That’s it! It is finished! I packed my bags, I said goodbye to old friends ( my Europe support group Sonya and Vera from the Lauder kindergarten in Budapest, Beti and Vanessa from Gan Balagan in Sofi), to mentors ( Mara and Nama who made this approach not only doable but also so well fitted with our Jewish heritage), to rediscovered friends (like Kate and Erin from Temple Emanuel that shared not only the room) but also their views on this process, their hopes and dreams and plans, to new friends (70 teachers from USA and Israel ready to share their experience on this journey), to pedagogistas and atelieristas and teachers that took time to share their excitement, curiosity, knowledge, ways of working and looking at kids with us.
And now what? Where do I go from here? In one of the workshops, they told us over and over: theory and practice go hand in hand all the time.
So the next step is practice. Here is my to-do list for home:
– define a workgroup. A workgroup is a bunch of people working together with a common goal.
– take the I out of the conversation and of the process of thought. They said we weren’t on a professional training program but in a process of ” transformazione”. Because we change the basics of how you deal with a world, you transform yourself, you evolve. And one of the concepts is acknowledging multiple ways of looking at the world. And you can not do that if everything is around me: I think, I want, my opinion is;
– documentation, observation, questions, and repeat the process with the new input.
So children, here I come! It is our Gan so it has to be no longer what I think is good and important but what WE think. Parents, members of the community lets be a functioning working group!
Does this mean that in x amount of time everything will be perfect? For sure not! But at least we will evolve together aware of our reality, history, traditions, culture, and dreams! ~ Dalia Golda, Director Gradinita Ganeden, Bucharest, Romania
