Creating Intentionally Joyful Spaces
Some thoughts on the #OER23 Conference, held in Inverness 5-6th April 2023
This blog explores #OER23 as a joyful space (and I find there’s a lot to write about). For blogs exploring what happened at #OER23 check out the hashtag on Twitter - there are many wonderful snapshots of the conference).
I experienced the conference by being physically there; other delegates participated online. I can only speak to the physical experience, so it’s instructional to read blogs by online participants.
The purpose of this blog is to write a book about joy, so you’ll see me articulating and re-articulating my thinking, hopefully getting clearer (not always!) I wanted to blog about the joyful experience that was #OER23 and hopefully deconstruct some of the joyful elements that made it so.
I knew, of course, that #OER (the Open Educational Resources movement) is a joyful community. I’ve been hanging on its coat tails for a few years now, thanks to the warm embrace of Frances Bell and #FemEdTech*. I am cheerfully an impostor here, though less so as the years pass. As Martin Weller writes in his own #OER blog,
The conference isn’t really about OER anymore, which is fine, it has evolved into a ‘thinking about aspects of openness in education’ conference and is still the most thought-provoking and engaging one I attend.
Believing You Belong
I’d echo that. But back when I felt I didn’t quite fit (“not a techie”), during the Covid times when I was getting to know people online (even co-chairing the conference in 2021) I knew I was welcomed:
because of explicit actions taken by individuals,
because of the culture of communications and
because of the systems in place to run the conference.
And so it was up to me to believe I belonged and not act like an outsider. This was an important lesson for me. I found the ‘impostor’ path very tempting at first. Avoiding self-psychoanalysis, my default setting is to stand on the sidelines, yearning to belong. You can’t do that forever, not when you’re being invited in. Or, at least if you do choose to stay on the outside, you can’t complain about it.
As online participant Helen deWaard writes in her post-conference reflections,
There’s JOY in feeling like you belong.
You have to find some of that in yourself, but you also have to be invited in. From the call for papers to the community’s support for post-#OER23 blogs, care is taken to
Notice who is around you and make practical connections (eg on social media)
Notice and nurture those connections
Take every opportunity to notice others’ work (and cite it)
Notice what individuals are thinking and feeling
Noticing is big. Noticing is at the very heart of joyful practice. It’s everyone’s responsibility (not just the organisers). And it’s not easy to do fine noticing during a busy conference, but I noticed how rarely I saw people standing alone, unless they were clearly communicating that they wanted space (earphones in, laptop open etc.) In the joyful practice of noticing, I got the sense of many people recognising their own responsibility to lead conversations of belonging. ‘Goose leadership’ is something else which is dear to joyful practice (blog to follow).
Joyful practice is (pro)active, explicit, intentional (and usually tiny). I had my own unforgettable experience of being invited to be present as myself. In the week preceding #OER23 I’d been at the behemoth trade fair #BETT23, then had an unusually sociable weekend. After a slow and beautifully solitary road trip to Inverness, I blogged about a new insight into myself (yes! at 57!) in social settings. When I encountered conference organiser Maren Deepwell shortly after my arrival, she gracefully let me know about the quiet spaces and the beauty of the campus for escape walks. No pulling me to one side (I had, after all, blogged publicly), no stage whisper or special voice. Nowhere to go for that little devil who still sits on my shoulder sometimes and encourages me to self-shame.
‘Like-Minded’ People
I did not experience the sense of any cliques. Cliquism is something I’ve developed a finely tuned instinct for over the years, one of the gifts of that outsider impulse. Cliques destroy community and so anti-clique practice is joyful practice, as joy is all about relationality. Writing this, I realise I definitely want to do some work around cliques and I know this will take me into the territory of Brené Brown, who describes the related phenomenon of favouritism (clique + potestas/hierarchy power) as ‘termites in the walls’ of an organisation (aka woodworm).
Unless they are intentionally toxic, cliques tend not to be intentional. Especially post-pandemic, it’s very human to want to spend time with pals and it’s hard to resist. Even #JoyFE has fallen foul of this, unwittingly. A few months into the Ideas Rooms, I realised that in the five minutes wait period for people to arrive, facilitators were getting drawn into in-jokes and insider language. Again, it’s hard to resist, but it’s a joyful practice to notice and counter these impulses.
