Sketching the contours of an emergent learning community

A series on deschooling workshops

In the UK learning communities mean a specific thing. To respect their definition when talking about learning communities as Freedom to Learn recognises them I have left them as is, whilst talking about any other learning community I have placed them in quotation marks; this also hints at the almost impossible notion of capturing what an actual learning community might entail as we move towards it as a community.

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Illichian Learning Webs and a Decentralised “Learning Community”

For the past four weeks I have helped to set up and been attending, whilst trying to avoid running, deschooling workshops for home educating parents. I have undertaken this venture with initially one other parent who I reconnected with a few months ago. Both of us have had young people attend learning communities and both young people left feeling jaded or burnt out. The question we asked each other was how do you create community spaces for neurodivergent self-directed young people that honour their experience of learning communities being too intense for them whilst at the same time recognising that they actually have a strong need for bursts of intensity. Whilst recognising that they have to self-direct that flow themselves and that requires structures that support them to do so.

What might those structures look like? How do we work through structure versus agency for self-directed young people that involves both them and the parents who are supporting them? How do we read Illich and dream of living amongst more decentralised learning webs than learning communities are offering and turn that into a reality.

I say that I have been trying to avoid running as I have many thoughts on this question of Illichian learning webs. I have been compiling notes and writings on self-directed education, both at home and in learning communities, for the past three years; lots of which I have not published. I have many thoughts on what the reality could/even (tentatively) should look like of a more decentralised “learning community”, but equally I have strong thoughts on leadership and vision and creating a project and what I would want my role in that to be. I am wary of creating a space for me to share those ideas too freely. Wary of becoming the “founder” of such a community; of paving the way for something to happen and saying this might be the way that this will work, of being it’s “director”.

So instead together we have drawn on the notion of deschooling workshops, asking a series of questions to invite discussion between a group of parents who are practicing creating a culture of self-directed education (SDE) in their home, whilst at the same time allowing young people to come together and to create friendships and play together. The aim of this project is to work our way from the bottom-up into a potential emergent “learning community”, but avoiding as much prescription from either of us original parents as possible. You can’t force community and we recognise that the specific group of people that we are bringing together might not have the capacity or connections to create something that one could call community.

So the structure is as outlined and the plan is as follows: at the bottom of the pyramid of hope and possibilities is a series of a dozen workshops that help us as parents get to better grips with our understanding of self-direction and our own deschooling, and after we have done that we all walk away satisfied and grateful for a space for those intellectual discussions.

One step up from that is that most families makes at least one good friend and so as well as the benefits of deschooling workshops there are friendships that are fostered by this space that continue on after it reaches a natural conclusion.

One step up from that is that there forms multiple close friendships and a community of practice around self-direction does form. Hopefully through the questions and topics we explore and the answers we share with each other we can sketch the contours of what a community might look like that serves these particular adults and young people in this particular moment and something more substantial can form.

Seeking out members

I want to write a series of reflections on how this project is progressing, but also share as much information about how we went about doing it for others to borrow.

We live in a reasonably large city in England, with probably the most dense home education scene in the whole country. We advertised our plan in both a large Home Ed Facebook group and a whatsapp community that had just been set up and was very active with a couple of hundred members. We created a google form to create some friction to ensure that we got people who were already somewhat invested in it. We were upfront that anyone could join but told them the age ranges of our children (4-10) just to set expectations.

We asked the following questions:

• What is your name?

• How many children do you have and what ages are they?

• What day would work best Tuesday or Friday?

• What is your postcode area?

• What are you hoping to get out of these workshops? What might be a topic you would be interested in discussing and exploring?

Within 48 hours we had ten responses, only one of which chose a different day to everyone else, and so we decided to close the form. We had previously said to each other that a group of six or seven families might be optimal but we didn’t want to turn anyone away and we also suspected that not everyone would turn up or that some might come and decide it is not for them. As it turns out we have now four weeks in, got a group of five families who are committed to attending and therefore we are thinking about opening it up again to see if we can increase the numbers by two or three families.¹ Below are the age ranges of those who were interested (red for no longer coming, green for committed to attending regularly).

