High autonomy and/or high agency?
A series on deschooling workshops
For the past couple of months we have been hanging out regularly with the family who we co-created the idea for deschooling workshops with. Trying to make use of the last autumnal weather before the weather breaks and we slide into winter we have been meeting outside in various parks, but when the inevitable cold came mixed in with the ever present British rain we headed indoors. As we sat drinking tea around a warm kitchen table the conversation ebbed and flowed and meandered into mathematics, which happens to be my background. Though our children enjoy maths and have shown various inclinations for learning maths, and though we have both noticed a number of different ways in which maths has come up spontaneously in their self-direction we also noted that often efforts to "teach" maths often come up against resistance.
I reflected that during my time facilitating at a learning community that maths was the one thing that was consistently asked for, especially by tweens and teens, and the one thing that people regularly would commit to: we had a weekly small maths group for around two years. Running maths clubs is something that I have always been interested in. I ran one for a friend's daughter, which morphed into an out of hours club at the learning community that I then ended up working at. Could a small weekly maths club be the first exploration of what a decentralised "learning community" could offer? And how to go about offering that up to a "community". Actually who might that community of young mathematicians be?
The best way to start something is to start something so we conspired to start mixing in a small maths session into our weekly playdates, starting with the four of our children and then working how to scale it later if we so chose.
So two days before this week's workshop I sat around my kitchen table exploring multiplication with cuisenaire rods. Due to a change of plans I was hosting just their daughter this week so I sat with her for around ten minutes as she messed around with the cuisenaire rods as my children finished playing Minecraft. I was happy to let my daughter carry on playing Minecraft because I wanted her friend to independently discover the relationships between the different coloured rods, but when she had worked out how they related to each other I called my daughter to join us.
Whilst there was mild resistance at first, an I just want to finish this off first vibe, she did come when we both said that we were ready to start. For the next half hour I posed various questions about the nature of multiplication and we used the rods to reason that multiplication is commutative, and discover that we can think about multiplication as repeated addition, as an area or as an array. Everyone enjoyed playing exploring maths and it came to a natural conclusion when my son decided it was time for an ice lolly.
The next day myself and my two children took our dog for a long walk, stopped at a cafe for a winter ice cream, and then went food shopping. When we returned we all settled down into the lounge, my son and I playing computer games, her on a tablet: I'm going to build a base. What base should I build? A castle, a farm, a cottage?
All three of us discussed possible buildings, different technical designs, potentially even making it an underwater base. She decided on a plan and set about to get the information she needed for such a build from YouTube. After about twenty minutes I could hear that she was most definitely not still researching Minecraft builds and around twenty minutes after that I asked her what she was doing:
What happened to your plan to build a base?
What got in the way?
Are you ok with the fact that you aren't doing what you said you wanted to do?
She proclaimed that she was tired from the long walk and that she had started to build something but she had done it out of sand and that was wrong. I suggested she could fix it and change it, but she brushed that idea aside and said that she tired and that she was happy doing what she was doing now.
A few hours later we were walking together to her football training when out of the blue she proclaimed: I think the learning community has really influenced my self-direction in a bad way.
I asked her what she meant.
Well you don't have to do anything there. It would be better if you had to do something. Maybe just one class a week that you sign up for and are expected to commit to going to. Obviously you don't have to go if you really don't want to one week, but... Here her brain was clearly grappling with the realisation that that was in fact the reality of the setting. You can sign up and commit and you also don't need to commit as you are ultimately in charge of your own learning.
Maybe there needs to be a system whereby you are forced to go, she reasoned. Here she threw out ideas, some form of corporal punishment, which I am not sure if it was a joke delivered deadpan or a desperate first lunge for an accountability process, to a more reasoned and thought out collective accountability system where there were stickers that were gained for skipping class and the whole community had a threshold they had to stay under or they forgo something like an end of season day trip.1
I reminded her that, as well as numerous one-of offerings, there had always been a few ongoing classes at any one time including a couple of history clubs at various times (history was the imagined class she said that she would sign up for) including one that was initiated by her and her friend. She lamented the fact that whilst she had good intentions - I recognise that compared to a lot of other young people in meetings, she voiced plenty more ideas about potential offerings - she could never follow them through because she found the environment was not conducive to sustaining learning.