A brief dig into research around cliques suggests that the main concern with them is workplace toxicity. It also makes logical sense, given how humans operate along a spectrum of conscious/unconscious bias, that they tend to be made up of people ‘like us’ (we sometimes use the proxy phrase ‘like-minded’ to hide bias - again, not always knowingly). So there’s a powerful case to be made for anti-clique work as part of joyful practice, operating out of values of equity/equality, diversity, belonging and respect. ‘Like values’ makes much more sense and allows for agreeable disagreement. It’s a strength of the #OER movement that we find each other on the basis of those like values, that commitment to ‘open’ arising from our own, individual, affirmative ethics: common ground to meet and proceed with generous assumptions.
Anti-Competitive Practice
Pro-social (community building), anti-competitive practice has been a mainstay of #JoyFE from the beginning. The two are yoked together because competitive practice is anti-social and anti-community. I reached a new level of understanding about how mired we all are in capitalism when I was preparing for a webinar about anti-competitive practice for AmplifyFE (also very much part of the open movement)**. Everywhere I searched online, I was tripping over negative references to anti-competition, because it’s the enemy of ‘the market’.
#OER23 made a commitment to anti-competitive practice not only in the way individuals were welcomed (see above) but also in the construction of the programme. Yes there were three keynotes and they did literally what they were asked to do - they set the tone. They got us thinking differently and those conversations continued throughout the two days often with the keynote presenters because yes, Rikke Toft Nørgård, Anna-Wendy Stevenson and Dave Cormier did not run away to explore the delights of the Highlands, job done. We were all present as equals*** and that point was subtly and regularly reinforced.
The programme built in the predictable ease of long lunchtimes, short breaks and a reasonable finish time, as well as social events to which everyone was invited (again, no sense of cliques rushing off to be alone together). Hot drinks and water were constantly available, so we weren’t infantilised into being told when to drink (or rushing for the loo at the same time). And timings were tightly observed, another deal-breaker for joyful practice. The Thinking Environment is everywhere in #JoyFE (and deserves a fresh blog post here soon). It structures the Ideas Room and bookends each Writing Room, our events and any meetings we have, because we have learned that strictly observing time is a principle of equality. Outside of the sessions, the invitation to rest was always present, recognising that skipping a session to take time out, or chat with others, mattered as much as the presentations themselves. This was a key joyful difference between #OER23 and other conferences I’ve been to: consumption (of others’ research) was made sense of by an encompassing sense of community; time to process, collectively challenge, and forge new activist projects and connections.
The Importance of Place
Ah, Inverness. I won’t lie, after a very lean year financially I’d promised myself no more trips till my situation was less precarious but Inverness was irresistible. And that’s even before I’d seen the gorgeous Inverness Campus of the University of the Highlands and Islands. And I was very lucky to be awarded a scholarship which meant I was able to travel with greater peace of mind.
Not everywhere is quite as beautiful as this striking campus and sometimes needs must. But this provided a very different vibe to the expensive hotel which is supposed to offer a treat to busy educators but which screams ‘corporate’ in this day and age. Universities are corporate entities too, but they are not all about the money. With its lake, gardens and green walkways, UHI Inverness reflected an unexpectedly joyful thread of the conference: what I’d call a posthuman**** embrace of more-than-human teachers. Despite the campus being sited in a retail/light industry area of the city, it was impossible to forget that one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world was surrounding us all, because our conversations brought the outside in. The past, the future, nature…all were part of the conference culture, reflected in the holidays some of us planned around the event (my gorgeous road trips!), family memory-making, ancestral and more recent links - and in our presentations, from Rikke’s ‘Hyper-Hybrid Futures’ (places, peoples, planet), to Clare Thomson, Louise Drumm and Frances Bell’s Rewilding Education workshop, bringing old practices of stitching and making to murmured conversations around sustainability. I’d also include the two pots of slightly battered sweetgrass I carted around with me; Frances graciously accepted one and the other has just about survived a further 500 miles home.
Of particular significance to the whole place thing was that #OER23 hired a whole floor of the Inverness College building and we had access to it all. No doors were locked to us, so if someone wanted to have a meeting, hide out or crack on with something, they could pop into an unused classroom. Having experience of some English FE colleges where you need escorting to the toilet, this was refreshing. Yes, it was Easter Week with no students in but it communicated not only easeful space but trust. No joy without trust, not ever.
