The Power of Revisiting

My partner has watched Sex and the City at least hundreds of times. I asked him "how could you do that? Isn't it boring given you know what happens?"

He said, "I find it comforting, to know whats coming up." He then added, "I also sometimes come away with a different feeling - it depends where I am in life."

For most of my life, I have resisted revisiting stories. I think "What a waste of time - I could be reading and learning something new!" or "how boring." When my dad retells the same story I have heard a hundred times, I feel impatient. I politely listen, eager to move on.

When I began exploring Learning Stories, a narrative approach from New Zealand on documenting children's learning, something sparked an appreciation for revisiting unlike anything I had experienced before.

I was part of an intensive study of Learning Stories to better learn about the approach. While on a visit to one of the school sites, four year old Kai eagerly read and re-read his learning stories from when he was an infant. In these stories, his teachers had written them as letters to him (learning stories or typically written as a letter to the child - coming from the heart). He couldn't quite read all the words but he had clearly been read the story several times at this point - he was able to tell me everything. He pointed to his younger self attempting to build with blocks. He said, "Look! I'm so persistent!".

And that's when it hit me - revisiting stories can deepen our sense of self. And now Kai, being a little older, had a deeper appreciation for what he was able to do. He also still saw himself as persistent. Based on what I saw of Kai in the classroom, he was confident and responsible with the autonomy had in his classroom.

As well as deepening a sense of self, I thought about how else might revisiting and adjusting my lens to revisiting deepen my relationship with myself and others?

Remember my dad and how he retells the same stories? Well, now I allow myself to enjoy them. I enjoy noticing a new detail or how it's deepening my sense of who my dad is. While I might not learn something new from the story, sometimes a different part hits me. Or a new questions comes up to ask my dad. All because I know the story so well.

I also wondered about what revisiting might have to teach me about embracing emergence in education. During my weekly reflection, I now review my daily reflections from the past couple of days. Instead of rushing through them I savor them, I wonder about them, I enjoy them, and insights often spring up. I notice new patterns.

In looping back, I think in terms of the circle. In taking my reflection and insights and acting on them, I move forward in terms of a line. When I pause to reflect, I'm looping back yet again to myself and my experiences. And when they connect my past as I move towards the future, that creates a spiral. And that spiral is what I aim to live in throughout my days, weeks, months, and years of life. It's what allows me to embrace ambiguity and be with what I do not know.