Unschooling a Masters Degree
My journey through education has been an up and down affair. As a student who was fairly academic and enjoyed almost all subjects my primary education was pretty uneventful, but I did hint at things to come in my final few months when my teacher, who that year wrote on my report that I didn’t suffer fools gladly, started acting, in my opinion, like a fool and so I decided I had had enough, as I was done for the day, and I was just going to walk home. This signaled the start of an escalatory mismatch between my uncompromising personality and the stifling inflexiblity of the education system that I found myself in. Inevitably that meant an increasing amount of detentions and suspensions before being finally expelled. But in some sense that day when Matthew Teal and I had a fracas in the coatroom and Mrs Lloyd took his side is a metaphor; in a sense I have been trying to bring my education back home ever since.
I have a taught undergraduate with integrated masters in mechanical engineering and a PGCE in Secondary Mathematics but my main passion and reading unsurprisingly revolves around self-directed education. We have two children, seven and three, who we home educate and who self-direct their education and I work at a learning community where children are all entrusted to self-direct their education, and I specifically work on a program for tweens and teenagers who want to self-direct their education with more structure.
Play, unschooling, deschooling, radical education, radical parenting, children’s rights, the politics of schooling, anthropology of learning, and the neuroscience of learning are the kinds of things that I have been reading about, thinking about, and discussing with other unschooling parents and children for the last seven or eight years. I have been guiding young people through the self-managed learning approach at work and utilising that approach on myself too, which I wrote about here, and planning and reflecting on what aims I want to achieve has been useful in lots of avenues. But are there other frameworks in which I can structure learning and reading around self-direction?
Sophie Christophy is another UK based unschooler working in a learning community who similarly was finding they were reading a lot around children’s rights and wanted to further their knowledge by doing a masters degree. Finding the usual prohibitions such as time and money and the added idea that the course that looked most like what they wanted to do was maybe not the best representation of their interests but the best compromise, they realised, hang on, I’m an unschooling parent, I am an unschooler, I could just unschool this, and so they did, creating an Unschooled Master of Arts – in Children’s Rights, Parenthood and Education, writing not only the module lists, but the course content as well. There are other examples online of people taking the idea and applying it to their context, unschooling a seminary degree, or even a PhD.
I first heard about Sophie Christophy’s idea a few years ago and I have started loosely constructing unschooled masters on alternative mathematics pedagogies twice before, drafting out some rough module ideas, but I have always found the concern of having enough time a barrier. Sophie also runs a parenting course where in one session they distill the idea of focusing on a topic and self-directing yourself into a #microUMA and suggest to the course attendees to take the idea and apply it to a smaller topic for two weeks. Here they talk about how a new tongue drum they bought set them off on their study of the history and musicality of hand bells. Last year in my learning circle, I took this idea and applied it to learning about the science of baking bread and found it valuable as a primer for focusing more directly on a topic I was already focusing on loosely.
So why unschool a masters?
I believe that a certain direction and clarity might help drive learning forward in a way that I want to explore. I think the conscious collation of reading material will help keep my reading on track. I am a sporadic reader, reading across a variety of topics as and when they take my whim. Often I move from this to that because this or that takes my fancy. Putting in some time to create a reading list to pick from may allow me to be sporadic in what I choose to read, book to book, article to article, but to do so within the confines of a predetermined list that is still narrow enough to connect more dots together. Writing about the process is a way to demonstrate learning to myself and offer accountability, but also to engage openly in a dialogue with others. Unschooling is a lifestyle choice, that says this is the way that humans learn best, but unschooling doesn’t preclude choosing to engage in specific structures at certain times such as a college course, for the structure of a taught course and a reading list has a real value.
However, like Sophie, the rigidity of following someone else’s module design and reading list doesn’t fit with me right now. I think exploring how we could deinstitutionalise learning is in itself a useful journey and one that more people should undertake. I don’t think that in the future everyone will be unschooling their graduate studies, but I’m sure there is something valuable that could be learnt from attempting to. This won’t be a masters, I understand that. I won’t get a certificate and I am happy with that. I don’t need it for a career, however the process will help me immensely in my chosen career, I imagine.
So how will it be structured?
I wrote recently about the four educative drives that the Alliance for Self-Directed Education state are innate in human beings: curiosity, sociabality and playfulness being evidenced from birth and planfulness developing shortly after. Most masters programmes are six modules and a dissertation, however, for me to fit my schedule best over the next year I am aiming to undertake one module on each of these four drives and then write a dissertation on all four.
Exploring and reading about one topic over the course of a twelve week term I will then write about it in the holiday before the next term starts.
I will study planfulness in the Autumn and write about it at Christmas
I will study playfulness in the Winter/Spring and write about it over Easter
I will study curiosity over the summer term and write about it in the first weeks of the summer holiday.
And I will research sociability over the summer holidays and write about it by the start of September.
I will then start writing a dissertation in September and complete it by the end of October half term next year.
My partner recently completed a healthcare leadership masters and they blended academic assignments and work based assignments. I think I would like to aim to write 10,000 words on each of the drives themselves in an academic style with reference to my experiences in the learning community I work in. So I will produce four 10,000 word work based assignments, one on each module, and then a 10,000 word academic dissertation bringing all four drives together.
I don’t want to feel siloed into doing this so I will also start to explore ways of undertaking this masters that can replicate some of the elements of a cohort based programme. Potential ideas off the bat are a short podcast at the end of each module with a guest to discuss the research I have worked through. I can already think of a number of people I know who unschool or work in learning communities that might be up for it and have the background expertise. Also, maybe some interviews with some of the children I work with exploring their perceptions of each of the four words.
If this interests you and you would like to involve yourself in anyway, or you know of any research/articles/books/talks that would be useful for me to look at for any of my modules please feel free to get in touch.
Planfulness as a research proposal
Turning the phrase planfulness into a module question is the first step and then collating a reading list around that second. Next week I hope to collate a reading list, but for now my working title for a module on planfulness is as follows: