On the road for a little over 2 months now, our project is becoming clearer, more precise and self-defined. After hundreds of hours of research, dozens of exciting meetings, discussions that lead us to see things differently, and all these smiles of children happy to learn in a context that suits them, we can now put our finger on what we want you to discover at the rate of our reports.
Let it be said, traditional school, as we know it, is going badly, all over the world. Just chat with the teachers, educators, parents or even the children around and you will see it. In Quebec, like everywhere else, even in Finland in fact, we wonder, we wonder what we could do differently, how to go and find these young people who seem to us so different today. We are struggling in a financial context that does not follow the needs expressed. Passionate teachers and early childhood educators take hours of their personal time each week to develop different projects to hook their students, and often also have to fight the system to get approved these projects. Studies are multiplying, and even if more and more of them agree on the same thing, governments are slow to implement the necessary changes allowing the application of these new measures which could, however, evidence and experiment support, make a huge difference in the world of education. But if you are interested in our project, all that, you probably already know. So unless it is used to present the innovative projects that we intend to make you discover, we will leave aside these realities to dwell on models, stories that do good, promising and inspiring projects.
When creating this project, we started from an assumption that we are far from being the only ones to emit: ” There is no pedagogy, as fantastic as it is, which is suitable for all the children of the earth , nor to all educators and teachers in the world. ” Because yes, we are convinced that for a method to work, the child must feel good about it and it must correspond to his own way, but it is also necessary that the teacher who practices it is convinced that what he is doing is positive to.
After all these months of preparation, our hypothesis does not change. It is the way of sharing our discoveries that changes a little. While we initially saw the project under a journalistic eye where we intended to remain neutral and objective, and therefore to present both what is going well and what is going wrong, today we choose the positive and inspiration, while remaining in non-judgment. Because what goes wrong or just not as well, there are enough people to talk about it. Enough resources available on the Internet, in books or even in public opinion so that there is no need to add more.
Over the next few months, we will be sharing our meetings with people who do things differently. Innovative and inspiring ideas. Pedagogies that think outside the box. Schools, teachers, parents and specialists who have chosen to stop waiting for things to change and who have decided to make change for the children, for them and for the world of tomorrow. We choose to make you discover solutions, big or small ideas that it is possible to adapt to its reality in order to improve the daily lives of children. We leave in a few days for Switzerland, then Denmark and Finland because our reservations are made, but thereafter, we open up to the different possibilities. We had to say no to certain opportunities because they did not fit into our overly defined dates. We want to be able to avoid doing it again because, at the end, what we want to remember from this great trip and share with you is that it is possible to do things differently, even on a small scale, even by not changing only a very small thing of our daily life and that it is the whole of these small gestures which will make a difference and which will allow us to create the school of tomorrow. Far be it from us to believe that everything we present to you must absolutely be done everywhere. These are different ideas and ways of doing things that we will present to you in order to inspire you and make you see that you are not alone in wanting something else and working on it daily. Some ideas can be reproduced, others modified, others may not suit you at all, but all will have the merit of being positive and part of an enriching process.
So let’s go! Because it is high time to relight the stars!
Geneviève and David