As expected there is a slight skew in gender balance towards mothers, apart from myself we have one other male attending who comes with their partner so as they can help each other facilitate their younger children whilst the discussions are going on.²

We are meeting in a local park that has a room for hire at the back of a cafe. We meet for a hour and a half and have a large enough indoor space that can accommodate both adults and young people doing things separately, but most weeks most of the time the young people age five and up have taken themselves off to the park that is just across the field and played in there as a group, whilst the toddlers have played either in the room or just outside.

What one might term as distractions from young people have been somewhat frequent and at times loud and/or messy (though no real conflict that requires adult support has broken out). One initial fear was that some people might be put off by the notion of a group for adults and young people and the fear that maybe I, as an adult, may not be able to concentrate fully if my young person is being distracting, or worse still that they might therefore stop other people concentrating on the workshops fully. It has been refreshing that we have a number of people coming with very young children. However, there have been one or two who have changed their minds because of the above fears.

The purpose of these workshops is to create space for adults to discuss set questions, but of course there is no notion that each planned discussion need actually take place. We can either roll a question or topic over to another week, there is no desire to be in anyway “productive” with how we use this time that we come together. And in fact we have rolled topics over, mostly, however, because the adults have taken too long, or rather got too excited about, discussing the first thing on the “agenda”.

Below I outline the first two sessions that we came together for.

Week 1: What is your relationship to school?

The first week we met as a small group of four. We discussed the following questions, grouped as three separate topics:

• What was your experience of school?

• How did it affect your understanding of learning, success and creativity?

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• What realizations or experiences have pushed you towards deschooling?

• What challenges or barriers have you encountered in letting go of traditional schooling ideas?

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• What does a fully deschooled life look like to you?

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Our experiences of school were fairly similar in that three of us all quite enjoyed it and found it easy and somewhat rewarding, especially in primary school, but as secondary school wore on we all came to find parts of school that were challenging or frustrating in our own different ways. The social side of school was something that became more complex as some of us got older. Interestingly some people found the structure and routine of school to be satisfying as they believe that helped their neurodivergent experience get more out of learning. Learning itself was something that all three of us particularly enjoyed, and we all recognised that that was probably because we didn’t find it hard and created feedback loops that were satisfying.

However, the seeking the validation that school reinforces through being successful on school's own terms and the long lasting effects of that was a theme that came up quite a bit, and how that decentres our understanding of who we truly are. As someone said: as an adult I didn’t know who I was or what I liked doing.

And whilst there are positive feedback loops created where doing well at school and getting good grades is something that feels good, the dark side of that experience of learning in a school environment is that failure is considered an epic failure.

We all had experiences, either as we moved into college or university, where the sudden transition towards greater autonomy was too much, either for ourselves or the system itself, or both.

As for our experiences as an adult one of us had worked as a teacher, one of us trained as a teacher for a year but never worked in the system, and one of us had removed a child from school after it had clearly not worked for them. The thing that we all noticed is that both the curriculum has changed since our experiences of school in the 1990’s and that behaviour systems have become much more extreme. We discussed isolation and the negative impacts it has on young people, but also how for some young people isolation can be freedom from school itself.

Whilst we are making philosophical inquiries and practical decisions about education and choosing a path of self-direction often it can be hard to trust our judgements as it can be hard to know how ingrained schoolishness really is within us. Despite having strong beliefs about self-direction we all recognised that it can be hard to let go of control and give back lots of autonomy and shed ourselves of attachment to milestones and progress:I’m a competitive person, but why? What am I trying to prove?”

This is particularly pertinent because we still feel other people’s judgement: parents, friends or grandparents, but also not just those outside of SDE. Even within the movement of self-direction there can be some ideologies that are quite dogmatic and one can still feel judgement from parents who hold views and practices that run counter to ours.

This fed nicely into the question what would a fully deschooled life look like to you?

The purpose of this question was to try and start to sketch the contours of what this community might become. What are the aspects of deschooling that feels pertinent to us as individuals that we can come together and discuss. Answers to this were hopefully meant to lead into topics that we could discuss in future weeks. We did discuss that taking elements of something that looks like school if done on the terms of the learner's involved and respecting their autonomy is not only valid, but also sometimes essential and required to help them achieve their learning goals. However, we had also ran the clock hard with our previous discussions and were running low on time.

Having prepared this first workshop I offered to run the second one on our relationship as adults to our own self-direction, but floated the notion that I wanted this to be a co-created space where other people might design workshops that they want to and we can split the labour as feels comfortable for people. We will return to questions on a deschooled life later on and try to sketch out questions for the future sessions together.

