New perspectives: Re-imagining a Positive Direction for Education

For three days at the end of March we have enjoy the hospitality of our Slovenian partners Brigita and Branko and their host institution the National Education Institute of Slovenia. Here the jigsaw pieces of the project have developed coherence as we build our website, make sense of what we have learned and imagine the place of the project in the educational landscape. 

This European project was designed, funded and undertaken in response to the global pandemic and unusually is only two years in duration. In many ways its title ‘RAPIDE’ suits the nature of this work. As the pandemic impacted on schools, colleges and universities there was a need to continue to provide an education, sustain a place of connection for children and young people, and find a viable way of working for teachers. 

Digital competencies became critical. Finding and creating effective digital platforms was necessary. Reaching out into the community in new virtual ways was essential. 

While education professionals aimed to create coherence and continuity there was also a strong sense of interruption and disconnect. Teachers and learners had to find new ways of fashioning learning environments, of enabling progress achievement, or ensuring wellbeing, of working both pragmatically and creatively to generate viable ways for education to be sustained. This conundrum is at the heart of our project. 

As an acronym RAPIDE stands for Re-imagining a Positive Direction for Education. It reflects the opportunities and indeed the imperative to rethink ways of learning and to make sense of what the new world might offer. The goal of the project is to underline the enormous energy of educators to adapt to external disruptions. 

There are dimensions in the RAPIDE project:

• EXPLORE: This dimension relates to narratives of educational experiences and responses during the pandemic. The narratives were collected through interviews and written reflections from teachers and the wider education community in our partner countries. These narratives reveal their stories of the pandemic. They express the changes and dilemmas, the emotions and reactions, the decision and actions, the redesigning, the reaching out, the reflections and the ways in which these combined to create opportunities to rethink or re-imagine what may be possible and may be preferable in our education systems of the future. 
• ENGAGE: This dimension relates to the development of a co-coaching model. Like all forms of coaching this involves a facilitated conversation to promote thinking and provoke decision-making. It is a form of coaching which we believe is accessible to all. We have created coaching guidelines and question scaffolds. We have invited participants both in the project and beyond to engage in co-coaching conversations that originate from their own experiences, help them to explore their own and others’ perspectives and to think through what might be possible in the future and how they may play an active role in that. It is not coaching around meeting targets. There is no set agenda. It is about creating space for reflection and imagination. 
• ENABLE: This dimension relates to how we can work in a positive way with those beyond the school gates. The knowledge, resources and enthusiasm available to educators to draw upon from families, community groups, cultural organisations and others are a reminder that learning happens in a connected world. They create an opportunity to broaden our view on educational settings. 

This week in Slovenia we have worked, talked, laughed, problem-solved and walked.  Our views have been of both of the beautiful city and hillside landscapes. There are two more partner meetings taking us through springtime and into summer. We will hold our final conference in Leeds in May and we will launch our website by then. As European partners we will continue to seek opportunities to work collaboratively to support the international profession of educators whose work is so critical in creating vitality, hope and a positive future for education.