From the Freedom to Learn Forum 2024

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A session at the freedom to learn forum 2024: is sde a cult?

The Freedom to Learn Forum took place for the 5th time last August. Folks engaged in Self Directed Education - in a huge range of contexts and capacities - gathered at East Kent Sudbury’s expansive site to co-create three full days of Unconference (click through for the excellent explainer of unconference and open space technology!). 

If you are interested in spending time with others who are seeking or working for freedom in education, then if you possibly can, take up the invitation to ‘ weave together this year's forum using our gifts, a culture of reciprocity, and the co-created magic’ an join the Forum this year, at a beautiful site in the Peak District from 28  August to 1st September. Think about what you want from the space, and come prepared to engage in ways that are aligned with your energy and needs. If you want to hang out and play, craft, chat, sleep, sing, talk, write, organise, imagine, reflect, plan for the year ahead … all of these are welcome, and it’s for you to attend to your needs and wants and meet them, individually and collectively, while you are there! The Open Space technology is a flexible and enabling tool - which can be navigated in so many different ways…

Each Forum is shaped by people attending with their whole selves, and intentions, interests and curiosities come together in a unique way, only to be experienced and never to be repeated. In 2024 I had a sense of each person  leaving with fresh or crystalised ideas and directions - seeds of potentialities to grow in the soil of our own localised - and interconnected - contexts.

The 2024 Forum gave me a huge impetus for reflection on my role in the wider landscape of education, and energy and inspiration to bring to The Garden as the project and my role within it went through significant change. These concrete actions are a snapshot from the week after the 2024 Forum.

Concrete actions:

Peer support through the year

Over the past two years I have sporadically attended regular online calls. Meeting on the Sunday, a number of people volunteered to help hold these and we explored how to make the most of them. My goal is to attend more often than not: at least 7 calls over the coming 12 months. 

One intention I brought to the Forum was to explore peer supervision models to support reflective practice. A number of us at The Forum agreed to set up a peer support whatsapp group. I will revisit the models that I have previously experienced and enjoyed and research others to share with the group, and I shared the intention with a friend to set up a nucleus of ideally 4-6 people, with the possibility to meet as pairs or threes in a format that is agreed to be mutually supportive. 

Visits between settings. 

Meeting others with shared values and similar contexts, it's possible to unpick the similarities and differences in our responses to situations that stem from universal dynamics but manifest in diverse ways. It’s hard to explain what we do -in theory and practice- without firsthand observatipn as part of the process. I'd like to clarify our invitation to visitors in an extended network of reciprocity - to figure out with the young people what welcome we can provide in a way that’s aligned with our whole community’s needs.  For myself, I hope to make visits to 2 settings I haven't visited before.

Writing to share and develop my thought

I’m writing this now! 

I want to dedicate time to writing on a season by season basis, with regular times for generating ideas, free writing, researching and editing to shareable forms.

Deschooling

Holding the many different lived experiences of deschooling I came into contact with will hold me to supporting this process with care, awareness and openness - in myself and others.

Site and resource inspiration

EKS has an expansive site that enables resource access far beyond the scope of The Garden’s site. However, we have got potential to optimise our set up within our contraints - and we also have the resources of the city of Bristol to access. I want to draw on others’ experiences to boost generating ideas of how we can maximise our use of sites and resources. It's an imagination and systems challenge as well as a practical one!

Neuroinclusive practice

Attending sessions on neurodiversity affirmed the knowledge, understanding and good practice I already have - and also the space for learning and applying others’ insights to creative problem solving. I’ve signed up for the October cohort of Spectrum Gaming’s 6 week Autism Acceptance course to access collective learning to boost this strand.

Bess Spencer-Vellacott

Director & Mentor at The Garden

Why three days?

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The Garden has always been and intends to remain a three day commitment. This post explains why this isn’t an accident but a carefully considered choice.

Sometimes people ask us when we will move to five days but this is easy to answer: never! The five day week is part of the web of problems we’re trying to address (but that’s another post!) and also legally it isn’t possible to do this without becoming a school. If we were to become a school, we wouldn’t be able to operate under our ethos.

