
SPEAKER_02Jen, how about you? What is it that has changed for you being involved in communities of practice?
SPEAKER_04I think um, as I was listening to the sharing that was taking place, I think what kind of rises to the surface is the tenderness that the participants bring to our gatherings. And so when someone's voice is shaking and the tears are falling, as they're showing up as their whole selves, there's just this level of ease that others offer to uh each other in these moments of like, I see you, I get it, I understand. And you know, it's it's hard to really even articulate the power that that has for someone in a center that doesn't really have someone to uh share with in in this same way, or someone that might work in a in a family childcare program by themselves. So these these relationships are they just grow in different ways. So we would see a family childcare educator reaching out to another, and they form a a real bond and and would reach out and connect in those in-between times, which I think is speaks to the power of relationship and and connection, but just that whole the tenderness, the messages that you would get afterwards, like I couldn't talk because I was gonna cry, but I really wanted to say thank you, or I really wanted to agree with you know someone's story, so I reached out to them, right? Like there's just this this knowing and this being seen that is just so powerful.
SPEAKER_00This quote that actually comes from Illuminating Care, which is Carol Garboard and Murray's book. And the quote is may all of us teach young children with a belief that we are worthy of care and with a conviction that we are the caring adults our children need and deserve. Wow.
SPEAKER_01Preach, Nikki, preach. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03I was just gonna add a quote by um, you know, thinking of Ram Das, the spiritual leader that says, you know, in the end, we are all walking each other home, right? That importance of being embraced, being seen, being heard. And you know, when Jen was talking, I you know, I got chills because we have been, you know, those communities of practice really do become powerful invitations for our educators to be who they are and to share their thinking and and to be vulnerable and know that it's a safe place for them.
SPEAKER_00Jacqueline and I have seen with educators that we both work with, this amazing reaching out, this even on a Zoom community of practice in a breakout room, there's these serendipitous moments of connection that happen, and people see each other and they see their shared experience, even in different places, in different municipalities across the lower mainland. And they, because they're going to have an ongoing relationship in a community of practice, they're bold enough to reach out and say, Can you come visit me? Or can I come and visit you? And can we talk more about how you do this or how we do this? And so these that because of the time and the connections that are possible in a community of practice, these amazing connections and networks start to develop that are way beyond the topic or the book or anything that we're doing. It comes from these moments of being seen and seeing each other as we talk about things that matter.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely. When we started the community practice of illuminating care after our first session, somebody had one of our educators had reached out to us and she had commented that it had really moved her in in and it sparked her desire to write again. And she wrote a poem based on our gathering, and she wanted to share it with us. I mean, these are those little snippets is that Nikki was talking about how powerful those the gatherings are and how powerful it is to be seen and to be heard, to be valued, to be honored for who they are as a human being.
SPEAKER_02As I listen to the ideas that you share about what professional learning looks like and sounds like, and then I hear also messaging such as uh building capacity, quality training, and uh quality childcare settings. I like to know how this idea of professional learning being and embodying a connected experience, a connected experience to oneself as as well as one another, how that fits in with very established rhetoric in this sector. I know I'm going off script, but I really do want to challenge, challenge you on this.
SPEAKER_00Everything we do in our practice, everything, everything from what we put out for art in the morning to how we deal with families, to the way we choose to be growing in our practice is a pedagogical choice. And people's time is precious, very precious. And so it is a pedagogical choice how you spend time growing as an early childhood educator. And to do that with some integrity in your practice is to want more than being handed a handout and walking out of a room alone and not ever changing anything in your classroom. And we had this feeling, but we had no test of that until we went into community with communities of practice and we found every single educator came to those sessions and said, I have been wanting more. I need to change my practice. I'm tired of doing things the same way. And they were looking for complexity more than we had anticipated. They were looking for depth far greater than we had anticipated. They wanted connection with each other to sharpen their own thinking, to sharpen their own practice. They had it all, they had the desire. It just needed a place. It needed a container that wasn't super time constrained, that wasn't super directive, that wasn't super constrained. They wanted the ability to enter into their own thinking and their own conversation. And all we did was provide the vehicle for that. And it was powerfully transformative for the educators and for us.
SPEAKER_04In our communities of practice, we have educators that are newly graduated. Some are still in our ECE programs, and then we have educators who are, you know, they are the elders of our field. They they have been in our in ECE for 20, 30 years. And they are really the ones that are modeling that whole idea of leaning into the longing. And the longing is what Nikki's talked about in terms of that that rich, deep thinking that people are starving for. I think it's so important that we kind of yes, acknowledge that communities of practice are powerful and are important, but also kind of call out the fact that people are now seeing that communities of practice are important and being talked about, but also that what does a true community of practice look like? How can we really kind of set the standard of not just putting a tagline onto an offering and calling it a community of practice, but really supporting people to enter into that idea of how do I step into these values? How do I use these? What are my values? And how do I use this in a way that can really support the educators that are curious, that are looking for something that is a little bit different.
