1.   Rethinking Volunteering 

Cath Barton 

What would you love to do for two hours a month that would support your wellbeing?  We want to rethink volunteering as a way of investing in your own wellbeing by giving a couple of hours of your time each month to share a hobby or skill.  Our Two Hour Club is supporting people to do something they love alongside other people with the same interest.

2.   Rituals

Kate McCoy; Nou Ra, Ronan Bodley

In 2022 we bring our Rituals! This project was born out of a pandemic desire to cope with sudden change, grief and confusion. The workshop looks at the importance of rituals in our lives and invites participants to become involved in creating new secular rituals to help us through difficult times. They may be acts of connection, cleansing, coping, celebration, commiseration, calling for… or something else. The workshop will conclude with creating a brief ritual to close the conference that can be simply performed with all conference attendees.

3.   A Creative Exploration of Well-Being 

Lowis Charfe

Using creative and experiential methods I plan to assist participants to reflect and explore on what the term 'well-being' means to them. What factors help nurture their sense of well-being and how the concept is individually determined yet is impacted by societal factors.  The workshop will help participants critically examine how our understanding of well-being can be used in our direct work and how to navigate law and policy to make 'well-being' meaningful to people. Exploring how we move beyond it being a 'concept' or legal requirement, to something that is alive in our practice.

4.   How to weave sustainability through a social pedagogy

June O'Sullivan & Mandy Cuttler

Building sustainable wellbeing can be filtered through many organisational and pedagogical lens. Here at LEYF we are aligning our sustainability wellbeing through our Green LEYF approach.  This is where we weave the three legs of  sustainability : economic , social and environmental together into an organisational strategy  aligning it to the UN 17 SDG goals.

This approach underpins our belief that we must prepare children to become global citizens.  Many staff were anxious that our youngest children were facing the long-term consequences of the sustainability crisis. Staff were also aware that this is also "the time when the foundations of thinking, being, knowing and acting are becoming ‘hard wired’ and relationships with others and with the environment are becoming established" (Davis, 2008, p.20)

To mobilize new ways of weaving sustainability into the pedagogy, we developed a Continuing Professional Development Level 4 Diploma in Sustainability in the Early Years. Designed to support colleagues transform their learning about sustainability and initiate change by building a Community of Practice including colleagues, managers, parents and suppliers. Teachers understood the importance of relationships but needed to figure out how to learn to become sustainability informed to impact personal behaviour, practice, and organisational functions.  Ultimately, they wanted sustainability not just a buzzword.

Our presentation tells, the steps we have achieved so far but how we need to continue to build a Community of Learning that is collaborative and self-sustaining".

5.   Sensory learning practices in community herbalism as methods of embodying knowledge

Rasheeqa Ahmad (Hedge Herbs)

I propose to offer an interactive workshop inviting participants to join in with a process of meeting a plant through the senses, as a way to show how learning can be accessed in multiple modes and to support different learning styles. This process is based on an approach termed the Goethean method, whose aim is to develop insights into the workings of nature through deep observation, subjective and intuitive engagement of our senses and collective sharing of impressions. During the session we will connect with a specific plant of the season, using a number of different approaches, to build an embodied and objective collection of knowledge and information. The idea is to show how we can apply diverse learning methods to generate a useful and effective process that can be adapted to different settings. We will also get to know the plant as a new friend!

The workshop will combine an introduction to the process and to my work, background and vision, with a participatory sharing of knowledge and experience of the subject within the group, followed by the plant connection activity. This will involve observing, smelling, tasting, moving and drawing, to arrive at a final sharing of impressions gathered by the group. I will share an info sheet describing the process, for participants to take away as a resource for future activity if it is something they find useful as a learning tool.

1. The power in social awareness

Danielle Dza Ifakemi Osajivbe-Williams

The power in social awareness is about spotlighting the need for social context reflexivity as part of our approach to wellness as a practical resolve to our current world. In a time with globalisation and global warming, it is imperative to have a grasp on how certain cultural, historical and social contexts shape our individual lives and contribute to how we show up to educate, inform and even heal others. This work introduces the concepts of western hierarchal knowledge, institutional abuse and proposes ways that western forms of healing can integrate other forms of knowledge around healing in equitable ways, with awareness of threats and opportunities

2. An informal educator’s approach to supporting children and families on the edge of the care system

Roger Hiley, Oxfordshire County Council

An introduction to the work of the Riverside Centre for Outdoor Learning, part of Oxfordshire County Council’s Children’s Social Care (CSC). We are informal educators, with specialisms in both the outdoors and use of therapeutic models. This creates a pedological approach to working with children, young people and families (CYP&F) in a social care setting, similar to the European Pedagogues of countries like Denmark or Germany.