We’ve often also been asked to consider one or two day places but three is our minimum for some very good reasons.

The Garden grew out of a great love and respect for the home education community in Bristol, though there were aspects I struggled with. While there were and are a great many activities for learning and socialising that it wouldn’t have been possible to do anywhere near all of them, it felt more transient than I had hoped. The reliance on a car bothered me and the approach to conflict even more so. The sheer volume of home education choice in our city provided ample opportunities to avoid people if there had been a disagreement.

When we were starting out, The Garden was lucky to receive some wisdom from lifelong democratic educator Albert Lamb, who at that time was working at the now defunct A Place To Grow in Stroud, which was a huge inspiration to us. Albert told us that, in his experience, three consecutive days was the minimum to feel like a community and to get stuck into ongoing projects. Any fewer became more like a drop in activity or social and the level of commitment dropped off significantly.

Though I was initially skeptical of this, over the last eight years I have seen what happens when anyone isn’t able to join consistently for the full three days. They aren’t able to get into the flow of projects as everyone else is and collaboration tends to be minimal for practical reasons.

They also appear somewhat removed and apart from the rest of the group as discussions move on in their absence. Issues are much more likely to go unaddressed, partly because there’s less time for a process but also because more space in between allows people to paint over the cracks and pretend everything is fine.

I wanted to create a space where young people could collaborate on in-depth, ongoing, interest-led projects and truly build and maintain community. Where they couldn’t simply avoid the difficult conversations but learn to brave them and develop the skills for great relationships.

Artemis D Bear

Founder and director of The Garden

What do you think is important?

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There’s a common misconception with self-directed or autonomous learning, that if people are not just permitted but facilitated in their desires that the outcome is inevitably selfish, indulgent and hedonistic. This is understandable but misguided.

To illustrate, my family had tickets to go pumpkin picking today. Halloween is a special celebration for us and we were all very much looking forward to it. However we’ve decided as a family to go on a protest march instead. Not because it’s what we’d prefer to do but because we think it’s more important.

We are social creatures. We are animals with the capacity for complex moral thinking. We are not asking young people what they want. We are asking them what they think is important.

New Spaces New Faces

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We are looking forward to the upcoming year in The Garden starting next week and the prospect of two new indoor spaces being installed this month. We will be having two new landpods which will increase our indoor space, giving us multiple spaces to work with the young people on different projects and the young people more freedom to move between and explore different dynamics. Our experience from our Bristol Learning Community pilot demonstrated the need for having more indoor spaces, in which we can allow our young people to move into, to undertake more focused activities or socialise in small groups.

So, as we think about coming back and new spaces we are also thinking about new faces. We still have spaces at The Garden from September and if you are interested in coming then please feel free to reach out to us and arrange a visit or trial day. Also, after running our Bristol Learning Community pilot for the whole of last year we are pausing our new intake for one season. We will then be starting up again after half term in early November, with our new spaces available to use. This will give interested young people opportunities to visit the space during the next six week season. We’ll be sharing more detail soon on the Bristol Learning Community’s more structured learning programme based on self-managed learning for ages 10+ so watch this space!


Tim Rutherford and Bess Spencer-Vellacott, mentors at The Garden

What is Agile Learning?

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The Garden is now part of the Agile Learning Center Network, which is an international community of educators committed to self directed education fit for the 21st century.

We’ve actually been using Agile style methods for a while now, experiencing a sort of convergent evolution by trial and error. What this looks like for us at the moment, thanks to mentor Tim, is using a rather fitting gardening analogy for project planning and tracking.

Seeds are new project ideas, which become Sproutlings once we have had a meeting about them, progressing to Growing as soon as work has begun and finally Blooming when completed. Credit to mentor Bess for the brilliant addition of the Compost section, for ideas that we aren’t currently working on but might revive or inspire future ideas.

The garden mega board

Our lovely illustrated post it notes can be moved around the board and in and out of the weekly timetable, giving a visual reminder of what we’re working on and what stage we’re at with it.

