SOL: DESIGNING SCHOOLS THAT LOVE
←back to index2019; with School of Love
Workshops and presentations in the context of We Love you program @Beursschouwburg, Brussels (BE)
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<3<3<3 Observations from within, written by a participant as personal notes
* The beating heart of each School that Loves is the setting up of a curriculum that has "the lust to learn" as its core value.
* Schools that Love move around the desire to learn rather than attempting a progress towards a predefined set of learning outcomes. They do so by organising "classes" as moments of deep hanging out. Those are learning paths rather than trajectories, they lead nowhere else(?) than everything that shows up on the road itself.
* Schools that love however, use pre-specified subjects to establish a common focus during those deep hanging out-sessions.
* Also those sessions are structured around a set of methodologies from different domains of (scientific) research. Offering an outline for an inter(?)personal and -professional matrix, each of these methods are appropriated according to the specific needs of the studied subject. This appropriation happens both in the preliminary stage and during the actual sessions. The adaptations are open to all partakers, as “deep hanging” means/establishes situated agency for all. The only condition is the recognition and respect (presevation?) of the common focus that is needed to keep the session alive. This means that distraction and detour are default and encouraged, but also that all partakers are sharing the responsibility to keep up with "the lust to learn". (This can also imply conflict, moments of rest/naps, ...)
* Since, while deeply hanging out, time often seems to have different intervals to the ones practiced by society, each session entitles one person with the role of timekeeper. The timekeeper keeps track of the program and makes notice when the session is running out of time. The choice is then offered to either change direction according to the program, or to continue with whatever is happening at that specific moment.
* Concerning the decision-making processes, a School that Loves has a specific way of dealing with hierarchy. As there are no fixed positions, roles are statuses that are being mutualised in between all. Unlearning is embraced as an inherent and fundamental part of learning*. And notions such as "student" and "teacher" are mutually (but not necessarily simultaneously) carried out by each participant.
* Schools that Love provide snacks, just as a crucial equivalent of the role of timekeeper, since the body as biological clock offers(implies?) yet another time frame to keep track of.
* Ideally a session closes with reflecting on what happened. Embodying the digestion process can also be organised by sharing food together :). This moment entails decisions on what will happen next. If not yet scheduled, a date for a new session is set. Proposals for methodologies are welcomed. Any assignments? Schools that Loves offer the option to take school with you. As they are nomadic situations, homework is not existing.
* Schools that Love are a precondition that can move in many directions but that ultimately is about a state of mind that fuels the lust for life...
* learning might need to be changed with another word???
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How to design and how to be a school that loves?
Rethinking and designing new school formats while reflecting on love as a pedagogical and political attitude is a recurrent SOL activity. In this worksession, we dived once more into the same practice of designing schools, but this time with a specific emphasis on designing a school that doesn’t only include love in it’s curriculum, but is also structurally and systematically based on love. In simpler words - we asked ourselves how to design an institution that loves. We aimed to implement in real time the ideas developed during the workshop, so that the process itself becomes a school that loves. We speculate on what a school that loves would require as a structure, an architecture, a system, a community, an institution embedded in current or fantastic societies.
The way of being together during the workshop included methodologies that allowed personal stories to be told and be treated as knowledge, in an environment directed to the participants’ needs and to who they are. The notion of situated agency was a key aspect in our investigation - how can agency be given in relation to the subjective situation of each person, so that the person knows how and feels safe to activate it? We enjoyed inventing some ‘methodological distractions’ by letting what comes spontaneously in the process to take us away from initial plans, trusting that any deviation is there because it belongs to the process and the people in it. Exhaustion - mental or physical, was not pushed aside, but cared for by creating an intimate zone where each of us could enter and exit different modes of engagement.
Moving, thinking, talking, eating, cooking, complaining, articulating, napping -collectively or solo-, writing, confessing, unlearning, letting time unfold, watching time unfold, spacing out, collapsing, being playful or silent together, entering conflicts, reflecting on conflicts, enjoying each other despite the conflicts, failing to be efficient, efficiently failing, producing, resisting production, practicing positionality, working hard, criticizing work…. Could this be a summary of what was going on during the workshop? Probably, at least through the shared terminology that we developed, for us it is.
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