February 19th 2021
Happy Lunar New Year and a belated Valentines Day to you and yours. Have you noticed that different cultures, societies, families, people use different calendars, celebrate different holidays and carve up “the year” and the past in different ways? Do you have some sense of how calendars change over time? When I was a kid growing up in the sixties and seventies there was no Martin Luther King Day. Currently there is a mass movement to change Christopher Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day. How do you and your family currently understand the yearly calendar? What mix of religious, state, cultural, personal and “nature/earth” significant dates mark and map the flow of ( your) time?
I’ve recently had the opportunity to collaborate with early childhood teachers around how we address “the holidays” at our private, secular, progressive preschool/Kindergarten, with an after school program for children K-5. We started with some basic tenets. We are a nature based, inclusive, multicultural school. Our intention is to construct an emergent curriculum around the children’s interests and their ongoing encounters with each other, the community and the larger world. How could we reconstruct the school calendar to better reflect our aspirations to ground our school values in the earth and embrace a multi-cultural, progressive reckoning with the past and vision of the future.
We wanted to celebrate significant events in the natural world like the winter and summer solstices. We wanted to be culturally inclusive by acknowledging a wide range of holidays without feeling compelled to recognize every holiday that people celebrate regardless of who makes up the school. We wanted to learn about federal and state holidays and their significance, to help children understand about their local communities and country as a whole. Finally we wanted to support children in making sense and meaning out of the holidays that were central in their own lives.
We had a kind of implicit rule against celebrating “religious” holidays, but on the other hand the children, with their penchant for drawing hearts, and making up parodies of Christmas songs, demanded that we do something to address student interest in these holidays. There was also a general unease around the “commercialization” of religious holidays and an interest in distilling humanistic, secular, spiritual meaning from the cultural, religious, and ethical traditions with which different families engage. We wanted to celebrate cultural/political heroes such as Martin Luther King, among many others, as paragons of leadership, wisdom, and legitimate authority. And we wanted every child and every family to feel included in the school calendar.
We came to the group consensus that what we wanted to do was construct the school calendar around the natural world. We didn’t need to “celebrate” religious holidays as much as acknowledge, explore and learn about them. We would explore religious holidays by making relevant connections with the natural world, using children’s questions and comments to draw connections between different cultural traditions, and finding common ground around universal values, needs and desires. Similarly, we might approach federal and state holidays from the perspective of what kind of “beloved community” we aspire to, and guide the children as best we could, both through the monuments and minefields of the past, and the beacons and siren calls of the future. For instance we wanted to make the shift from celebrating Columbus Day to celebrating Indigenous People’s Day. Finally, we wanted to draw on “local funds” of family and community knowledge to inform this aspirational calendar of the future that would critically and creatively face history and our collective pasts.
Elders, teachers, caretakers, parents, storytellers, artists, and social activists are between past and future. We want to do our best to share with our children what the world is like, what is important, what is worth celebrating, how to deal with injustice and suffering, and at the same time not rob from them their natality, creativity and uniqueness in bringing new solutions and energy into the world. How we choose to shape the calendar year for the children we take care of and educate has implications for the kinds of communities we want to live in and our fundamental relationship with the earth. I offer this provisional, eccentric calendar for 2021 that is grounded in the natural world and strives to be culturally inclusive. I have added 1) a few important educational figures and movements, 2) significant events and moments in the history of how we understand childhood and adult responsibilities and obligations in relationship to children, as well as 3) some key moments in how we relate to the earth.
An earth based, multicultural, childhood-centered, educational calendar for 2021 (March)
https://1drv.ms/w/s!Ah8PRzsycIjsgkkDWgmKKxO6U3rs
Please make it your own, for your own family and communities, and feel free to print it out and share it. I would love suggestions for dates that I should add. As much as we have to remap and reorient ourselves in relationship to where we live and the earth, we also need to simultaneously reenvision and reimagine the relationship between past and future in this, our collective and individual presence.
PS. In caring for children the most important “calendar” is the weather, events and rhythms of the day, the necessities, opportunities and flow of the week, and the cycles, shifts and irruptions of the seasons. More on that another time!