Once a week on a Tuesday we hold a Projects Planting meeting where all the mentors are available to discuss new and ongoing projects, as well as review completed or abandoned ones. The meeting is optional but tends to be well-attended, as this is a great opportunity to develop ideas into projects and collaborate with others in bringing them to fruition.

We’re really excited about the possibilities of being part of this huge network of likeminded folk all over the world and to share what we learn with the young people at The Garden.

If you’d like to find out more about Agile Learning Centers in practice, check out the Holding Unfolding podcast, as recommended to us by the wonderful Adele Jarrett-Kerr from Soulcraft Learning Community.

Artemis D. Bear, founder of The Garden

The shift to a systems thinking paradigm

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Marshmallow toasting when you can’t have an open fire

Marshmallow toasting when you can’t have an open fire

I’ve had this pet theory for about fifteen years now. I think we’re moving from a reductionist paradigm, which has been dominant since the enlightenment, to a systems thinking paradigm.

Reductionism is the attempt to understand the world by breaking everything down into its constituent parts to see how it works, applying simple cause and effect to explain observed phenomena. In systems thinking, the world is a complex system, with many interrelated objects, interacting with each other to produce chaotic looking outcomes. In simplest terms, under a systems thinking worldview the relationships between things are more important than the things themselves.

If you’re looking for evidence of this paradigm shift, you can find it everywhere, in all areas of human thought and activity. Permaculture is systems thinking for horticulture, artificial intelligence is systems thinking for electronic engineering, environmental behaviour change relies on systems thinking, and there’s a whole area of business theory that’s even called systems thinking.

In an ideal world education and learning would return to being emergent from culture in the way it has been for the vast majority of human history. Young people would all learn from being a part of society and not segregated from it, especially in the form of hierarchical and authoritarian institutions. However, with capitalism being the dominant culture, this isn’t possible for most at the moment.

At The Garden we try to recreate this organic process as best we can by focussing on relationships rather than outcomes. I often say to prospective families that even if they never learned anything else at The Garden (which of course they do), if young people moved on from our learning community with only emotional security and good social skills they’d always do well for themselves.

As anyone who works on something of social benefit should feel, I look forward to the day when the paradigm shift is complete and projects like The Garden are no longer needed but until then we will maintain our pocket of utopian culture, where relationships are the bedrock on which everything else is built.

Artemis D. Bear, founder of The Garden

A fork in the road

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Today we found ourselves at a fork in the road. It just appeared and then we had to decide what to do with it. This particular fork had a purple handle, which is curious for any fork but especially a fork in the road. It had also been outlined in rainbow chalk, with an arrow drawing attention to its inexplicable existence.

One of my favourite sayings (borrowed from somewhere forgotten) is that language is a poor form of communication, which is absolutely true but it also provides so much opportunity for playfulness and joy. Two of our favourite things.

When people try to make the argument that children will miss out on something terribly important if they don’t go to school, I can’t help but think of everything they miss out on if they do. We didn’t teach anyone about fronted adverbials at The Garden today but I’d bet you any money in the world that we discussed a broader range of topics than any school did, all the while following our interests and passions.

But what about depth you say? I challenge anyone to spend a few minutes speaking with our resident thirteen year old geologist, whose knowledge would likely put most geology undergraduates to shame. Or listen to a spooky, atmospheric tale told by our tiny storyteller and claim that it would be improved by the addition of an arbitrary quantity of prepositions.

Forks in the road are a part of life. We always choose joy.

Artemis D. Bear, founder of The Garden

Wild Learning

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We’ve just finished our first season of Wild Maths, which is experiential, interest-led and needs-based maths sessions in our beautiful wild space. We celebrated the end of the course with mobius bagels and Sierpinski cookies and now we’re planning and looking forward to the next season of maths fun at The Garden.

Off the back of the storming success of Wild Maths, we’ll soon be launching a full programme of Wild Learning, including Wild Writing, Wild Science, Wild Arts and Wild Thinking. More information coming soon!

ARTEMIS AND TIM CELEBRATE THE LAST SESSION OF OUR FIRST SEASON OF WILD MATHS

ARTEMIS AND TIM CELEBRATE THE LAST SESSION OF OUR FIRST SEASON OF WILD MATHS