Success of each Young Explorer’s Club depends mostly on supervisors – their willingness to do something absolutely new, create new development possibility for children or the youth, create safe space for experiments, learning and development of skills of being in a group, as well as acquiring new competences.
Supervisors are an extremely diverse group of people – there are not only natural sciences teachers among them but also mathematicians, humanists, active parents, library and community centre employees and even nuns and priests. What they all have in common is openness, enthusiasm and readiness to enter unknown areas of knowledge and reality. Such consent to experimentation requires substantial courage – each of them will sooner or later face the necessity to answer questions of Club members with the following words: “I don’t know but we should try to think together, why it is so and we will experiment” (as we all know well, only few adults say something like that easily...).
There are many models of work which are used by supervisors in their everyday work. Some of them share their passion with Club members – they take part in astronomical observations together, organise trip to forest or meadow to watch birds. Others become almost regular Club members – they try to make of lack of theoretical knowledge in the field of natural sciences an advantage and become one of young (at least in spirit) explorers looking with Club members for answers.
Role of the Club supervisor exceed often the already great challenge which is to create a comfort space for experimentation and maximally independent learning about the world. They start with simple experiments, then proceed to more complicated observations, research or projects – in such a way they and the Club become an important part of lives of their local communities. They organise Festivals of Young Explorer’s Club, nights of experiments, demonstrations for younger children, parents and grandparents. All these is to a great extent possible thanks to engagement of supervisors. But it is not about supervisors being idealists, changing the environment alone. Supervisors should bring all people concerned into activities of the Club – other teachers, parents, superiors, representatives of local authorities (even if they do not know how much they can do thanks to it and what value arises from the existence of the Club in their neighbourhood).
This joint changing of the local community (school community or even in the whole town), which begins with simple (at first glance) experiments, can be a fascinating adventure and an opportunity of individual development for supervisors, too. It also becomes a source of huge satisfaction deriving from observation of the amazing development of Club members and from awareness that we change Polish education and create a new generation of active, critically thinking and well-educated people thanks to participation in a great family of Young Explorer’s Club.