Anyone who has ever stopped to watch a hawk in flight will know that this is one of the natural world’s most elegant phenomena.
– John Burnside

In the bilingual book Treasures in the Thicket | Tesoros en el monte, authors Bethica Quinn and Rosalina Rodriguez share a moment when three-year-old Alma is ready to draw and paint. She asks for a photo of a hawk they often see on their regular walks to a canyon. “Each week, when we visit this nearby natural space, we are gifted with the sight of this majestic bird as it sails above our heads or with the sound of its fierce cries. This time, the monarch of the skies deigned to sit on a branch near our group and allowed us to observe and take pictures.” Her teacher is surprised, then, when Alma doesn’t reference the perched hawk in the photo, but instead paints her memory of its soaring wings.

“This is the great gift of committing ourselves as teachers to acts of collaboration with the children in our care: we never know what they are going to teach us,” they write. “Through the journeys of collaboration that we share with children, we learn about the complex inner worlds of individual children, about the arts of teaching and learning, and about what it means to be human.”

They continue, “There is no right way to approach any work of co-construction with children, but it is nevertheless a skill that can be honed with practice. Each time we enter the ‘thicket’ of collaboration with children—each time we engage in our reflective process in order to decide what questions to ask, what structure to provide, and what resources to offer—we get a little better at navigating this thicket. We get a little better at working in partnership with children to support their learning. We get a little better at being the kind of teachers we want to be.”