Relationships are the heart of learning

Understanding our relationship to ourselves, each other and the content and systems we live within is key to achieving well-being in the future.

Relationships are the core of learning. When we understand that ongoing connections to ourselves, to others, to content to inquiry -- with their confusions, tensions, breaks, and healings-- are the core of developing richer selves and societies, it’s easier to keep our focus on what matters and what’s peripheral.

Tests are peripheral.

Finding passions and pursuing them is core.

Loving ourselves (self-care) and seeing our interdependence and the co-value of everything/every being is core.

Relationship to methods of inquiry

Learning is explorational, experiential, and synthetic. Learning accrues through these things -- finding and refining questions of importance to us, finding and carrying out ways to investigate these questions, to pursue them in depth with curiosity, collectively, through external and internal resources. Inquiry involves pushing at the edges of things -- of transgression (crossing and breaking boundaries, taking risks), the inevitability of error, and of learning from errors (as opportunities for new information, questions, and possibilities).

The model of learning in schools at all levels has to center on inquiry (our naturally-given approach to learning) -- all that accrues to be synthesized accumulates through that inquiry, through sharing and critiquing it in ongoing ways with others, and through moving on with it. (Arts model this method.) Depth broadens as well as deepens. We need to find ways to access a plethora of ideas and organize them so we can hold onto them and build in and around them -- and then use the structures to find new questions and new inquiries.

Relationship to politics, curriculum, and content

From local to international, education is a political act. We who care about how politics impact learning have to think about education from policy angles, even when our bent is to think from individual, personal, and relational perspectives. Education is everyone’s responsibility. All experts and professionals have an investment in children.

But what is our relationship with children? What do we learn from children and youth? How do we create a culture of listening and trust, and interdependence: a culture that truly values and learns from difference? What do we do about power differentials, authority, and mandates? How do we become better together?

What do we draw from to determine what we do in the classroom? The children’s interests? What’s outside the classroom? Media? Families? Trends? Popular culture? Disciplines? Content? There’s “classical” content -- and much of that is good. But there’s also non-dominant and contemporary content -- and that’s essential for engagement and immediate utility. Generative topics can balance the important with the engaging.

How do we decide what to DO? How do we DO something? How do we know what we do is what we need to?

So much of our history has been veiled and hidden in schools, and bringing it to the fore is critical to healing the rifts in our understanding and in our society. How does racism impact everything the US is, who we’ve been, how we’ve become, and how we’re becoming? What does it have to do with Whiteness -- and Whiteness with it? With BIPOC cultures and peoples? With justice and equity? How do schools contribute to the development of anti-racist peoples and societies? And what is the role of arts and interdisciplinarity and relationships in all that?

This begs the consideration of our relationship to security and change. How do we teach the inevitability of change and the response to it, countering the many ways we build paper walls and bridges that cannot hold in the face of it? Issues of false authority, power, information/propaganda, characterizations, othering -- all propel our fear of change and difference. This leads to oppression, bigotry, cruelty, greed, and othering. How do we identify and turn together rather than away?

Relationship to love

We’ve been ashamed of love as weak and infantile. But love is service, power, strength, motivation, hope, joy -- the reason behind everything, the ultimate goal

How do we use love as the core of all we do, from selecting content that matters, to healing relationships, to maintaining order, to finding valued inquiries we can share? How do we tie love to peace and to the value of life and living, together, on a planet we share and that asks so little of us, but without which we cannot exist?