As educators, we face many challenges in our daily lives. Sometimes these challenges are completely out of our control, like the seagulls who choose to live on our rooftop playground and change the dynamics of our outdoor environment in ways we had never imagined.

It is easy to fall into everyday reactions to these events and fall into a routine of checking, cleaning, avoiding, hiding, and whatever it takes to bring things back to “normal” – especially when these events are not pleasant to live with.

In the journal we share today, we want to invite you to imagine the possibilities when you pause in these difficult moments and think of them as pedagogical opportunities rather than unfortunate situations that need to be dealt with.

Joy, an educator, and Leigh, our Pedagogy and Approach Support, began to see the seagulls as “more than” the “trouble” they had become in the rooftop playground. As they began to invite themselves and the children to notice the seagulls with a pedagogical lens, they began to notice their ways of living, their nests, their movement – which was inspiration for a longer period of watching, listening and inquiring.

The Satellite Nest

During our summer, we have encountered seagulls in our space. This encounter has been disruptive, surprising, restricting, tense, and sometimes even disturbing.

More times than not, we find ourselves in our separated, private spaces, which make us feel safe and comfortable in isolation alongside those we consider to be similar. However, the seagulls are insisting that it is an unavoidable fact we live in a shared world with others who are radically different from us.

Since the beginning of this encounter, we have had no choice but to share our outside space. Although we do not see any nests in the space, this space has become a safe space for the seagulls to take care of their babies, to nest.

Satellite has been a safe space, perhaps just like a nest, for the children and educators here. Rather than to simply "occupy" this space, the seagulls encounter is asking us to re-think and consider what it is to live with others, sharing a safe space.

We have been learning everyday how to live and be part of the seagull's life, as much as it has become a part of ours.

This encounter has been uncomfortable, strange, and was never called for; which is why it brings so much more possibility for something anew.

As we continue to form a relationship through this inevitable encounter, we are asked to think deeply about co-existing with others: What is created when we share a nest?

Moving with Seagulls

Paying attention invites us to slow down and pause with seagulls' unique character – movement being one particular noticing that we had paused with. With images and videos of seagull's movement, children were invited to pay closer attention to what was happening. In doing so, we responded by moving our own bodies in similar yet very different ways.

 

In moving, little learnings have come about. We have learned that seagulls have wings while we have arms, they move their wings in ways that our arms cannot, and by moving in these ways seagulls travel to and from different places. We also realized that our arms cannot carry the weight of our bodies in the air as seagulls' wings do.

These learnings become pieces of our knowing and have come to lessen what used to seem like a great chasm of radical differences between us and the seagulls. Other-encounters help us to learn beyond the scope of human and asks us to relocate ourselves away from the center to the periphery of the world with other lives (Ingold, 2002). By understanding other lives in such diverse ways, we do not become "seagull experts" or simply rely on scientific facts, but we begin to create ways of knowing that enables further relations to and curiosities.

Other-encounters can never be predetermined or planned, as they present themselves to us in spaces that we once thought was our own.

Over a span of the summer months, the baby seagulls have grown and flew away elsewhere. However, as they have been each year in the warm summer months, we expect these seagulls' return to their/our nest here at Satellite. In the meantime, rather than treating this as an end to children’s relations with the seagulls, we hope to cultivate conditions that will further nourish our curiosity of others and the world until our re-encounter with them.