Recently, a friend sent me a reflection by Richard Rohr where he talks about being in liminal space, “where we are betwixt and between, having left one room or stage of life but not yet entered the next.” When we are in liminal space, we are at our most vulnerable and are most humbled, and therefore, are most open to new learning and new ways of life.
We are certainly in liminal space at a variety of levels. The one that we share with the world-wide collective is, of course, this global pandemic. But we also share a liminal space with all of our fellow Montessori guides: that space in our practice betwixt and between teaching concretely and teaching with 2-dimensional e-learning. And we are about to share a liminal space as we exit the room holding our current cohort of children to enter a room with our fall cohort.
Some of this is not new: we experience transitions between cohorts every year at this time. They are simultaneously heart-expanding and heart-breaking; we celebrate the accomplishments of the year and greet our newest community members just as we bid farewell to children whom we have loved and guided.
This year, of course, has added layers of complexity. Leaving the physical classroom mid-year with little warning afforded no opportunity for most teachers to prepare the community for the time apart. Over the past many weeks, our communities have transformed and reformed themselves in both predictable and surprising ways. The question arises: how we can navigate this year’s transition to bring a sense of fulfillment to those who are leaving and a sense of anticipation and welcome to those who are joining? We do so by intentionally attending to 3 C’s: Culminate, Celebrate, and Cheer.
Culminate the year’s learning
We usually have culminating activities in our classrooms. Some culminate academics – we finish a longer study or tie a ribbon on a sequence of lessons. Some are social, planning an end-of-year event either for the class or for families. Some are metaphoric, such as cleaning and packing up the classroom, taking home the last bits of work from this year’s group to make room for the new community in the fall. These have the effect of bringing a sense of closure to the efforts of the year.
This year we may need to think a little differently to produce the same result. Rather than blithely relying on what has worked in past years or mourning the loss of culminating traditions that can’t be implemented now, consider what elements of school have had the greatest impact on the children in recent weeks, and build something from that. If culminations are built around these meaningful things, this year might be the best year-end ever. For example:
- Elementary-age children often are fascinated by others’ lives and life-stories, sometimes to the point of hero-worship. If the spotlight among your children has shown brightly on the helpers and heroes in this time of crisis, a culminating project might be to Zoom-as-your-hero. Heroes could come from current events or from history; they could be home-schooling parents, grocery stockers, astronauts, athletes, or great peacemakers. With a minimal amount of research and the barest of costuming, each child could create a short presentation (live or recorded) showing who their hero is and why. Cap off the session with a discussion of ways in which the community has been heroic this year.
- Second-plane children are also developing a herd instinct and a sense of responsible independence, turning gently away from parents to peers for feedback and support. If children have indicated frustration over their loss of freedoms during stay-at-home, some kind of culminating activity that recognizes children’s growing self-sufficiency may be meaningful. Something as simple as asking each child to talk about something that they learned during school-at-home time that they might not have learned otherwise might be really meaningful. This sharing should more closely resemble “show-and-tell” than formal presentations. And the learning that children talk about and might lean more towards social learning and new practical life skills or personal interest work than towards academics.
Celebrate the year
As the year draws to a close, we want to celebrate the year for everyone, especially those who are moving on. Some in our 3-year classrooms will be following the normal developmental rhythm of transitioning to the next half-plane of development, as is true every year. There will be those who “graduate” to a new Montessori class, while others will be moving on to other schools. There will also be families who, because of fear of infection, financial limitations, or other reasons, will choose to continue to home-school their children this fall. Unless we are specifically, overtly asked by the child’s parents to offer advice about options for their child, we must diligently guard against the temptation to form an opinion about their choice. It has been said that, while we are all in the same ocean, we are not all in the same boat. We have imperfect knowledge of what forces are at work in the family. And it is not our job to make life choices for these children. If a family decides to home school or to try a different school next year and it doesn’t work out, consider how they will view the option to return if we are overtly or even subtly critical of their decision vs. if we are lovingly supportive, wishing them the best in the new year.
How do we celebrate the year for all children while maintaining social distance? We spend time with no more agenda than to enjoy and appreciate each other. Most of us will not have the opportunity to meet to celebrate in person. But there are things that can be done that capitalize on the best that distance learning has to offer. For example:
- Engage children in creative play with or without an academic twist
- Play old-fashioned party games like MadLibs, Scattergories, or Charades. If you design the games yourself, you can steer the game towards something that children studied this year. If you don’t need the academic twist, there are tools online to generate word lists for you.
