Rob Paterson posted a link to a great short documentary about a Sudbury Valley type school in Maryland called Fairhaven. Sudbury Valley schools are democratically run and non-coercive. In our Supported Homelaerning Program here on Bowen Island, we use many of the same principles and we operate under many of the same assumptions that these kids are expressing in the video.
I love the last comment, that this kind of learning prepares a kid for living and learning within a worldof chaos, which is what the real world is actually like.
Tunstall Bay, Bowen Island
An old quote, freshly rediscovered:
If you want to build a ship,
don’t drum up people together to collect wood
and don’t assign them tasks and work,
but rather teach them to long for
the endless immensity of the sea.— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
From whiskey river:
No Knowing
Do not follow the path I say
for it does not exist
you cannot find enlightenment
contained within a list
do not follow leaders
they cannot set you free
and perhaps now most importantly
listen not to me.
– Ikkyu
I’m in the middle of a period of teaching at the moment, having just come off a two day Open Space practice workshop with college students and a three day Art of Hosting with Aboriginal youth leaders and coming up to a three day OST practice retreat.
I can’t think of better advice for my students!
I have recently come into a set of three nice 1/2lb juggling balls from Higgins Brothers (“The Physical Intelligence People”).
Teaching myself to juggle has been a great learning practice. I first learned how to juggle in 1984, with three tennis balls, in my parents basement. The flow kicked in while I was watching the CBC news magazine program “The Journal” as Barbara Frum was interviewing the Ethiopian foreign minister about the famine in his country. That is how sharp my awareness was that evening: I can remember exactly what was happening when I finally got three balls to cascade.
Fast forward about 20 years and here I live on this island with a whole bunch of homeschooled kids around me. One of them, my 15 year old friend Calder Stewart is an excellent juggler and a good juggling teacher. And his dad, Paul, is even better. Paul juggles all the time. On the ferry, waiting for the bus, in the line up at the store…and he always has a new trick or two that he is working on.
And then, my friend Ashley falls in love with Thomas Arthur who is the best space sculptor I have ever seen and he comes to visit with Ashley and shows me a few things. So I’m a lucky guy. Lots of teachers around, lots of people better than me and a nice set of good tools.
And all of that goes to facilitating flow, because for me that is what it is all about. Keeping three balls in the air, and making them do things like change direction or bounce off walls is a beautiful, accessible physical flow practice for me. When we reach flow, we are more likely to practice, and when practice more, we reach flow more.
Calder and I were talking today and he was saying that he drives his dad crazy because he never “practices.” I told him that I never “practice” either. I just play. All the time. Whether it is music or juggling. I never pick up my flute ormyt jugglign balls just to practice. I always pick up my tools to play to get to flow. Play as practice, practice as play.
Maybe one day I’ll get like this. The thing to notice about this video is not the technique (which is astounding) but the flow he is in. Imagine being in THAT spot? Wow.
Wait till Thomas posts a video of his work sometime and you’ll see someone who does even more amazing stuff with a much simpler approach.
On Monday I was up in Kamloops taking part in an annual gathering called the “Stop Sexual Exploitation of Children and Youth” Conference. That’s a mouthful but it’s a truly wonderful annual gathering hosted by The Justice Institute of British Columbia (itself a great thing we have here in BC).
I was asked to come and deliever a workshop on dialogue and deliberation methods with youth, and so I showed up to do that. In my design I though it would be cool to see if I could give people a tast of what it feels like to be engaged so deeply that we experience emergence. I wanted people to experience what it feels like to work from their strengths and have something appear about youth engagement that no one person brought into the room with them. And I had 2.5 hours.
I began where I always begin, telling the story of the quadrants, and mapping the four open space practices in some detail (link opens a .pdf). Instead of filling in my own practices, I asked people what their practices were and we filled in the map together. This is important, because people truly do know how to do opening, inviting, holding and grounding. It’s just a matter of turning their attention to how they do it.
After that, we moved into an opening practice, with a bit of an Appreciative Inquiry experience. I invited people to pair up and interview one another on the question of “Tell me a story or two of a time when you felt deeply engaged by others. What might we learn from that about engagement in general?” People spent a very short time interviewing – 10 minutes each – and then they returned to the circle.
Next I gave them a taste of The World Cafe and we moved into fours to process some of this learning. The question for the first 20 minute round was “What can we learn from these reflections about deeply engaging youth.” After the first round was over, the groups mixed up and continued exploring the question. At the end of the second 20 minutes, I asked them to remain in their spots and turn their collective minds to discerning “What ideas want to hatch now?” The third round was quieter and more deliberate.
Finally we reconvened in a circle and I invited reflections about where we were at after spending this time thinking through this work. We got a number of ideas, including thoughts about deep listening, about approaching youth where they are, both physically and emotionally and about showing up completely authentically in engagement and with curiosity about where the process might lead. There were also a number of “aha’s” about detaching from outcomes.
In just over an hour and a half, using nothing but the resources and stories of the people in the room we did experience a little bit of emergence and a I think everyone got some good ideas out of the session. If we had had more time, I would have then worked with the most interesting ideas (as determined by the group) and perhaps split people up into little design teams to figure out how these principles might work in a grounded engagement process. Then we could have melded these conversations together into some tools and approaches that might be useful.
I think the biggest learning for people was just how fast learning can take place when you are engaged in deep conversation about stuff that matters. And how the most important person in that kind of process is not the facilitator or the teacher, but the experts you are surrounded by, and the stories and experiences of your own life, seen in a new light.