The Future of Education
Lockdown Learning
Our lockdown learning journey has come to an end with our final episode of our podcast this week, we hope that you’ve enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed making it. We’d like to also say thank you to all our wonderful guests that have given us their time and shared their thoughts with us over the last few months, we couldn’t have done it without you. For our final episode we wanted to look to the future. What will our education systems look like in a post COVID-19 world? As we all rush to get back to ‘normal’ as lockdown measures are eased, many people...
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What special needs tell us about schools
Lockdown Learning
As alternative educational settings we often hear from parents of children struggling with the mainstream approach to learning. Children who need to move more than the school day allows for, find it hard to focus on work they aren’t interested in or simply learn in different ways than their peers. It’s not surprising that parents look elsewhere for something that suits their child. But yet we can’t help but think that something must be deeply wrong for so many children to find it so hard to thrive in our school system. And that’s the topic of our podcast this week as...
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Play, play and more play
Lockdown Learning
“Play is really the work of children, play is how they understand the world and how they become adults. The importance of play cannot be overstated” remarked Larry Welshon in last week’s episode about Democratic Education. In Lockdown our children have had more time to get bored and figure out how to spend their time than ever before, and hopefully they’ve spent a large part of it playing. This week we dive deeper into the topic of play with Henry Readhead, Deputy Head at Summerhill School, the oldest children’s democracy in the world. Children at...
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Democratic Education: The Power of a Vote
Lockdown Learning
If, like Alex O’Neill who we spoke to in , lockdown has caused to you to pause and reconsider what learning looks like for your children you might be wondering what your options are. We’ve talked a lot about home education in this series - as that’s what we’ve all kind of been thrown into - but home education is just one alternative available. This week we delve deeper into one of the alternative school models available - Democratic Education - we asked founders of the schools hosting this podcast Kezia Cantwell Wright and Larry Welshon about their journey to...
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Moving Forwards not Backwards
Lockdown Learning
Millions of children around the world will have had a completely different learning experience over the past 12 weeks. For many it will have been a difficult experience missing the company of their friends, unable to play outside and still others may have been living with the virus and helping to care for loved ones. But for many the break from school has been a relief, and has provided the opportunity, perhaps for the first time, to explore their own interests and learn at their own pace. As we heard from , there are so many ways to home educate and styles even vary within...
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Deschooling: The Art of Letting Go
Lockdown Learning
Finding yourself suddenly without the structure of school you are used to can be liberating for some and scary for others. We all remember the moment we realised we were leaving formal education behind and wondered “what now?” Learning to learn without school is a journey and children will all react to the experience differently, so will their parents. This week we talked to Je’anna Clements founder and staff member of a self-directed learning community in South Africa and asked her about this process of letting go and relearning often referred to as deschooling. ...
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From Teacher to Home Educator
Lockdown Learning
Becoming your child’s teacher overnight can be a daunting challenge, but as your child’s parent you know them better than anyone - you might just have all the qualifications you need after all. Many teachers decide when they have children of their own not to send them to school but to help them learn at home instead. This week we talk to two teachers that chose to leave the mainstream system and ask them how supporting a child at home is different to teaching in a school. If you’d like to know more about the playful life of an unschooler you can read Heidi’s blog...
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Mind the gap - How children learn at home
Lockdown Learning
Just how do children learn when not in a classroom? We all know what learning looks like in school - we’ve all been there it’s familiar to us. But not so many grew up home educated or in self-directed schools and the unknown makes us nervous. This week we were incredibly lucky to speak to Harriet Pattison, who has carried out extensive research into how children learn when not in traditional schools. What methods do parents use, what learning styles do children have? Do they all learn at the same pace? And what happens when schooling...
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Managing Mental Health & Wellbeing in Lockdown
Lockdown Learning
Stuck in the house - or maybe a tiny flat - together, day after day, week after week. Lockdown is starting to feel rather like groundhog day isn’t it. Add to that the anxiety created by a global pandemic and the pressures of working from home and home learning everyone’s mental health is struggling right now. We talked to Dr. Naomi Fisher, a clinical psychologist about what we can do to protect our children’s mental health and well being as well as our own.
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Home Education 101
Lockdown Learning
So, you’re suddenly homeschooling – what now?
info_outlineOur lockdown learning journey has come to an end with our final episode of our podcast this week, we hope that you’ve enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed making it. We’d like to also say thank you to all our wonderful guests that have given us their time and shared their thoughts with us over the last few months, we couldn’t have done it without you.
For our final episode we wanted to look to the future. What will our education systems look like in a post COVID-19 world? As we all rush to get back to ‘normal’ as lockdown measures are eased, many people are questioning what that normal should look like and many teachers, parents and children are voicing their desire to take this opportunity to change the way we learn for the better. We asked a wide variety of guests what they hoped that future had in store, we hope you enjoy hearing their dreams for the future of education.
Guests: (Alphabetical by surname)
Artemis D. Bear
Kezia Cantwell-Wright
Sophie Christophy
Je’anna Clements
Kate Coleman
Kimberley Cooper
Marc Gallivan
Derry Hannam
Christel Hartkamp-Bakker
Anna Hobbs
Harriet Pattison
Antoinette Reid
Heidi Steel
Danny Whitehouse
Find out more:
Our guests from this week’s episode are involved with a wide variety of wonderful projects, here’s a brief summary of each one and the links to find out more.
Artemis D. Bear is the founder of The Garden, a self-directed learning community in Bristol, UK, for Home Educated children.
Kezia Cantwell-Wright, Kate Coleman and Anna Hobbs are staff members at East Kent Sudbury School, a self-directed democratic setting for Home Educated children, aiming to become the UKs first Independent School based on the Sudbury model. They all write regularly on the EKSS blog.
Sophie Christophy is the CEO at The Phoenix Education Trust, a charity which supports both alternative learning spaces and mainstream education providers in providing learning programmes which support student’s voice. Amongst other things, Phoenix prepared an education strategy pack to help school leaders through the COVID-19 pandemic. Sophie also co-founded and works at the self-directed consent based setting The Cabin and regularly writes and about and runs workshops on consent based education and parenting, see her blog.
Je’anna Clements is the founder of Riverstone Village a self-directed learning community in South Africa, children’s rights campaigner and writes about self-directed education.
Kimberley Cooper is the founder of education consultancy Holistic Learning and a teacher at King Alfred School, London.
Marc Gallivan, as well as being the co-host of The Lockdown Learning Podcast is a staff member at Sudbury model school Alpine Valley School in Colorado, USA.
Derry Hannam is a retired deputy head teacher who consistently worked to bring democratic practices into the mainstream, which he has documented in his recent book ‘Becoming a Democratic Teacher in a State School’. He has also worked as a school inspector and advisor to the government on citizenship in schools, writing the Hannam Report.
Christel Hartkamp-Bakker has founded and worked as part of the staff team at several democratic schools in The Netherlands, most recently SudburySchool Harderwijk, she also have the recent TEDx talk ‘Can we trust children to educate themselves?’
Dr. Harriet Pattison is a senior lecturer in Early Childhood Education and researcher at Liverpool Hope University. She is the author of Rethinking Learning to Read and co-author of How children learn at home. You can also read her recent research here.
Antoinette Reid is an unschooling parent, her daughter attends EKSS part-time, you can follow her on Twitter @Antoinette_R_.
Heidi Steel is a former teacher, now unschooling parent, she writes about unschooling, learning and play on her blog Live, Play, Learn.
Danny Whitehouse Chief Executive at the Charles Burrell Centre, guardian member and company secretary of The Phoenix Education Trust and co-founder of Reimagining Education Norfolk.
Contact the show at [email protected]