(This is crossposted to GameSchoolCon, a partner with Lace on Race, and is part of our Educational focus for February.

We are focusing here on the educational part, but for those of us in the LoR community, I invite you to do what we almost always do, which is to pivot to race.

So read it twice–once for the originally intended content, but also expanding it into how this dynamic can play out with a racially focused lens.)

I’ve been lurking around for the last day or so now, and I want to talk a little about one of the most radical and revolutionary things I have seen here at GSC.

It’s something amazing that I don’t often see elsewhere, and definitely not in more traditional spaces.

It’s a big word, and it encompasses a big idea.

Intergenerational.

We who have taken alternative paths are sort of used to it; this idea that those younger than we have something of value, and that their perspective is legitimate and even authoritative. But to see it in action, in the rooms; downstairs in the lobby; in panel discussions…

Welp. That is barrier bashing indeed.

We talk a lot about making the environments we create for our children and young. And that is crucial. As crucial, I think is the discussion about the environments youth create *for themselves*.

And this: the environment that they *invite adults to enter into with them* that is different than what we experienced, either when we were their ages, or now.

There is a wistfulness that I have felt when observing this weekend. A good wistfulness, but a quiet, almost ache, nonetheless. At lunch yesterday, there was a family near me where there was a deep discussion, that the child was leading. There was no condescension or patronizing on the part of the adults, just deep listening and good queries and an unspoken but real acknowledgement that the young person was the authority, and they were not going to squander this moment to learn.

Read that paragraph again. When we are talking about educating our children in traditional settings, the flow always seems to go one way, from the person on the dominant side of any given slash, be it parent, or teacher, or coach, or admin, who makes all the rules we live by under the educational umbrella (and we can add dominant race, and gender orientation and presentation, and class and income distribution, but for now let’s focus on the educational setting,), and those on the putative subordinate side of the slash, the child, the student, the athlete.

Turing this on its head, making space for the young person, to teach, and, every bit as radically, show us how best to teach them, on every axis, both academic knowledge and soft social skills, is a development that is both wonderful, and wistful to see.

Let me ask you all–what is the best thing you have noticed here this weekend at GSC? Not just all the action, but something you can keep in your back pocket for the coming year?