SPEAKER_02One thing that I noticed, and I'd love your feedback on this, is there is no one way to get it all right. What we've noticed is there's often a continuum. People jump into trying a community of practice, and it can be highly controlled. They got the PowerPoint ready, they even want to bring in a guest speaker, the expert. And that's okay, in that I think maybe one of the fears that people have about initiating a community of practice is they won't get it right. And I'd love to hear your feedback on that continuum of comfort and the continuum of bringing in personal and collective values and where you started from and how that has grown over a period of time.
SPEAKER_03I am one of those people that that needs to get it right. Uh, you know, I need to have things written down, I need to have that script, I am that kind of person, and I've had to really be okay and be comfortable with that not knowing. I mean, yes, we have, you know, a shell, right? We have a guideline. You know, we gather, we plan, we think, okay, what are we going to offer next? And so, you know, we do that planning, but to to to let that go and not to speak from my notes, is it has always been challenging for me. But again, this is where I have grown in in this experience with with you know the support of these three amazing women, um, because there is no right way of doing this. There is your way, you know, alongside the educators that are with you. So I just wanted to throw that in.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's been my observation too, Lisa, that we worked with, and I think she'll be okay if I mention her name, Carrie McCormick in Williams Lake. She was um working with her community of practice, and it was a fairly, very well organized, uh tight agenda, and that over the course of several weeks, one of the most important quotes that she said that I remember was, and then I just allowed the questions to linger and the unknowing to happen, and that was okay. And it's that unknowing that I get a sense of that we're also honoring, that we don't have to have the exact answers to everyone's questions, longings, or wonderings either.
SPEAKER_00I think there can be elements of a community of practice. So there's certain things that in a community of practice that we're doing is there's going to be a welcome package, there's going to be some poetry, there's going to be we're going to seek some external perspectives because we recognize also we don't have, we only have our perspective. And so we might invite someone else in to share a different perspective on the topic as a way of broadening all of our understanding about whatever it is we're we're studying. Um and we've worked actually with three or three authors of the books that we've done, and they've all come with that same notion of I'm I will share another perspective or my perspective on on this on this writing thing. And it's been a very open dialogue. So I do think you can have, I don't think we want to say it's just like emergent curriculum, right? People think there's no structure. And the opposite is kind of true, that there's there's quite a lot of things in place, and then we may deploy any of them at any time as makes sense to the group. So it's not that we don't do tremendous amount of planning and and thinking together before we go into a group. It's that we've become quite nimble with being able to ditch something if it doesn't seem like it's going to fit or have something in our back pocket to offer. And we've also become really um okay with a little bit of silence or awkwardness because sometimes, especially in the beginning, we tend to rush through those moments. If you were you know in a room, you might rush quicker. Zoom gives you a little bit more of a buffer, I think, but a little bit of silence is actually sometimes the place, the breathing space that people need to really think through something. We're not all super fast processors, and sometimes people just need those quiet few minutes to really take on something that has just been offered or shared by us or by someone else in the group.
SPEAKER_01I I'm remembering a group that Jen and I were doing, and it was kind of like, oh no, oh no, oh no, moment in the middle of the group, and we're just, you know, while they were in breakout, coming back together to go, okay, we're gonna switch gears a little bit here. We've got enough thinking and conversations that we can adjust and go with the group without feeling like this isn't organized or this is not cohesive or it's not uh um it's not honoring.
SPEAKER_02I get this picture of an archaeological dig then. You don't bring the treasure, it's already there. And you just have a variety of tools with which you can excavate all of the potential wonderings and gems of knowledge and understandings and connections, and that it's a matter of having some tools and having a set of how we are going to be together in this space, this values that you spoke of that really coalesces people that brings people together. And it sounds like people want to keep coming together because of that.
SPEAKER_03I was just gonna say that we'll continue to offer communities of practice which embrace our humanity and fulfill our desire and needs for that deep connection.
SPEAKER_02Thank you, Jen, Jacqueline, Lisa, and Nikki for coming together today to talk about communities of practice. Maybe you would like to talk about what's what matters to you, what matters in your professional life, and you'd like an opportunity to be seen and heard as a whole person, then uh reach out to the BC Communities of Practice or to myself, Katherine Riel, at the eceprodiebursary.org site, and we'll get started with a conversation and find out how we can support you in this new way of learning, connecting, engaging, and sharing. Thanks for joining us.