Creating the Container

We were maybe eight and ten and my sister and I were in a row about something. He suggested we all go for a walk to the old farmhouse. We walked through the trees and along the power lines to the sandpit. By the time the walk was over, my sister and I were happy, laughing. The row long forgotten. My Gramp was a magical container maker in my young life.

The container is the space around the experience. The container can be the space around a conversation, or within our work environment. It is the sense of whether we are welcomed or challenged. The space around our experience in a restaurant. 

Me and my Gramp, and little sister.

Today I will be teaching a course... ironically about teaching. One of the primary things I will be looking for as a learning outcome throughout the delivery of the course is whether the learner can create a welcoming environment, or in other words, a container for the learners they teach.
What does that mean?
Hopefully, we all have that teacher we remember from our youth who made us feel special. That teacher who made learning seem easy. We all remember that waiter or waitress who made us feel like our presence was important. And we remember those who made us feel the opposite.  

While the container is influenced by the learning content, and the lighting, the physical space, it is also influenced by the personality and actions of the person or people within the container. 

Since Covid, the physical and atmospheric space around the collective us has changed. How we behave with each other has changed. How safe we feel in the world has changed. Politicians and political parties constantly trying to put each other down, or hold a superior position has created a world of similiar dissent and conflict. This primed sense of not feeling safe leaves us all looking for safety. 

Who is my tribe? Where can I go that I feel welcomed? These are important questions. And so is the question, 

How can I make the container I am in feel welcoming to others?

When learners feel threatened or bored, they do not engage in learning. You can offer all the content you want and the learner may get very little out of it. The most important thing any instructor can do is create a space that is welcoming and interesting.

The same is true in our family containers, our neighbourhoods, our political groups, our recreation groups. You will only ever be as successful as you could be when the who is more important than the what. It is why so many feel that gender rights are essential to them. It is why women joined a suffragette movement. It is why when governments told us to stay in bubbles and wear masks, there was backlash. The goals of the Covid rules was to reduce the virus - the virus was the what. Unfortunately the who were not considered as strongly. The result, we all felt unsafe. 

Let me put in an aside here... I do not envy the government trying to deal with the who of hundreds of thousands, millions of people. Even billions. You will never please all of those people. So I say thank you to the government for your efforts to protect us from a global pandemic. But I am also in NS where we had Dr Robert Strang who many fell in love with. Why? Because during a global pandemic, he was a voice of reason, of calm and steadiness. He felt like our Poppop, our Grampy. He made us feel safer. 

Consider the containers you are moving through. Do they make you feel welcomed? How do you influence the containers you are in?  See what happens if you focus on the who rather than the what.