{"id":264,"date":"2022-06-28T17:05:44","date_gmt":"2022-06-29T00:05:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/?p=264"},"modified":"2022-06-28T20:36:48","modified_gmt":"2022-06-29T03:36:48","slug":"chaos-garden-growing-the-legendary-rhinos-adaptive-soccer-program","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/2022\/06\/28\/chaos-garden-growing-the-legendary-rhinos-adaptive-soccer-program\/","title":{"rendered":"Chaos Garden: Growing the Legendary Rhinos Adaptive Soccer Program"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This week, three things happened:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. We celebrated the end of the inaugural season of the Legendary Rhinos Adaptive Soccer team<\/a>, which I started along with Katie Jameson. <\/li>
  2. My Chaos Garden grew some accidental kale, and a curse.<\/li>
  3. I accidentally taught a poem involving dildos to my Entrepreneurial Leadership class. <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    After a year of change, Dottie and I had the chance to grow a garden. Over the winter, I stared at our little garden box and imagined neat rows of carrots, peas growing up along stakes, fat pumpkins for Halloween. Dottie would learn about plants and our connection to the earth, and we would smilingly harvest our bounty together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    After a hard week in March, I decided it was planting day. I tried to show Dottie how to poke a hole in the earth, put in the seed, cover it up, water it. Somehow, however, our enthusiasm got the best of us. Seeds everywhere. For awhile, nothing grew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    And who could blame it? I watered it inconsistently. I know nothing about gardening. I forgot to stake the peas. (A missed stake mistake). But soon, our little garden box was lush with plants we couldn\u2019t name. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    A purple flower appeared, so I Googled \u201cpurple flower\u201d and found out that it\u2019s an invasive weed called Paterson\u2019s Curse. Some green leaves with purple stems appeared, so I asked people on Twitter and found out that it was red Russian Kale, which was remarkable because we did not plant red Russian Kale. I Googled \u201cRed Russian Kale recipes.\u201d I tasted the kale leaves \u2014  bitter \u2014 and then Googled \u201care there any poisonous plants that look like red Russian Kale.\u201d So, a bunch of unintentional kale and a curse. That felt about right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I turned the kale into a chorizo, sweet potato and kale stew, feeling as hearty as my grandmother, whose garden was a marvel. As the stew emerged from the Instant Pot, I tried to impress upon Dottie the importance of the moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \u201cThis is food we grew with our own hands,\u201d I intoned, leaving out the part where we did not actually plant kale. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    She elected to dine on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The Chaos Garden has no linear lines, but things have grown all the same. Not on the timeline we planned, sometimes not what we expected to grow: but in all directions, growth is happening. It doesn\u2019t look like someone else\u2019s growth, but what a beautiful surprise to come outside in the morning and see a bright red poppy growing or a bunch of pea pods hiding in the undergrowth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    ***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    This April, Katie Jameson and I created an adaptive soccer league in two weeks. Marpole Soccer Club said yes to inclusion and hopped right in. It was remarkable: people said yes and kept saying yes. Marpole Soccer Club provided the practice space, equipment, jerseys, insurance, registration. We found the kids and volunteers. It grew like a live thing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I have so much to say about our club. About all the people who made it happen: who said yes, when they could have said no, when there were so many reasons to say no. I kept expecting things to go wrong, but they didn\u2019t. What if no one signed up? They did. What if no one came to the first practice? They did. What if no volunteers showed up? They did. What if kids didn\u2019t stick around? They did. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Without a business plan or a proposal or a timeline or a Gantt chart, this program grew from the everyday magic of people showing up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Our soccer doesn\u2019t look like someone else\u2019s soccer. Katie Jameson has written beautifully<\/a> about how sometimes soccer is kicking a ball and sometimes it\u2019s twirling in a field and sometimes it\u2019s the joy of running a feather under your chin in the sensory tent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    We end the day with a parachute and bubbles. We kick the soccer ball at cartoon villains our volunteers taped to the side of a cardboard box. We sit in the grass and play with pebbles. We jump on balance stones, pretending it is lava. Someone donated a dinosaur costume. Kids spend a few practices on the sidelines, then slowly move towards the group, and it\u2019s beautiful to see them migrate. We learn together and adapt and try again. But within that wildness, I also have a plan. In fact, I make a visual schedule of each practice plan, which some athletes appreciate and others don’t need. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I could say so much about this program. But I\u2019m thinking about all the unexpected blooming I saw over the eight weeks of the program. Children with developmental disabilities deserve a place where they can participate in ways that feel meaningful to them. They deserve to be in the sunshine, twirling, with a volunteer who cares for them, alongside other children who are chasing a ball or popping a bubble. They deserve community where the price of admission isn\u2019t \u201cbehaving.\u201d\u00a0 When things feel so hopeless right now politically, how beautiful to be able to grow one small program that feels hopeful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    ***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    This semester, I\u2019m teaching a bunch of new classes. I appreciate the hard work of my colleagues, who have generously given me their excellent teaching materials. One of the classes involves helping students develop their identities as entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Starting an adaptive soccer program is a type of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs identify a problem, come up with a solution and, in doing so, create financial or social benefit. It felt strange to be talking about business canvas models and Gantt charts (very important things!) when my own entrepreneurship involved basically being like “hey, uh, want to start an adaptive program? Okay cool.