A few weeks ago I closed a piece with a question I hadn’t fully answered. Writing about the ISBE Mid-Career Development Programme, I reflected upon what travels well for educators, and suspected that the answer would keep travelling too. I didn’t expect to pick this thread up quite so soon, but some generous module feedback on the Cards of Insight has made me look again at what the Cards give educators to think with, and what travels alongside them once they do.
The Cards were designed to support movement between perspectives, allowing people to bring them together and notice where experiences connect, complicate or challenge one another. What is becoming more visible through this recent feedback is what people make of that possibility. One perspective might reinforce another; another might unsettle what had seemed relatively secure. It isn’t always the comfortable connections that are the most interesting. An assumption that makes sense through one Card can feel rather different when another is brought alongside it, opening another way of seeing what happened, why somebody responded as they did, or what they might do differently in practice.
Something happens in the juxtaposition.
The physicality of this interests me too. Cards are held together, moved and placed side by side. That was intentional in the design, but the connections people make are necessarily their own. They bring their histories, hesitations, professional judgements and lived situations to the space between them, and what becomes significant need not remain fixed. As the reflections accumulate, the question becomes less about whether the Cards prompt reflection and more about how people use relationships between perspectives to think with their own experience.
We have plenty of reflective models, prompts and frameworks in education, many of them enormously useful in giving structure to experience. But structure is not the same as substance. There is a difference between being asked to revisit an experience through a template and encountering a fragment of somebody else’s lived professional world, something not already contained within our own account of what happened. This feels especially pertinent to enterprise and entrepreneurship education, where we routinely ask learners to live with uncertainty, test assumptions and rethink what they thought they knew. Yet in educators’ own professional learning, we often pay considerable attention to the reflective process and rather less to what we place within it.
This adds something to my earlier question about what travels well. Alongside the capabilities, practices and experiences we carry with us, what we are given to think with along the way matters too: perspectives that can be placed against our own, resisted, connected and returned to.
I’m still learning what that asks of someone, and of a Card. The Cards continue to travel, and the learning travels with them.
Felicity
Cards of Insight © Dr Felicity Healey-Benson. 12 Persona Vignette illustrations brought to life by Vanessa Damianou.
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