Why three days?

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?

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

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?

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

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

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

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

Why self directed education and basic income need each other

My mum always told me that if you want something done you should ask a busy person to do it, which was confusing to me as a child but I now realise exactly what she meant. I work, probably too much, on a lot of different projects but they all have a common thread of freedom and social justice.

In addition to my work in education, I’m the co-founder of UBI Lab Bristol, which is part of the UBI Lab Network. We’re campaigning for a universal basic income (UBI) trial in our city because we believe it will contribute to a fairer and more equitable society. A study from last year showed that a UBI costing less than the current benefits system could eliminate absolute poverty in the UK.

Personally, I also think UBI is inevitable. Automation is coming and will do away with a huge number of jobs. We need to find a better way to redistribute resources. Someone in the UBI Lab Network told me that he thinks the potential mental health crisis from this changing relationship with work is one of the greatest challenges of our movement because he worries that people won’t know what to do with their lives without full time employment. If I didn’t agree before the mass confessions of boredom during lockdown I certainly do now.

Self directed education creates motivated, lifelong learners, who have the inner resources to construct their own meaningful lives based on their own values, interests and aptitudes. Young people who learn in this way don’t need the rails of a standardised education system, followed by a standardised working life. The don’t tend to go into the “bullshit jobs” that create environmental destruction, societal harm and psychological distress. If you’re interested in finding out more about why this is I’d recommend the book Drive by Daniel H. Pink.

On the other hand, many families (more than ever since the pandemic began) would love to give their children a different experience from the outdated and unevidenced factory model of schooling that has come clearly into view during the lockdown periods. This isn’t possible for a huge number due to financial constraints. A UBI would facilitate the kind of 21st century learning that all young people could thrive with.

A recent trial from Finland showed that not only did a basic income improve financial and mental wellbeing, it also increased employment. This doesn’t surprise me at all. People want to live meaningful lives and they are willing to work hard to create that, given the opportunity to do so. Most of my work is unpaid and as a result my income is low. I could absolutely get more or better paid work but would far rather earn less and work on projects I wholeheartedly believe in and hope will make the world a better place. I don’t think I’m unusual in this but I do think I have had the privilege to make this a reality and I think everyone deserves that.

Artemis D. Bear, Founder of The Garden

The Hole

The toad in tHe hole

Today was our first day in the actual, real, physical space of The Garden since mid December and it was glorious; a day of industrious high energy and big feelings. All welcome of course.

One of the highlights was finding this toad in The Hole, which was charming in the way that it always is to encounter wildlife, but right now I’m really interested in talking about The Hole.

The Hole is just that; a hole, in an area of The Garden that was once called The Fortress but has been diplomatically renamed as The Clearing. It started as a small hole and has gradually, over time, become quite a significant one.

There’s no explicit learning objective here; no ultimate plan, at least as far as I can tell. Just a person who wanted to dig a hole and others who liked the idea and wanted to join in.

I could wax lyrical about all the amazing skills and capacities that are being developed by the work on The Hole, perhaps collaboration, motor skills, tool use and safety, strength, judgement, conflict management (ahem).

The reality is that all these are just guesses. I have absolutely no idea what the young people are really getting from this endeavour and, to be frank, it’s really none of my business.

Being a facilitator of autonomous education requires trust and that trust must come from a fundamental faith in humanity. Young people know what they need. If nothing else, those young people will remember the time they wanted to dig a hole and the adults simply said “Ok, do you need anything from us to make that happen?”

Artemis D. Bear, Founder of The Garden

Autumn & Winter News

This past few months at The Garden has seen some big changes. New people of all ages have joined the community, and others have left to move on to new opportunities and challenges. In July we said a sad ‘goodbye and come back soon’ to our learning mentors Amy and Rosena. This was a big step with big feelings for everyone involved and we all looked ahead with excitement and some trepidation to see what moving on would look like. We’ve been lucky enough to keep Amy (who’s been a part of The Garden since it was just a glint in some idealistic eyes) as a vision holder, and she’s always on hand for us to bounce ideas off and to give us the benefit of her experience.

Bon and Lucia joined The Garden in September as the new mentors, as did lots of new children. Together with the experienced community members we began the process of settling in and getting to know one another.

Spending your days in a community is not always easy. Giving genuine time and space to everyone’s needs (including your own) equally can feel strange when you’re not used to it. It takes time for people to realise they don’t have to fight to be heard; or that there’s always a place for them; or that their feelings are valid and important - even when they’re not pretty. Its very comforting to know that, whatever your process is, its accepted.

Day to day, the running of The Garden hasn’t changed too much. Each member is equal, with equal rights to, put forward ideas, be heard and make decisions. We start every day with a meeting to share our needs and feelings and do any planning for the day. Community members often use this as an opportunity to propose games or activities, locate any resources they need and check things like wood supplies.

Our Autumn, especially in the run up to Christmas/Yule, was been quite focused on performing. Our stage (painted rainbow for the arts trail event) needed to be timetabled so that all the various performance groups had a chance to practice! The people who came to our end of year celebration got a tiny taste of what some of us have been working on.

Dungeons and Dragons has also been a popular feature recently. You’d be amazed the different skills involved in creating a D&D character, let alone writing and running a campaign! Everyone involved has been tested to the limit, and we’ve learned a lot about resilience and the need to take breaks (and what ‘a break’ actually is).

During our last meeting before the Christmas break we looked back over this last year with gratitude for what we have, what we’ve made and for one another.  And we looked forward into 2019 with thoughtful optimism and hope for the seeds we’ve planted together.