Basis of an Agile Learning Center
When introducing Agile Learning Centers as a concept, this is often how I start:
Defining For Ourselves
It can be helpful to clarify some definitions and frameworks before starting to improvise together. Here are some words we’ll use a lot, and what we mean by them:
Education is the whole process by which one learns. This includes many kinds of experiencing, exploring, reflecting, integrating, applying, and changing.
“This is our work, to discover what we can give. Isn’t this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world?” Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
Self-Directed Education is a philosophy that advocates and practices an approach to education that, to complement Kimmerer’s definition and quote the Alliance for Self-Directed Education, “derives from the self-chosen activities and life experiences of the learner, whether or not those activities were chosen deliberately for the purpose of education.”
A facilitator is one whose presence opens space or creates ease, offering witness, non-judgement, non-attachment to outcomes, ease in not knowing, positive regard, safety, and generally conditions full of potential.
“Facilitating is about creating a space for people to do something, while teaching is about passing knowledge directly,” adrienne maree brown, Deem: Issue 1
Agile is an adjective meaning flexible and adaptable…but also a 2001 innovation in software development that we share principles with. Key principles from the Agile Manifesto that we share include welcoming change, working together, emergence, iteration, and this gem: “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.”
An Agile Learning Center (ALC) is an agile, self-organizing learning community maintaining active membership to the ALC Network and operating in accordance with our philosophical roots and principles.
The main agreements were and are to be respectful of people, mindful of their time, and intentional about how you engage. We are responsible for supporting each other, self-organizing to turn ideas into actions, and holding each other accountable. We practice facilitating from ALC roots/principles, committing to trust-building, caring without controlling, and contributing to a culture of generosity…generally working to show up in our relationships in ways that facilitate well-being and growth. We honor agreements set within our homebase ALCs and at the network level. Among us, we develop new agreements as we need to, through conversation and consensus. Read more of our Ecosystem Charter here.
The Agile Tree
The Soil // Trust
We often use the metaphor of a tree to illustrate our educational model. Some parts, the “roots” and the “trunk,” are essential ideas about learning which inform the practices of all successful ALCs, while others, the “leaves” and “fruit,” are flexible and may vary between communities. All metaphors are imperfect, but one of the reasons we settled on and stuck with the tree is that it occurred to us in the early days that, just as a tree’s roots can only hold it up thanks to immersion in something living and larger than themselves, the philosophical basis that forms the “roots” of our “tree” holds by touching a quality larger than itself. Our metaphor then, appropriately, starts with this relationship: we root our centers and our practices in trust.
The fundamental difference between ALCs and contemporary mass schooling environments comes down to the question of who we trust to decide what someone needs in their pursuit of a fully lived and satisfying life. Other questions tumble out of this one easily — what is the purpose of education, whose lives and desires are valued in a given system (and whose aren’t), how are we responsible to each other — but who we believe someone’s days and dreams should belong to shapes our answers to these and all the other questions that follow.
Schooling at large involves adults — often following mandates from other adults, following mandates from other adults — sorting young people using biased assessments, imposing standardized and standardizing treatment on those in each track along with judgements about who is or isn’t deemed worth investing energy in. These adults dictate when curiosity is to be performed and when it’s “disruptive” or “distracting,” make sure it’s clear to all that working together is “cheating,” and narrowly define intelligence and success in ways that limit young people’s dreams unless they resist. Math is what the curriculum says only, and it belongs in the prescribed time, place, and manner. Reading, like dish-washing, is a necessary chore to be endured, and writing must always conform with the class rubric to be “good.” Each test is the test, necessary and life-defining. After all, if we don’t process complex people with intellects, bodies, hearts, and histories into algorithm-friendly sets of scores, how will we be able to tell them who they are and what kind of usefulness they should aspire to?
Even if some preserve their wholeness or even find ways to flourish within such an ableist, alienating, and oppression-reproducing system, we dream an alternative that is liberating for all kids and contributes to a more just world. Folks have been dreaming of and working to realize alternatives for as long as schooling has existed; we’re new-er, and continuing a long-established tradition. There’s a rich history of resistance to schools dehumanizing children and reinforcing social inequity. There’s also a long history of communities outright rejecting the idea that education and childcare ought to be entrusted to institutions, particularly those organized by non-community members to serve their own agendas. Most contributors to this kit are located in the places where Black and Indigenous folks have spent hundreds of years finding ways to survive in spite of the efforts of such institutions. In these and other communities industrial institutions have historically offered mostly neglect and violence to, folks with their own expertise in collective care and knowledge sharing traditions have often understood mandated schools as places that expose their young people to harm. Many have and do continue self-organizing around community needs instead. Sometimes they call youth and education projects “schools,” and sometimes they don’t, much like how some ALCs organize as “schools” and some don’t, based on what best serves community needs.
Agile Learning Centers share a lineage with these formal and informal community projects that trust kids, trust people, to discern for themselves who they are, what they need to learn, and which choices will contribute to their sense of having a meaningful life. We trust their self-determination and curiosity. We trust their varied ways of knowing are valid, and their interdisciplinary interests add richness to our shared worlds. We trust that offering supportive relationships and safe places for play and exploration serves young people better than spending their childhoods on coercion and test-training ever could.