- Organize an outdoor scavenger hunt: generate a list of things that children in your class are likely to be able to find in their yards (or, if parents are amenable, in their neighborhoods). When they find an item, they can either photograph it or gather it. Again, if desired, the things that they find might relate to something they studied this year.
- Engage children in social play.
- “Who is most likely to…” is a fun way to celebrate friendship. To be sure that every child has a chance to be in the spotlight, it may be advisable to have an adult generate the questions.
- Kids love anything that involves animals. Create a guessing game where children give hints to their favorite animal by actions, sounds, or facts. This is sure to engender some joyful silliness and help children to know and appreciate each other better.
- A game with a more serious tone is to spotlight one child at a time and ask the others to offer adjectives that describe the child that start with the same sound or letter (Use first names, last names or both) At the end of the brainstorming, the child chooses the 2 adjectives that they feel best represents them and adds those adjectives to their screen name.
- Engage children in music and movement. While trying to have everyone join in song during videoconferencing has proven to be… well… painful, it is still possible to get everyone singing and dancing together with virtual karaoke! Mute everyone and invite them to dance and sing along to your favorite tune – or theirs!
- Engage the children in reflecting on their year. A very popular option this year is creating a Digital Memory Book. Teachers Pay Teachers, Amazon, and others offer templates for a nominal fee. Most that I previewed have a distinctly academic slant: “what 3 things do you like best about (language, math, science, music…) and why.” Some have the ability to upload a photo. With all of our newfound digital skills, it seems that it would not be hard to design a custom template that fits the classroom culture and experiences. Or each child could submit 1 page of their own design as a scanned page or pdf.
- Engage the children in celebrating milestones. For those who are moving on, take a page from high schools: they have gotten pretty creative. For example, a high school in Albuquerque posted large photos of each of the graduates on the split-rail fence outside the school and invited graduates’ families to parade. Teachers stood out behind the photos (practicing social distancing, of course) and waived and cheered and applauded as families drove past and honked back.
Cheer on the newcomers
By this time in a more typical year, most classrooms would have welcomed the children who will be joining the class in the fall to come for some kind of visit. This is so easy to do with teleconferencing! For example:
- Assign 1-2 buddies to each newcomer and ask that they meet via Facetime, WeChat, Zoom, or whatever platform your children use most often. Ask them to interview each other asking open-ended questions that you provide. Give them several days to find a time that works for each of the children. Afterward, have a class meeting (or a half-class meeting if you have a larger class) and ask each child to introduce their buddy and tell a couple of fun facts about them.
- FlipGrid is a (free) very intuitive app that allows you to pose a prompt and request a video response. One really great feature is that the prompt designer can determine the maximum time for the video response. Send out a prompt like, “Introduce yourself in 30 seconds or less, telling your name, age and 1-3 things that you are passionate about and why.” When all of the responses are in, ask everyone to watch the video of anyone that they don’t know. Ask all of the current students to respond to the videos of each of the new students with positive and welcoming feedback. (Bonus points if they identify a shared passion!)
Our Liminal Response
We have little choice about being in liminal space. But we do have a lot of choice of how to navigate within it. Despite its uncomfortable nature, Richard Rohe points out that, “much of the work of authentic spirituality and human development is to get people into liminal space and to keep them there long enough that they can learn something essential and new.” We have some say in what our children learn in this liminal space. By intentionally attending to these three C’s (Culminate, Celebrate and Cheer), we can help our current children learn that they are capable, strong, accomplished, and loved, and we can offer our new children the opportunity to join a community that values every member. In the process, we make our transition time feel more grounded, personal, and positive – to lessen the feeling of being “betwixt and between”. Perhaps most importantly, we model for the children that we are not defined by the times that we are in. With love, courage, and acceptance of ourselves and others, we can create the community that we want and need to become our truest and most authentic selves.
To read Richard Rohr’s full insightful reflection on liminal space, see Between Two Worlds at https://cac.org/between-two-worlds-2020-04-26/
Image by AndreaWahl from Pixabay
The word ‘aloha,’ in foreign use, has taken the place of every English equivalent. It is a greeting, a farewell, thanks, love, goodwill. Aloha looks at you from tidies and illuminations; it meets you on the roads and at house-doors. It is conveyed to you in letters: the air is full of it.
Isabella Lucy Bird, 19th-century British explorer, writer, photographer, and naturalist.