Hello and welcome. My name is Tim and alongside my partner we unschool two children in Bristol, England. I also work at a learning community in an acre of woods in the middle of the city. The learning community is a mixed-age self-directed education space. We cater to any age between 5 and 16 and generally have between a dozen and twenty children with us at any one point in time. We are a consent-based education project using sociocratic tools in our meetings and we use agile learning tools for projects and additionally a self managed learning programme for more structured goal setting for those who opt in from the age of 10.
I have been writing essays on self-directed education and play and bi-weekly reflections on working at a learning community and facilitating young people in self-directed education.
I’m part of a writing collective who write essays to a set theme every month so I have written on topics from home, procrastination, the beach, and work. I have written a small series on the overformalisation of children’s football, and another on a pedagogy of wholeness. My thoughts and writing connects across various aspects of self-directed education and children’s rights advocacy: unschooling, play, freedom, power dynamics, creating conscious cultures and change, consent, conflict resolution and transformative justice, children’s innate curiosity, consensus decision making, “productivity”, and childism.
As well as the essays I am undertaking a unschooled masters project this year looking at the four educative drives: playfulness, sociability, curiosity, and planfulness. You can read about its conception here and follow its progress here.
With thanks,
Tim
