The latest translation of the SI Tool into Kazakh, the official language of Kazakhstan. Translation credit: Gulnaz Kordanova.

Apologies for the delay in the two parts of this newsletter. In April, I shared the question “What is not lost in translation?” as we take the Simple Interactions Tool across cultures and countries. Since then, I’ve had opportunities to facilitate SI workshops in New York City, South Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana, and Idaho for professionals including early childhood educators and advocates, K-12 teachers and social workers, community and technical college faculty, child welfare professionals, and pediatricians. Next stop, the country of Kazakhstan and orphan care professionals. The question of how SI adapts across contexts is never far from the conversations in these communities.

The last newsletter ended with the question: What are the essential messages of SI’s work across cultural contexts? Here are some thoughts from the road trips.

1. Facilitate as a guest. That’s the first thing that comes to mind whenever I visit each new community. Over the years, participants have shared that they liked the “feel” or “tone” or “vibe” of SI workshops. We hope that feeling is grounded in our respect as guests to the host community.

   The SI message needs a messenger who genuinely feels like a guest. No matter how much preparation we make, we never presume that we know the community. That means we are not there to prescribe to anybody what they should do, what is good practice, or even what recommendations are. We do have something of value to offer–we share questions, tools, or ways of thinking (e.g., active ingredient, the power of the simple and ordinary). But the ultimate “decider” of what is good and what is worth doing rests with the community. We are not the experts in that community. Sometimes the participants will point out little and big things in the video stories we brought that are new to us! Awe, wonder, and appreciation are how we feel about the work of studying “interactions” across contexts.
   

   Being a “guest” is not limited to outsiders. A school administrator is a guest inside a teacher’s classroom. An instructional coach is a guest inside a provider’s care setting. A home visitor is a guest inside a family’s home. There is a “guest” quality to all SI conversations because we all are guests when invited to reflect on someone else’s interactions and relationships.

   
   

2. Focus on the ordinary. The one message that did not change from Day 1 of SI work (e.g., talking about diaper change and feeding in orphanages), regardless of context or culture, is the emphasis on the simple and ordinary. It seems such an obvious thing to say: that the power of our human relationships comes from simple, ordinary moments. But it never seems to get old. Every place we went, participants would tell us how much they appreciated the reminder of the “ordinary”. It just struck us that most professionals (or parents and caregivers) do not often get the encouragement that their “ordinary” are appreciated. In our facilitation, by using ordinary examples of everyday living and inviting people to recall and share similar examples from their own lives, we set a tone for honoring the simple against the temptation towards the spectacular. If we helped participants see the ordinary in a workshop, it could help them to see the ordinary everywhere else long after the workshop. It is good to know that we got that right from the start, even as the tools and thinking evolved over time.

   
   

3. Be open to the movement of interactions. Specifically, be open to the many possibilities of “developmental” interactions. Once upon a time, we made assumptions that there were definitively “good” and “bad” interactions illustrated on our tool. We learned over time that each illustrated mode - we do mean each one, including the Xs - can be a part of a developmental interaction. It can contribute to the healthy development of a person or persons. We invite others to notice, imagine, or recall such possibilities. They might see it in the videos, discuss scenarios, or share their stories.

   
   

   As our thinking about simple interactions has changed, we have also modified the tool to reflect that. A significant visual change over the years is that the hardlines separating X, Y, Z into boxes have dissolved into dashed and porous lines. This represents a conceptual change in SI thinking. What is most important is not where an interaction is, but how we can move through X, Y, and Zs in response to the needs of the situation.

   We even played with a version of the SI tool simply as a deck of cards, which breaks from any implied sequence or order.

We are still developing these ideas in workshops, but the facilitation definitely has changed from asking people “which mode is this interaction” to “how does this interaction move between modes?” To many participants, this is both jolting (in the beginning) and liberating. They are the observers and deciders of what is “developmental” in their own interactions. Neither the tool nor the facilitator can offer definitive prescriptions.

If you have had opportunities sharing the SI tool or thinking with others, what responses have you received and what conversations have you engaged in? Tell us more about where, with whom, and how. We would like to hear and publish in this newsletter!