The latest installment of Teacher Tom's Podcast is ready for your ears. In this episode I tell my personal story with a particular focus on the kinds of communities we can create with young children at the center. If you've ever wanted to know more about cooperative preschools, you'll definitely want to give it a listen either by clicking this link or through your favorite podcast player.
Community has always stood at the center of my work with young children.
I spent the better part of 20 years as a teacher, for much of the time, the only teacher, at the Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool in Seattle, Washington.
A cooperative preschool is a school that is owned and operated by the parents who enroll their children. And I’m not talking about symbolic ownership, but actual legal ownership.
Typically, we would enroll 65 or so families each year, and they would become 65 equal co-owners of the school, with me, the teacher, being the only paid employee. Everything else that goes into running a school was done by the parents. Parents took on all the administrative work, they handled enrollment, gardening, repairs and maintenance, purchasing, food prep, field trip planning, photography, custodial tasks, and anything else that needed to be done.
When decisions needed to be made, it required the parent community to come together to discuss, debate, and, when consensus was impossible, to vote.
And as the only paid employee, I had, in a very real sense, 65 bosses. They hired me, they evaluated me, and they could, if they so desired, fire me.
Now, I imagine there are some educators out there thinking, “No way! I could never have 65 bosses!” I get it, but for me, it never felt that way.
You see, the part of being a cooperative that I came to value above all else, was that each family was required to provide me with an adult, one day a week, to serve as an assistant teacher . . . That’s right, one day a week, the parent or caregiver came to school with their child to serve under my supervision.
I often think the world would be a better place if more institutions or enterprises worked as cooperatives. I mean, the owners are also the customers and the employees. As customers, the motivation was to get your child a high quality preschool education at the lowest possible price. As employees, you wanted a satisfactory workplace. And as owners, you wanted a business that operated on sound financial principles.
But it was more than that. Every preschool becomes a community, but in a very real sense, a cooperative becomes a community of families, not unlike a tribe or village or neighborhood.
This is the kind of community humans have evolved to live in. For 99 percent of our existence we were hunter-gatherers living in communities of 20-200, closely-related individuals. It’s only been relatively recently that we’ve begun to aggregate ourselves into larger populations. Many of us have adapted, of course, but for many of us, and especially for young children, smaller communities like the one we created in our cooperative – or like those still found in some neighborhoods or churches or other affinity groups – are our most natural learning and living environments.
That’s my aspiration for Teacher Tom's Podcast: to become a kind of community for early childhood educators, parents, grandparents, and other caretakers of young children. And my hope is for it to be a community that takes play seriously!
Some of you may already know that I’m a married man. My wife and I have been together since 1984 – married since 1986. That’s nearly 40 years! Our child, Josephine, was born in 1996. When she was in kindergarten, I was talking with the head of her school about community. He said something that has stuck with me: “The sign of a healthy community is how quickly newcomers are brought into the center.”
We’ve all been part of – or tried to be part of – communities that seemed to resist our efforts to take part. Maybe there are too many rules – written and unwritten. Maybe the community is clique-y. Maybe there are divisions or fiefdoms that make it impossible to navigate. These are unhealthy communities. I’m hoping that the community that forms around our podcast can be the kind that brings newcomers immediately into its center.
That doesn’t mean that we all have to agree with one another. I mean, I have a few hard lines, like no violence, name-calling, or threats, but when it comes to young children, our adult roles, community, and what it means to be educated, I hope there will be room for everyone. In the pat, my wife and I have produced global online early childhood education summits called – get ready for it – Teacher Tom’s Play Summit. A couple of years ago, I was interviewing an Ojibwe educator named Hopi Martin. He asked me to imagine a burning campfire around which people, including you, were sitting. If someone wanted to know more about that campfire, they could ask you to describe the fire. You might talk about the color, the intensity, the way the wood is stacked, what kind of wood you think it is, the smoke, the heat.
But that’s just the fire from your perspective. If this person really wants to understand that fire, they would have to ask the person sitting next to you to describe it, then the next person, then the next, all the way around the circle until, finally, they had learned about the fire from all perspectives. But even then, Hopi said, they wouldn’t have the full picture of that fire until they asked the birds in the trees. Until they asked the trees themselves. Until they asked the worms underground.
I love this metaphor because it makes it clear that there is always something more to learn because there is always another perspective to consider. It has allowed me to see that when someone disagrees with me, they aren’t my rival, but rather my teacher. Every time I can see the world from another perspective, my own perspective, my own ideas and knowledge get bigger.
I want this podcast to be like that campfire, which is why most of the episodes will be about me stepping back and sharing the microphone with someone else.
I've started off by interviewing people I already know -- Denisha Jones, Lenore Skenazy, Maggie Dent, Lisa Murphy, Kisha Reid -- people with interesting perspectives, people who I hope will help expand your perspective. But if there are people you want to hear from, or people you think I’ll benefit from speaking with, or topics you’re interested in hearing about, let me know.
Let’s grow our ideas together! Please have a listen.
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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts. 
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