Field Note: Summer Expansions

The term is over. The final conversations with students have happened, the last pieces of work submitted. Now comes this different time - not exactly rest, but expansion.

I've been carrying fragments all year. Ideas that sparked during a workshop but couldn't be developed in the moment. Questions that emerged in corridor conversations but got lost in the rush toward deadlines. Provocations from reading that I bookmarked but never had space to properly think through.

Summer lets me spread these fragments out. See what connects. Follow threads that lead nowhere immediately useful. Read sideways instead of with purpose.

The garden outside has found its rhythm now - this is my second summer here, and the plants are a little more established, though the battle with the slugs continues. There's something about this abundance, hard-won and ongoing, that makes different kinds of thinking possible. Why restrict pedagogy to what fits neatly into module structures? What would happen if I let teaching ideas grow wild for a while?

I'm drawn to the creative work now - the designing and imagining that the year ahead might hold. New cohorts will arrive in September carrying questions I haven't anticipated. Fresh perspectives that will inevitably shift whatever I think I'm planning now. This summer expansion isn't really preparation in any conventional sense. It's more like creating conditions for surprise.

There's anticipation threading through it all. Not the anxiety of having everything mapped out, but the excitement of not knowing what will emerge when new voices enter the space. The year behind showed me that the best moments came from responding rather than delivering, from staying curious rather than certain.

So summer becomes this practice of expansion. Time to let ideas breathe and connect. Time to explore without immediate purpose. Time to remember what draws me to this work in the first place - not the systems and structures, but the possibility that education might be a space where different futures become imaginable.

By autumn, I'll be back in institutional rhythms. But maybe I can carry some of this expansiveness with me - the willingness to follow unexpected threads, to create space for questions that don't have ready answers, to trust that good teaching emerges from curiosity rather than certainty.

I'll post thoughts and reviews of my summer reading as I go - more to document my own thinking than anything else, to create artefacts that remind me what I was exploring when the term starts again and everything speeds up.