Welcome to The 40 Project

Welcome to The 40 Project, a weekly conversation for reflective educators and educational leaders. It’s an attempt to chronicle 2023 through reflection on the ebbs and flows of life in schools and their ecosystems. But what’s the 40 about?

In Australia, where I have spent all my education career, school-based academic years mostly provide for 40 weeks in their calendar - four terms, ranging between 8-11 weeks, depending on where holidays like Easter and other public holidays fall. Some schools have less, due to their remote location or history as boarding schools, but most Australian students and teachers find themselves engaged in an academic year of 40 on-campus weeks. Across each of the 40 school weeks in 2023, the goal is to support, encourage, provoke, challenge, and open possibilities for those called to the vocations of teaching and leading.

It will do so through a changing set of strategies, depending on the pressing matters of the week, including:

·???????a topic for reflection,

·???????commentary on current events or issues,

·???????insights from current reading or listening,

·???????feedback from those who subscribe,

·???????links to further resources.

Importantly, it is an invitation to hold ourselves and our work in unresolvable tension, embracing the pulls and pushes of family, friends, colleagues, community, policy, philosophy, faith, aspiration, disappointment, doubt, opportunity, limits of time, and so much more. Life is an endless cycle of being and becoming, yet much of our professional discourse is around the doing. There’s plenty of other places across LinkedIn and other platforms to help with this, if that’s what you’re after. The 40 Project opens up thin spaces, liminal spaces, uncertain spaces, hopeful spaces, in which we can join with each other on the journey through 2023.

So why 40?

It’s more than just the length of the school year. Across numerous cultural contexts, both religious and non-religious, 40 has significance:

·???????The Jewish story of Noah’s Ark tells of rain for 40 days and 40 nights;

·???????The people of Israel spent 40 years wandering the desert on their Exodus;

·???????Jesus goes into the desert to fast for 40 days in preparation for his mission; 40 is also the period between Jesus’ resurrection and ascension;

·???????The Prophet Mohammad was 40 when he received his revelation, and 40 is considered the age of maturity in Islam;

·???????Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity all have traditions of 40 day fasts; the annual season of Lent is one example;

·???????Meditative traditions and philosophies often include 40 day periods of retreat;

·???????40 cards comprise the Tarot;

·???????Numerologists consider 40 a period of transition from one state to another.

Regardless of tradition, 40 appears consistently as a period, real or symbolic, of reflection, of purification, of change, of completion. It seems a fitting identifier for this project which covers the 40 weeks of an academic year. Who knows what we might learn together through the experience.

Now…to 2023.

We appear to have avoided a third COVID or natural disaster disrupted start to the year, although there is still plenty of it around (especially for those across parts of the Murray-Darling basin). While this has brought some sense of relief, other anxieties seem to be heightened as we start the 2023 academic year:

·???????Teacher shortages – getting the year off to a smooth start remains a challenge for plenty of schools, unfortunately;

·???????Well-being – after three years of COVID and natural disasters, the physical and emotional impacts continue to emerge. Notice the number of professional learning posts that have highlighted its priority at the start of this year, and rightly so;

·???????ChatGPT – A spectrum of responses runs from total banning to unquestioning embrace. There’s so much “chat” (pardon the pun) going on at the moment. Governments, universities, education departments, and individual school leaders and teacher are wrestling with something that seemed well beyond the horizon at the start of 2022. The horizon has arrived!

These are by no means the only challenges around, but they are getting a lot of attention. Their complexity, and our response to the complexity, can appear confounding. Focus on the “doing” is not unimportant; it is just not all that is important, as Thomas Merton reminds us:

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on…you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.

A wise mentor once reminded me that the work of educators is rarely short-term. Those students starting Kindergarten next week will complete 13 years of schooling (if they stay on that long) in 2035. This doesn’t easily align with pressing priorities of governments, bureaucracies, employers, and others in the community who place expectations of all sorts on to schools.

Being, becoming, doing. Three interconnected priorities for The 40 Project in 2023.

Thanks for coming along.

Interested in more?

Wheatley, M. (2007). Finding our way: Leadership for an uncertain time. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Merton,?T.?(1985).?The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns (W. Shannon, Ed.).?Farrar, Straus, Giroux.