“Because Counting is Capitalism”
I was thrilled/excited/petrified to be invited to do a Gasta at #OER23. Gasta, led by Tom Farrelly, is a staple of the #OER conference programme. It means ‘rapid’ in Irish and four of us each got five minutes to get our point across before the audience started counting down (also in Irish) to a massive shout of “GASTA!” Tom takes it very personally if you get finished before the count. I know, I’m telling a story which only makes sense if you were there but it’s great high energy fun and everyone gets into the spirit. I was in great company with Eamon Costello, Mags Amond and Jim Groom. My adrenaline was so high that the only thing I remember about my five minutes was something I hadn’t planned to say at all - that we didn’t count anything in #JoyFE because “counting is capitalism.”***** The room rose in uproar. It was one of those times - rare in life for me - when I feel so safe in a space that I can be completely unguarded. It’s a vulnerable place to be; Brené Brown would call it “dropping the armour.” And it revealed a truth that I’d not known I’d thought before: having spaces where you don’t have to count is necessary to sustain joyful practice. That is, spaces outside capitalism.
I can feel a little eye-rolling and I get it. Capitalism is axiomatic, we can’t even see where it influences us any more. And I clearly don’t know how to get beyond it permanently, or I’d have told someone my grand plan by now. But I have come to believe that we have to have spaces where we step outside, get a breather from counting every little thing (in order to justify our existence) and re-energise. JoyFE is one such space. In very many deliberate and explicitly values-led ways (without having to write a list of values), #OER23 was another.
My Gasta was a call to arms about establishing JoyHE, using the JoyFE blueprint, which at the time was literally somewhere partially in my head and more fully in the collective experience of the last three years. #OER23 and some previous conversations online convinced me that there was an appetite for JoyHE and it was time to get that blueprint down. I can’t make it happen, it takes collective joyful activist energy (also known as potentia) to do that, but imagine what JoyHE might look like three years from now. JoyFE started as 20 people coming together (I haven’t counted), from approximately 15 FE organisations (at a guess). This blog is about making a start; conversations at #OER23 were about creating catalysts. Do more than ‘watch this space’ - join in!
Holiday Snaps
One of the real joys of #OER23 was knowing that the place was full of bloggers. As the event came to a close I didn’t want it to end (but I also did, because another principal of joyful practice is knowing when to step away). It was like that lovely experience back in the day of coming home from a holiday knowing you’d get your snaps back in two weeks. Blogging is part of the organic culture of #OER and arises from the values of open, but it had to start somewhere and that’s part of the conversation to come. With JoyFE that has taken much longer, despite (or because of?) the early establishment of the JoyFE magazine, which ran from April 2020 to September 2022. There are lessons to be learned, and I can only learn them from talking to you, dear #OER bloggers.
Warm Spaces
In conclusion (for now, because this blog is getting rather long), I want to draw on just one of the #OER23 presentations which resonated most powerfully with joyful practice. Prajakta Girme is researching ‘warm spaces’ in higher education; ways of enabling belonging. Her focus is specifically on refugee and migrant students, but her work has stayed with me throughout this exploration of joyful practice. A warm space can be a person****** (or people), it’s the culture of a place and it’s the systems, structures and processes that frame the venue, event or organisation. I want to learn more about Prajakta’s work and what it can teach us for joyful work. And to think, I nearly didn’t stay for the presentation because I was so anxious about my own! There’s a lesson in there too.
For now, my thinking is around the scary world we live in. I won’t reduce the frustration, anger, fear and pain of it to an acronym, but life is certainly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous; as Dave Cormier said, not fully knowable. These are the energies that fuel our joyful practices, as we filter them through affirmative ethics into collective potentia.
I set out in this blog to process and analyse why #OER23 was so joyful. And my intention with the blog as a whole is to begin to write my joyful practice book. It’s taken a while because in some ways #OER23 was the book. It has so many of the ingredients. I’d love to hear your take on what I’ve written, whether you were there or not.
Footnotes
*FemEdTech is a “reflexive, emergent network of people learning, practising and researching in educational technology.”
**I can’t find a recording online, but I’ve found my script so I’ll publish it here presently.
***As we say in a Thinking Environment: “role, rank and ego left at the door.”
****You call it what you want; it’s important to define terms but not be precious about them (that’s ‘ego’)
*****So, for example, we don’t count how many people attend the Ideas Room, we don’t keep a record of ideas or where they get to, we deliberately don’t have any money (we fundraise for the little we need to pay for Zoom), we can’t tell you how many people are involved at any one time. It is so REFRESHING.
******Shout out to Jeffrey Elkner who is literally the most joyful person I’ve ever met.