Dear Reader,

As we’ve been thinking about resilience in the Studio this month, neighborhoods have burned to the ground. Families have been exiled. Early childhood program directors have found turned on their computers to find access to their daily funding portals dismantled.

What does it mean to practice and grow resilience in a time of massive destabilization?

What we’ve been reading and discussing together offers some insightful lessons.

​Daniel Hunter encourages us to trust ourselves while finding others to trust as we grieve, to identify our paths and not obey in advance while imagining a positive future. I notice in his list so many elements that are consistent with what we’ve been doing for a while now. Ann Pelo and Margie Carter’s Thinking Lens also begins with knowing yourself; their direction that “What we call ‘professional development’ should focus on learning about ourselves, not just on how children learn and develop” is one that Susan and I have been increasingly attuned to over the last decade. The Reggio Approach has always been focused on social constructivist, community-centered, trust-dependent learning oriented toward envisioning possible utopias.

In The Parable of The Sower, Lauren Olamina’s practice of resilience is also one of trusting herself while finding others in whom to trust, understanding that change is always happening and that we are change-shapers - even in the midst of devastation with distant dreams of the stars.

And Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built In Hell teaches us that disasters can offer surprising opportunities to feed our hunger for belonging and meaning. She relays the words of a young medic responding to Hurricane Katrina: “It is so rare that you get an opportunity to put into action what maybe you’ve sat around the coffee table and talked with someone about. When do you ever see that the powers that be are failing at their duty, and when do you ever get the chance to move beyond being angry about it and actually doing something very concrete and tangible and immediate?”

Getting serious about resilience in this epoch’s disaster, then, might lead us to double down on some practices and open the door to new ones. In our work with children, their families, and colleagues, might we tend to taking seriously the ways in which communities can help us understand ourselves and the value of our own reading of experience - even as those learning communities, as Paola Strozzi writes, are framed by strong values and premises that are only negotiable to a point? Might we each - children and adults alike - find new energy to identify our paths of focus that lead us to imagine and play with new possible worlds? Can we release what we can’t control and recognize what is in the realm of our domain, co-creating alternative structures for belonging and meaning?

Exploring those questions will require newly centering our practice on love: A love that extends well beyond the familiar and easily known. I’m looking forward to going there with you.

Coming To The Studio

February's Through Line will be LOVE. We'll find guidance in conversation with Valarie Kaur and Nicole Marie of The Revolutionary Love Project. Nicole will lead a two-month course on building cultures of belonging, which you can read about here. Registration is included with Transform Plan membership and as a standalone offering. Over those two months, we'll read Valarie's See No Stranger. Our materials focus will be on color mixing. Join us!​

Also of note

• In last week's mailer, we had a drawing for a Studio membership generously sponsored by Margie Carter (thank you, Margie!) The winner was Rebecca Tate, an early childhood educator in rural Nevada who first learned about The Studio at the 2023 NAEYC Professional Learning Institute. We're always excited to welcome new members like Rebecca to The Studio: You can read about the many ways we've structured memberships here. If you find yourself hungry to participate but unable to do so because of the cost, we encourage you to reach out so we can create a path together.
• One of this month's fires took place in the same locale as the fires in Parable Of The Sower. This article describes how one bookstore - named after the author - responded: A vignette that somehow echoes all of the reading we did in The Studio this month.
• A potentially valuable resource to programs in the US, The Center for Law and Social Policy has published a guide to to mitigate the harm of possible immigration enforcement actions at or near early childhood programs and protect families’ safety and privacy.
• For those seeking refuge from the deluge of daily news, I found myself gobbling up The Telepathy Tapes podcast.

“The aim we are setting ourselves at school is for children to see and encounter things through establishing dialogue with them: yellow daisies, trees, but also theaters, city streets, and so on. All things that leave too many people indifferent. Instead our wish is for children to know how to look at them and listen with curiosity and participation, asking lots of whys, and with feelings of love, care, and responsibility toward them… We believe it is possible to encounter the extraordinarily meaningful even in this extraordinarily ordinary subject.”

— Declaration of Intents, five-year-old class, Scuola dell’infanzia Diana​

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