Summary Module Three

Summary Module Three

The heart of module three is firstly about cultivating particular dispositions. Consistent critical self-reflection that invites honest questions, accountability, and a willingness to be changed and challenged is essential for fostering relational leadership. Intention is required with everything we do in early childhood education. We must begin by asking ourselves what matters? What matters to you as an interconnected individual alongside what matters to the people around you within your particular context(s)?

Bringing your attention to local and global needs, concerns, intersections, and conditions will help draw your awareness to specific aspects of lived experiences which you may or may not experience yourself. Intentionally seeking diverse and new to you knowledges will not only expand your comprehension, but intentionality allows you to connect more meaningfully with the people and other-than-humans within your world.

When we begin to really see the people and other-than-humans around us, we are more likely to deeply and sincerely care for these others…and when we care for others, we are more committed to responding and co-creating the conditions for collective living. Connecting dispositions, theories, and practice doesn’t only require taking on new information, it also demands excluding and editing ways of knowing, being, and doing that no longer serve us or the others around us.

Commitment statements are a way to make visible what you stand for as an educator and leader as well as serves as a gesture to others to think and act collaboratively. Commitment statements create a space to root into particular obligations and responsibilities, to return to and revisit, a space for lively and rigorous conversations, to co-create, a space to speculate what might be possible. Commitment statements create a space for thinking to be put into action.