#self directed learning

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My oldest son has always hated school. He cried when I dropped him off in preschool. He complained in kindergarten, and by the time he was in grade 4, there were many mornings he just plain refused to go. And he was in Montessori. Most mornings involved fights; sometimes I had to physically pick him up kicking and screaming to get him into the car. Looking back, I cringe at the damage I was doing to him – but I didn’t know there were other options. When I preach about unschooling, it’s because I want other parents to know that there are options. That you don’t need to fight with your kids and they don’t need to spend the bulk of their waking lives in places that they hate.

When I realized that life was not working for us back in 2019, I started researching alternative school systems and came across the Sudbury schools in the US. Sudbury uses a self-directed model that gives the attending kids the freedom to learn based on their interests with staff there to help support their journey as needed. It’s totally child-led. I became enamoured. Alas, the closest school that could be comparable was over 100km away, so I decided to try and create a free school in my town. It was a bumpy ride and we ended up closing just before COVID hit but it did teach me a lot about self-directed education, autonomy, and all the failings of the school system. But it also taught me that my kid hated ANY kind of compulsory schooling – he didn’t want to be in an environment where there was perceived authority over his time or judgement from adults about his activities.

So our entry into unschooling came with a bit of a crash, simply because there were no other options left to us. I spent a year diving deep into the books, blogs, podcasts, and Facebook groups to try and navigate my very rocky deschooling process (made complicated by hormonal changes in my body) and my son’s deschooling process (made complicated by living in split homes with a father that was not supportive of this new way of learning). It was a hard year but we stuck with it because I knew that this was an important transition for us. I didn’t fully understand unschooling, but I knew that this was how I wanted to parent, how our family should live together. There was a lot of fights, tears, apologies, hugs, and eventually laughter. I’m happy to report that year two has gone much more smoothly. But in this second year, I’ve also come to a very important understanding that I felt deep inside but couldn’t fully comprehend.

When I was doing that initial deep dive into unschooling, I missed a very key component that made our first year so hard. Unschooling gurus taught that I needed to put my child first, at the expense of myself, and at the expense of others. I was told that anything less was not “radical unschooling” and I actually gaslit myself into believing this was true. But it was exhausting and continually sent me into spirals of self-doubt because I was not listening to my gut. About time spent alone watching YouTube, about getting enough sleep, about getting exercise. I was told that my concerns were too big and if I talked to my son about them, I’d be putting my adult issues onto his shoulders. I just needed to “deschool more”. But it wasn’t healthy at all.

It wasn’t until the fall of 2020 that I started exploring intersectional unschooling, a term I learned from Zakiyya Ishmael in an amazing article she wrote here: https://www.growingminds.co.za/intersectional-unschooling-a-new-semantic-musing/ As someone who was already exploring ideas of intersectionality between environmentalism and racism, this clicked automatically. It explained why unschooling felt like the right approach, but I had been looked at it from the wrong angle. Rather than putting the onus on prioritizing my child’s needs over my own, it reframed the picture as removing the power dynamic between us as two fully formed individuals. But this was a two-way street: just as I shouldn’t have power over my child, they should also not have power over me. We needed to learn how to live in harmony, respecting each other as people, and also respecting each others needs, fears, wants, etc. This left room for bringing my concerns to the relationship rather than pushing them down inside and, better yet, modeled that behaviour for my kids! In showing them respect, in removing that authority over them, they can now experience how to live in relationships – in community – without the need to assert power over others. I think this is what Lucy AitkenRead is referring to as “Third Wave” unschooling in a recent Youtube video.

Another absolutely fantastic piece from Carol Black. A must read! And as usual with anything by her, there are so many terrific quotes from this piece I had a lot of trouble picking.

"There is something profoundly deadening to a curious, engaged child about the feeling of being watched and measured, or even, some studies suggest, the anticipation of being measured. Sure, some kids seem to dig it. They preen and pose for it, they compete with their friends for it, they want to be better than everybody else. But everybody can’t be better than everybody else, and this business of being constantly scrutinized and compared to others does something insidious to the life of a child. I've seen kids drop what they're doing in an instant when they realize they're being observed in an appraising way. A wall goes up. The lights go out."

"But the power of the gaze goes beyond the numbers and letters used to quantify it. It exists in looks and tones and body language, in words and in the spaces between words. It is a way of looking at another human being, of confronting another human life; it is a philosophical stance, an emotional stance, a political stance, an exercise of power. As philosopher Martin Buber might have put it, the stance of true relationship says to the other, "I–Thou;" the evaluative gaze says "I–It." It says, "I am the subject; you are the object. I know what you are, I know what you should be, I know what 'standards' you must meet." It is a god-like stance, which is actually a big deal even if you think you are a fair and friendly god."

"The evaluative gaze of school is so constant a presence, so all-pervasive an eye, that many people have come to believe that children would actually not grow and develop without it. They believe that without their "feedback," without their constant "assessment," a child's development would literally slow or even stop. They believe that children would not learn from the things they experience and do and see and hear and make and read and imagine unless they have an adult to "assess" them (or unless the adult teaches them to "self-assess," which generally means teaching them to internalize the adult gaze.) For people whose experience is with children inside the school system, it may seem self-evident that this is true. For people whose experience is with children outside the school system, it may seem like believing that an acorn would not grow into an oak tree unless you measure it and give it your opinion. Because an oak tree does not actually require your opinion, and believe it or not, 90% of the time, neither does a child.

(click on images to see titles and in better size)

My half of the art show “Of Reverie” @fabulousfancyfrog and I were in back in 2015.

It was a fantastic experience organized by Compass , the self-directed learning centre I’ve been going to for nearly four years now. (my Compass portfolio). 

We were also mentored by three local artists for the time leading up to the exhibition and that helped me so much with the whole process of planning, painting, writing the artist statement, and framing it all ourselves.

All of my paintings for the show(except Ink Suit and Sheryl) were painted to specific albums and named after songs from them, so see if you can figure out what albums/songs I used haha.

Fortunately, a bunch of my pieces sold! Unfortunately, everything that didn’t sell perished in a fire started by a terrible roofer who fucked up an apartment full of people and two local businesses(one of which my mother worked at and my art was in). Everyone got out safely, which is the important thing but I’m still bitter about it.

ANYWAY,

I’m still pretty happy with how they turned out and the show itself was great! There’s pictures and maybe some videos floating around online, if you want to see more stuff from the event. It was titled Of Reverie and it was in the Fritzi Gallery in Ottawa.

(I posted these a while ago but the image quality was terrible so here’s fixed up versions)

Links to the pieces here on my Redbubble shop: 1(Ghosting) , 2(Secrets) , 3(The Gift) , 4(Poster of a Girl) , 5(Forever the Same) , 6(For Tomorrow) , 7(Roll With It) , 8(Time) , 9(Decades) , 10(Ink Suit) , 11(Everything Speaks) ,  12(Sheryl)

"I'm not for reform. I'm not for making classrooms nicer or prisons nicer. I'm looking at the systemic issues that caused them. And I'm looking at the ways that the people that are trapped inside those systems can get free."

Richards said she thinks people of colour need to build something new so that the old norm can become obsolete.

"When adults have embraced their position as shaper-of-child, they take for granted that they have the right to criticize at will: to correct, to lecture, to direct, and to inspect. It never occurs to them, just as it never occurs to the people who email me about typos, that their shouldering of authority might not be welcome, and that it is up to the individual they’re attempting to act upon to decide whether or not they want feedback.