Our underpinning approach is relational; assisting those who we work with to build or repair relationships. We want those who we work with, to feel motivated to change something in their life for the better, instead of us telling them how to change. We provide spaces for CYP&F to talk, to us and between themselves; by using woodland, river and climbing wall environments. This approach has been particularly useful for parents who have struggled with the more traditional support models offered by CSC, especially fathers. The use of the outdoor environment appears to have direct benefits for young people experiencing periods of poor mental health and low mood. In our work, we are supported by a Clinical Team (comprising of psychologists) who provide case supervisions, reflective spaces and support with formulating interventions.

3. Reframing the Narrative - moving away from a deficit model of care

Maddy Allen & Hannah Severn - Lighthouse Pedagogy Trust

Lighthouse Pedagogy Trust opened its first home in Sutton in 2022. Based on many years of research, we aim to reimagine how residential care can look in the UK. How we choose to speak to and about our young people is critical to the success of the home. In a world weighed down by bureaucracy, the lives of the children in the care system are heavily documented.

The documents we choose to create and how we write about our children will be with them for the rest of their lives. Lighthouse Pedagogy Trust is on a journey to consciously shift the narrative about the children in our care. From our meetings as a team to statutory reviews, care plans and daily write-ups, we seek to move away from deficit-based language to speak enthusiastically and compassionately about our children. 

This practical workshop will present tools researched, developed and used in our children's home. We will talk not only about the holistic models of care for our children, but also how this positive language prevents compassion fatigue in our team, and how language is intrinsically tied to our wellbeing. 

4. Perception of the world and human relations in the digital age

Debora Di Jorio – Centro Psicopedagogico Formazione Studi e Ricerche OIDA, Naples, Italy

Knowing how younger generations access different types of knowledge is one of the main goals of professionals involved in education and in the study of human development. Nowadays we all interact with two parallel realities, one that is physical and tangible, and another that is virtual and mainly visual. This results in an evolution of learning channels that interact with the information underlying our adaptations and our knowledge. The physical and virtual realities have different features that affect our learning and interaction modalities in a different way. In the physical reality, our adaptation to the environment is facilitated by the attentive function, which is a filter we developed through evolution that enables us to carefully select several environmental data. This promotes self-regulation through an activation/inhibition system that modulates our behavior by means of praxia and manipulative activities.

Orderly sequences of motor actions are supplemented by tactile, visual and proprioceptive activities enabling us to interact with the environment and the objects. All of this leads to the adaptation that improves our knowledge and our quality of life. In physical interactions, motor skills are regularly practised, together with perception channels that engage with the environment.

With time, this experience generates and consolidates learning, benefiting the nervous system’s metabolism, brain oxygenation and memory. It also promotes self-esteem, which is strictly connected with the pursuit of goals in the physical world, where communication and sharing are perceived as a completely corporeal experience.

5. Video Interaction Guidance (VIG) in the outdoors

Nathaniel David Spring, Oxfordshire County Council

My presentation will introduce the process of Video Interaction Guidance (VIG) and describe how I have combined this therapeutic, evidence-based intervention with outdoor activities to support vulnerable young people and their families to build stronger relationships through attuned communication. I will show an example of video clips from a VIG session and film of myself and a parent microanalysing the video clips, which exemplify principles of attuned communication, especially parent reception of child initiatives. By analysing examples of positive interaction, the aim is to activate the parent to discover their own naturally successful parenting style and understand the reason why, and how, it works. The parent can then apply what they’ve learnt in every-day life. I will finish the presentation by briefly highlighting some of the strengths and challenges of using the approach outside.

Association for Video Interaction Guidance UK: https://www.videointeractionguidance.net/

Short YouTube summary of VIG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRVaL_ZlxHs