Week 2: What is your relationship to self-direction

Again there were four of us, though a slightly different group attended. And these were the questions we worked through, again split roughly into three separate sections.

• When was the first time you remember directing your own learning? What did that feel like?

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• How do you decide what to learn or focus on?

• What challenges or barriers do you encounter in sustaining your self-directed practice?

• What helps or hinders your motivation when you don’t have external deadlines or expectations?

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• Do you think you model self-direction for young people to see?

• How, why or why not? And what might the barriers be?

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We recognised that it is hard to recognise what we enjoyed and decided to learn as young people as we can be “funneled into learning school based things even outside” as “what is culturally important is what school prioritises”. Did I like reading Horrible Histories for hours because I liked history or because I knew history was something that I needed to learn because it would come up in school? I think we all struggled to find clear demarcations of first instances of self-direction. Someone said that would go to the library a lot because they just wanted to know everything from a young age.

Despite a traumatic English GCSE experience which put them off words for a number of years someone said that they felt their real first experience of self-direction came in their 20’s when they were in bands and played music a lot and started songwriting, and suddenly had a relationship with crafting words that they had never had access to before.

We then moved on to answering questions about our own self-directed process as we currently see it. The notes that I took are below.

We then discussed modelling SDE. However, as with last week we were running low on time.

I stated that often I think a hindrance to me modelling self-direction is that most of the things that I am interested in are computer-based and on a screen and not as interesting to young people as they could be. The example I gave is that I am learning chess. I play on my phone or a computer quite a lot. But I also play chess with a 14 year old that I used to mentor and tutor maths who comes to my house. I gave the example of how much more interesting it is for a young person to sit and watch us play chess with actual live pieces, conversing with each other over the board, bantering back and forth as we both make bad moves.

I also have been to a chess club with him once; these have historically been the educational vehicles where people learn chess, either in an apprenticeship style model via mentors, or via their peers; both examples of powerful alternative learning vehicles outside of a school model. These live instances of viewing chess are inherently more instructive than me sat at the dining room playing online against someone from South Africa in pretty much silence. But they are inherently not accessible to my young people in terms of their frequency. It is just not how society is set up.

We discussed the fact that our society is just not set up in the same way that almost all other societies that practice self-directed education as the primary pedagogical method. We discussed the research that shows that Mexican children whose families likely have experience with Indigenous practices (and limited involvement in Western schooling), showed more sustained attention to (and learning from) instruction directed to another person. ³ ⁴ This state of open attention and the subsequent learning potentials that are involved are though downstream of culture.

However, how do we replicate that as single adults parenting our young people in siloed families under capitalism? What might that look like in a community of practice? How might that be different? How could a “learning community” evolve to undertake the challenges that are presented by such conditions?

We also discussed that the moment that you offer to explain to someone that you are playing chess and would you like me to show you how I am playing chess you are no longer in the realm of self-direction. Not that there is anything wrong with scaffolding to the zone of proximity, but you are no longer self-directing your own practice for someone to witness. The emphasis is no longer solely on oneself but on the young people or at best the relationship between you and them. Furthermore, often trying to turn something into a teachable moment you will see the interest suddenly dissipate. So are some things just better for modelling?

In essence we were left with more questions than answers, but in many ways that is the point of these workshops and in future weeks hopefully we might be able to sketch out tentative answers to these questions that might inform a community of practice that could better serve all of us, adults and young people alike.

1. Some people have simply not responded to either email or text despite reaching out multiple times to say they were keen. Some have realised that they can’t commit. Unfortunately one child has a traumatic response to the park we happen to be running it in and therefore they can’t attend. One person has broken a foot and can’t commit now but might be interested later. One person has three small young people and thinks that they can’t come and be attentive or not disruptive.

2. Five families therefore means six adults, though often only one of the couple who come along is present in the discussions at any one time.

3. Angélica López, Maricela Correa-Chávez, B. Rogoff, Kris D. Gutiérrez (2010) Attention to instruction directed to another by U.S. Mexican-heritage children of varying cultural backgrounds

4. K. Silva, Maricela Correa-Chávez, B. Rogoff (2010) Mexican-heritage children's attention and learning from interactions directed to others.