When your friends are just playing in the woods that is what you will naturally be drawn to.
We discussed briefly the merits of play as a form of learning, but I recognised that her feelings and observations were valid. I witnessed an inability to follow through on previous laid plans due to the competing interest of friends happening a lot with a number of young people. I asked if she was thinking about this because of the maths we did yesterday and how when we started doing maths there was no one else left in the house who was doing something else that could be distracting and which is why we were able to focus on the maths for the whole time we had set aside? And that maybe the resistance that she had initially was also perhaps easier to overcome as her friend was already there waiting?
She agreed that that had been useful in helping her to concentrate on what we were doing.
She then returned back to the original statement. She explained that by just playing and being free flowing and not ever committing to tasks and following them through regularly she felt she had created habits where that was the norm. I wondered if her experience of my brief reflective questions this afternoon around Minecraft base building had prompted these thoughts too. I affirmed to her that if the habits she has right now aren't serving her aims then we can work on creating habits that do work towards helping her create goals and follow through on them. Habits are malleable and we can work on creating lasting changes that work for her.
By now we had crossed through the gate and onto the football pitch.
Yes, that sounds good, but that's enough, we are at football now, they can't hear us talking about this.
For this week’s workshop we were back down to three, and one of us was going to arrive late. Initially as we arrived it was just us and the maths club family. The young people biked off to the park and I relayed to the other mum how our first maths session had gone.
I then also told the story above, how maybe there are things stirring in the sub-conscious of my daughter, reflections on learning and the conditions that she finds learning easiest within. How friends can act either as an accountability partner and make structure, that would otherwise be off-putting, enticing; but conversely, how in a different structures with more complicated dynamics they can be a barrier to following goals through. How they might be forming a model about what a "learning community" might look like that serves their needs for both friendship, play and "learning" as they envision it.
The other parent recounted that there seemed to be a similar reflective process going on within their child as they had come home and started a conversation in which they had started listing out their various friends and the shared interests that they had with each one, hinting at the possibility of maybe creating similar short learning sessions based on different interests with different people.
Somewhere through this conversation the other parent arrived and joined in, and the conversation flowed from this for the next hour or so. We discussed agency in young people and their self-direction. I shared excerpts from this twitter thread on agency that I have been ruminating upon for the last six months.2
We discussed the difference between agency and autonomy. At the learning community my colleague regularly pointed out that we were not necessarily a high autonomy setting. Yes, we were high autonomy in all of the ways that schools are low autonomy: bodily autonomy, choice of what to learn and when, choice of who, how and when to socialise, right to eat when you are hungry and not at designated times. But there were lots of ways in which we were not high autonomy, especially for certain individuals who would have benefited from scaffolding in certain ways that were just not possible within the culture that existed.
People who in school would have been swept along with the crowd in moments of transition, who in our setting might spend an hour moving from the one task that they had just completed to the next task that they wanted to do because there was the “freedom” for them to do so. Is this, my colleague asked, always high autonomy? My reflections on their observations, they spent more time with the younger ages in that setting where this disparity is potentially more likely to show up, have cross-pollinated my reflections on agency being rate-limited by competency.3
When my colleague spoke of low autonomy I think in some of their examples they were hinting at the difficulties in creating highly agential young people within the high autonomy (in the way that we often conceived of it) setting and that just saying that we were high autonomy in one domain didn’t mean that there were ways in which we could serve young people better in others.
Are we high autonomy when woodworking is one of our most consistent and popular offerings and yet the only way to access the tools is to get an adult to unlock the shed and get them out for you?
