Starting From Scratch

Starting from Scratch

When the goal is to provide an entirely fresh experience of learning, with the ambition of unleashing learner curiosity, facilitating stronger learner agency and enabling discovery, then the challenge is to effectively start from scratch again.

Learnlife has tackled this challenge in a variety of ways – and sharing those now might help others look differently at their own context. During its journey toward growing resilient lifelong learning capabilities in learners, the team has considered different ways of approaching curriculum, content and experiences, in order to maximise the wider goals. Those goals also include an outcome where people flourish and thrive into the future, while creating a noticeably positive impact upon their communities and perhaps even in a more global context.

The Paradigm Shift

There is a wider vision driving all thinking connected to creating new ways of viewing schedules and cycles. Inspired by the concepts of heutagogy, the personal learning mindset has helped direct all planning. Every learner will be at different stages on a journey toward growing strong self-determined learning capacity – essential for becoming proficient lifelong learners. Every learner is also likely to be at different stages of self-direction based on their strengths in different areas of learning and their own experiences.

Figure 1 – the wider paradigm

Figure 1 captures this flow from being recipients of content to becoming capable self-determined learners. Terms such as personalised learning are commonly used in relation to learning programmes becoming more student-centred. Learnlife views this as a great step in the right direction, but recognises that personalised learning typically involves a teacher or computer programme selecting the learning experiences for the learner. A personal learning mindset, as a wider goal, aims to enable stronger learner agency and self-awareness as learners, and the ability to generate their own learning pathway, now and into their future.  

Risk and Vision – perfect pairing

The risk is to approach new ways of experiencing learning that are sufficiently removed from traditional or industrial modes of thinking, so as to minimise reversionary tendencies. It is all too easy to simply shuffle the deckchairs rather than take a more iterative future-focused and fresh approach.

To do this, the vision for what might be needs to be bold, loud and accessible. The process of collective envisioning needs to produce a guiding statement, itself instantly understandable and owned by the community. These statements will become the north star guiding actions and choices moving forward. A team approach that ultimately involves learners as the co-creators of their experiences can spark fresh thinking and ideas that were perhaps never first imagined. The process creates a life of its own with continual iterations and improvements moving forward. It is a living vision.

What did we do at Learnlife?  

Initial thinking commenced for younger adolescents participating in the Urban programme in central Barcelona.

Figure 2 Starting Points

The starting point was to consider what did we want to include in a weekly programme. Core to our thinking was the need to grow a community which was very clearly founded on a shared positive experience of relationships. Maslow before Bloom thinking. So, CONNECT became part of every day and week – the first foundational building block. Connecting with self, connecting with others, Connecting with our own bodies.

The Urban programme is set up as a studio-based learning programme. CREATE came next. We wanted the learners to spend a major part of every day in different studios as a way of expanding their horizons and allowing passion to drive them forward.

Blessed with a thriving, creative and energetic urban environment right at the doorstep, DISCOVER became another initial piece of the puzzle. We visioned learning experiences occurring anywhere, everywhere throughout the accessible and surrounding communities, museums, workplaces and start up studios. As a starting point, one day a week was set aside for this. This engagement with the wider Barcelona communities, culture - and challenges, provided an authentic, organic pathway into transdisciplinary thinking.

The first learner-imagined component arose as part of the DISCOVER building block. As learners grew their love of learning, they started to suggest short term workshops that they might lead. Workshops such as those to learn basic Russian, to better understand the physics of skateboarding or the nuances of Catalan cuisine, emerged from the learners themselves. Learner-led discovery. Exactly what we had hoped for – but arising from an evident new joy in learning.

Mindful that there is an existing body of knowledge that can provide a launch pad for applied thinking, EXTEND became part of the weekly schedules. Learners displayed a wide range of understanding and competence with regard to their literacy and numeracy skills, so the Core Concepts Lab (CCLs) workshops were added into the equation. Mindful that the wider vision was for highly personal learning programmes, these CCLs were tailored to the variety of presenting needs. In time, thinking scientifically was included as a further building block.

Learners presented with a number of different language experiences. Most learners could confidently speak two or three different languages. The concept of ‘heart language’ developed. Learners could output in the language that best expressed their emotions. Further EXTEND workshops were created for those who wanted to learn or strengthen a different language.

The final component of the initial model for scheduling learning experiences each week involved learning arising from the reflection process. REFLECT became an essential component of all learning. It also formed a specific way to conclude a cycle of learning. Learners reflected on all their learning in a 360 meeting. These meetings involve a learner finding creative ways of presenting their learning from the current cycle to a selected audience, typically including some peers, a Learning Guide and a parent or guardian. A 360 assessment ends with the small audience providing tips and tops. Tips for further directions in their learning, tops as a way of celebrating the learning.

We’ve Only Just Begun

This post has attempted to capture the starting point of thinking for the learning schedules and wider cycles of the Learnlife Urban programme in Barcelona. With every new week, every new learner and every new Learning Guide, the process is continually enriched with fresh thinking and constant improvements. The team – and indeed the whole community – has embraced a fail forward  mindset, one that views all experiences as being highly valid in growth as lifelong learners. As so often happens on an adventure, it is the unexpected pathways and spontaneous side-tracks that have led to some of the best learning experiences – and the gradual development of a learning ecosystem that no longer thinks of itself as a school with students – rather learners constantly seeking to grow themselves, their community and make a positive impact on the wider world.