Sharing: who you are and what you know

Meetings in Bangkok

What do an air-conditioned office in Bangkok, a sparse pre-school classroom in rural Bangladesh, a grand hall at the University of Oxford, and a sleek conference room in Paris all have in common? Aside from all being places I have found myself over the past 4 weeks (the last month has been pretty varied to say the least), they are also all places in which I have spent time with different people and learnt something new.

Meetings with my team in Bangkok were excellent; I came away with a long list of action items to pursue and a better sense of who I work with. My visit to Bangladesh was really helpful; I got a chance to learn about my colleagues’, their work and home situations and to understand better how my work could help support them. Delivering a paper at a major education and development conference in Oxford went well; I heard lots of interesting presentations and was able to have some very helpful discussions with both new and old contacts. And my time in Paris–representing our organisation at a UNESCO meeting for NGOs with which they are in formal partnership–gave me another opportunity to understand the broader context for our work. Although each situation was as different to the other as could almost seem possible, each gave me the opportunity to meet different people and expand my knowledge and understanding in a new way.

Conference in Oxford

A major part of my role at the moment is to coordinate ‘community of practice’ events in Asia. These events provide an opportunity for people working with language, culture, education and development in Asia to get together and share their experiences, joys and challenges. It would be easy to say that those events, when people are all sat in a room having set aside time to be together, are the times when we really ‘learn’. And of course they are (well, we hope they are!), however, my experiences over the last few years have taught me that it is often in the everyday times of life when we learn the most.

UNESCO, Paris

It is the routine events or meetings, the casual chats with friends and colleagues over dinner or a coffee, and the chances to visit new places and experience new things that provide the best opportunities to learn and share. It is in these everyday moments that I have found myself learning the most about myself, my relationships with others, and ultimately the role I should be playing in my life and work. I guess it is my hope that through each of these experiences and interactions I am both learning from others and sharing what I have learnt with others. If so, my learning has the potential to be so much more powerful than any specific event, affecting anyone I meet wherever I am.

Pre-school classroom in Bangladesh

I also love these personal encounters not only because they often teach me the most, but because they ‘level the playing field’. We all have a unique story to share and experiences to learn from, whoever we are, wherever we’re from and whatever we’ve done! We don’t need to be trained teachers or have done something really unusual or exciting, we just need to be willing to share ourselves and our stories openly with others.

So, who have you met and what have you learnt, and shared, today?