My daughters lament on the distractions of others playing and the impact of her following through on offerings she signed up to is an example of high autonomy in all the ways that school is not, but she was starting to recognise that it wasn't creating high agency within her. In fact, possibly the opposite. She had all the choice of the menu but felt she never ended up eating anything.4
The parent who had joined us late then offered their reflections on some of the topics that we had discussed previously around our school experience. They said that when they started their PhD they finally had the autonomy that they had craved throughout their whole learning journey, but they soon had to concede that they also had to be grateful for those learning experiences previously that had created the baseline competencies they had that allowed them to be capable of self-directing a whole PhD. Yes, maybe there could have been a way that I could have gained those without the emotional and psychological impact that schooling had on me, but I also have to concede that for me they provide me with great value now.
Their first child has been to school and also tried various different alternative settings: a learning community, a Steiner co-op, a Montessori co-op. They are finally settled on a place that seems to work best for him: a co-op where there are structured lessons but that you have the autonomy to use the resources either to follow along with the teacher or to self-direct and explore on your own. A fairly high autonomy environment with scaffolding towards high agency if one so chooses. Sometimes he just spends the week not doing anything but drawing, sometimes he fully invests in the lessons. Ultimately he is happy, which is the baseline condition for learning.5
We discussed the challenges of working out how to create the conditions for those competencies to develop in a totally different self-directed environment, when our only experience of them developing is through school, but furthermore with young people that have a different neurotype to our own.
Again there were no answers to this session. I think Illich as he conceived of decentralised learning webs would approve of a mixed ecosystem of self-directed spaces and settings. I think the obvious questions for any parent is who is this child I have in front of me and what do they need. Trying different settings out for your young person to find the right fit for them, however, is not the end of the job when you get one that finally seems to work for them.
As that parent noted, people often have a misconception of unschooling as easy for parents because it is seen as hands off, but actually it is very much the opposite. The attention required and the reflective thought to put processes in place to support them is an ongoing and full-on job. Yes, lots of young people very much don't want you to be hands-on over their shoulder, but the hands-off approach does not mean there is still not a lot of labour required.
We have to work with them to help them create habits that will serve their aims; we have to labour to create spaces for them to have those small shared classes with people of interest, but still provide enough time to keep those friendships alive through play. We have to create a maths class for them and slip it inside their playdate to create conditions for highly friendship motivated young people to be able to get on board with something that resembles structure that they would otherwise back slowly away from. But we also have to recognise that we are in a feedback loop with them and listen to their needs as problems come up.
For example, how do we continue a weekly maths class when one of the families is ill? We listen and they tell us: do it on Minecraft, apparently. And so that's what I am going to be doing this afternoon.
This suggestion was somewhat reminiscent of some processes that schools use so I wondered if she had come across it or parts of it before.
I recommend reading the whole thread and not just these excerpts. Not that I agree with everything he writes, but I think there is a lot of food for thought in there.
When I shared my reflections on agency with them they found it an interesting framework that did fit with some of their observations.
Another facilitator from a different learning community that I would often visit who I spoke to fortnightly about learning community culture said that they notice a further problem for some young people. That they might make the choice to do the activity but the fear of someone interrupting them would make it hard for them to concentrate at all. That actually settings with high flow and volume, would present challenges for them to meet their learning aims in, even in spaces in the setting that might be the least likely to be disrupted. I worked with a boy who was a good artist but never did any drawing with us; he once told me that “this space is not a space that is conducive to drawing, I prefer drawing at home where it is quiet.”
I know some Agile Learning Centres have responded to this by instigating quiet sections of the day where the atmosphere is expected to be conducive to “working” and “learning”.
I tutor maths to a teenager that I used to mentor at the learning community for over a year. I asked him yesterday when he came what he thought of my daughter's observations and suggestions. He concurred. That too much freedom can sometimes be paralysing for people who need more structure. He wishes that the co-op that his parents were close to pulling together with some other family friends had got off the ground as it would have suited his learning style and needs more. It sounds like the project as conceived was similar to this co-op. Structured lessons with the capacity for self-direction within that.