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    When I teach, I try to hold that tension: the need to plan versus the fact that so many of the things I\u2019ve built happened in ways I couldn\u2019t have planned for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    But then I think about all of the knowledge and skills that I needed to acquire to be able to start a program without a blueprint. I\u2019ve coached wheelchair basketball off and on since I was 16. I\u2019ve played wheelchair basketball at an international level. I worked in sport administration doing marketing, PR and communications. I\u2019ve taught a bunch of different higher-education courses. I\u2019ve parented for nearly 5 years. And I\u2019ve done it all in an unwieldy disabled body and neurodivergent mind. My experience allowed me to freestyle. If I\u2019d tried to start this program when I was 20, it would have been a disaster. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    And I think about how much help I needed. This program wouldn\u2019t have existed with Katie Jameson\u2019s grit, her passion, her marketing skills, her photography, her beliefs about inclusion, the beautiful way she parents her kids. It wouldn\u2019t have existed without Courtney and Allison\u2019s soccer program knowledge, enthusiasm and grant-writing capacity, or the organizational capacity that Marpole Soccer Club brought. It wouldn\u2019t have existed without the skills of the volunteers, and the volunteer coaches, and the parents and the athletes themselves. It wouldn\u2019t exist without my mom, who not only attended practices but also routinely just does my laundry or picks up my kid from daycare when I have a doctor\u2019s appointment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The idea that entrepreneurs are lone geniuses is the thing that leads us to tech bros accidentally inventing taxes while draining resources from marginalized communities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    So, in this class, I\u2019ve tried to balance helping students plan with giving students the opportunity to play, iterate and dabble without the expectation of a finished product or \u201cvalue added.\u201d I\u2019ve tried to help them think about using their gifts to make their communities better. For example, the students just wrote Surrey Neighbourhood Improvement Grants to practice identifying a problem and coming up with a solution that involves the community. We hope to submit some, and bring their projects to life as a final exam.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     Which leads me to today. Last week, we watched the Kirby Ferguson documentary \u201cEverything is a Remix.<\/a>\u201d Today, we started by practicing the \u201cbuilding blocks of creativity:\u201d copying, combining and transforming. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I brought a bunch of different poems to class. I put students into groups, and each was given a different poem. First, students copied the lines of their poem on to strips of paper. Then, they combined the lines of their poems to create a new poem. Lastly, they took their favourite line and used it to create something new. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The students did beautifully. They wrote gorgeous poems. They bloomed in unexpected ways. However, a few giggles from the back of the room reminded me that the Kim Addonizio poem I\u2019d brought contains references to dildos. Obviously, these students are adults and can handle a few references to sex toys, and the poem isn’t explicit, but I imagined some other business instructor asking their student, “What are you doing in Arley’s ENTR 1100 class?” Oh, you know, learning about innovation by remixing this poem about dildos and tampons. The usual.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    And that reminded me of how hard I tried to be a business-y business teacher at the beginning of my career, rather than the teacher who accidentally assigns dildo poems. And it reminded me that this course was built off the amazing work of my colleague John Grant, who designed it with such thoughtfulness and care, so I could build upon it in my own weird ways. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Planning is important. Organizing is important. And I am working on my planning and organizing skills. But I am, at heart, a bit of an agent of chaos, and I think I do a disservice to my students if I try to force myself into a Business Teacher mold. It takes an entire school to grow a business student, and they will get a wide range of wonderful instructors with different approaches. My approach just happens to involve mildly risque poetry: an approach I\u2019ve developed through my years as a wheelchair basketball coach, novelist, teacher, communications manager, athlete etc.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    And, as usual, I\u2019m thinking about inclusion. It\u2019s hard to scale up inclusion, because so much of it happens in every-day moments: the hard work of building relationships, of reaching out when things aren\u2019t quite working to figure out how to do it better, of that special mix of personalities and access needs that somehow grow into a community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    However, part of growing is recognizing the need to move through different phases. Love created our soccer team. But love needs support to turn into something permanent. People leave, they burn out, they grow in different directions. So now, it\u2019s time for planning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Our next goal for the club is to build more organizational capacity. We need paid coaches and more support for volunteers. We need a donations plan. We need structure, so that we can engage in joyful play. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    It will be a balance, I think, between ensuring the program\u2019s sustainability and allowing for that organic wildness. I think it starts with respect. We respect our athletes enough to place them at the center: to ask them, to design with them in mind. We respect that one person alone can\u2019t plan. We respect that each athlete in our program has gifts and abilities and talents, and we need everyone\u2019s help to find the best way to help them bloom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This week, three things happened: We celebrated the end of the inaugural season of the Legendary Rhinos Adaptive Soccer team, which I started along with Katie Jameson.  My Chaos Garden grew some accidental kale, and a curse. I accidentally taught a poem involving dildos to my Entrepreneurial Leadership class.  After a year of change, Dottie […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":270,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions\/270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}