The Roots // Foundations
In the soil of trust, the Agile Tree has four main roots that are the underlying assumptions of our educational model. These roots are the foundation all other aspects of an ALC follow from:
1.Learning: Learning is natural. It’s happening all the time. Babies gather information, exploring and experimenting as their development and environments allow. Playing, imagining, noticing, imitating…it’s all learning! Concerns about how to force people to learn something, as well as delusions that we can predict and dictate to them what content they’ll need to learn for the future, don’t actually serve learners. Accompaniment as they direct their attention, experiment with different study methods, and figure out who they are as a learner does.
2. Self-Direction: People learn best by making their own decisions, and children are people. Adults take for granted from experience that focusing on learning material is easier if we’re feeling emotionally and psychologically safe, fed, rested, and consenting to the time and place of the study session. Maybe we know we personally study better with earplugs in, music on, a pomodoro timer, or in parallel with a friend. We definitely know we’re more motivated when we’re choosing the content or when we can clearly relate it to a goal we have for ourselves. Even though we can often manage some studying in disembodying and coercive environments — and we may sometimes opt into those environments to accomplish a specific goal — we can learn so much more when our self-direction is supported instead. Now imagine what would be possible if we didn’t interrupt young people’s self-direction and school them away from their educative impulses for their whole adolescence!
3. Experience: People learn more from their culture and environment than from the content they are taught. The medium is the message. Whatever we say, do we act like everyone in the room brings knowledge to contribute? Like a teen’s questions matter more than how she’s dressed? Like failure is part of learning, grades don’t determine your value, “great books” come from all cultures, and “history” is a process we’re actively part of right now? If there are lessons we want folks to understand from their time at our center — like that they’re trustworthy, that there’s richness in difference, and that consent matters — signs and slogans aren’t enough. We have to align our practice with our values, aware of what lessons are being modeled and felt.
4. Success: Learning and personal growth are achieved through non-linear processes. Recognizing we iterate through cycles of intention, creation, reflection, and sharing, we can allow for time dreaming, reflecting, failing, and even resting to be as important to our process as time spent on activities conventional schools and bosses would recognize as productive. Within our ALC communities, we can set up daily practices as scaffolding to support clear intention-setting and ongoing reflection. We can have nuanced conversations about what success would involve and feel like for each of us as we pursue our various goals.
The sharing phase of the cycle is both one of the most ALC-specific aspects of these “roots” and one of the most frequently misunderstood. “Sharing” can look like making a blog post or social media video, documenting your reflections, conclusions, and accomplishments with a public artifact. “Sharing” can also be the moment when you teach what you learned, a practice that certainly reinforces your recall of the material and demands a deeper understanding than is needed to pass a multiple choice test. These ways of sharing are valuable, but unless we’ve done some deschooling around who and what our learning is for, it’s easy to fall into assuming the documentation or performance are the whole point, and that external approval and validation of them is success. Pausing to remember that learning is for the learner, for self-actualization and fully living a life that they find meaningful, clarifies that success is deeper and more personal than getting lots of followers on your YouTube channel (although it doesn’t exclude that, if that’s what you’re into)! So what’s important about sharing? While we aren’t looking to others for judgement and gold stars, we also don’t learn or live in isolation. Our communities help us grow. When we offer them our skills and insights as we learn, on top of deepening our learning we enrich the community, inspire others on their journeys, and contribute to creating a culture of generosity in which there are more resources available to everyone as everyone grows and shares. Making public posts and offerings is sharing, but so is volunteering in a meeting or following up with someone newly interested in that thing you do. It’s not about the format; it’s about the relationship.
The Trunk // Community
A tree’s trunk, the bulk of it, does an astonishing number of jobs. It protects, stabilizes, stores, records, transports, bends, reaches, and more! Engaged community members at an ALC, like the tree trunk, embody the project in the present while holding lessons from the past and reaching for the future. Philosophy is great, but ultimately our projects are about people.
“[Matthew] Lieberman challenges our fundamental understanding of human needs, putting social connection that supports interdependence before even food, water, and shelter. If we don’t ask for or accept help because of the independence we feel we must have, we don’t offer it because of the scarcity we feel…One of the things we most miss out on by not having deep community is the abundance of support, resources, and care that exists when you’ve got many hearts and hands circling you. We can create more of what we all need when we are in community.” Mia Birdsong, How We Show Up
The Branches // Principles
The branches of the Agile Tree are the guiding principles we use to translate theory into practice and ideals into action. We want each program to be able to invent, adapt, assess, and reinvent our structures, tools, and practices to the needs of their unique community and setting. As you do so, we recommend using these principles as touchstones to help ensure your adaptations are in the spirit of the ALC educational model and haven’t wandered back toward the habits of authoritarian schooling that shape so much of our world.
Play Infinitely: Play is one of the most powerful paths to growth. Infinite play is the mindset that games are for adapting, that part of the play is changing rules and boundaries to make space for all the players so that the game may continue and expand to incorporate new horizons.
Be Agile: Make tools and practices flexible, adaptable, and easy to change… or change back again. Too much change all at once can be disorienting — try gentle changes over multiple iterations to see what’s working.
Amplify Agency: Ensure tools support personal choice and freedom, as well as responsibility for those choices. Everyone should have the opportunity to participate in designing and upgrading the structures which guide them.
Create Intentional Culture: We shape culture; culture shapes us. A powerful, positive culture is the strongest, most pervasive support structure a learning community can have. Develop collective mastery rather than restrictive rule-making. Remember, intentional culture building supports intentionality in other domains as well.
Make Feedback Visible: Make choices, patterns, and outcomes visible to participants so they can tune their future behavior accordingly. Make the implicit explicit and expand transparency. These practices empower and build trust among community members.
Clarify, Simplify, and Connect: Don’t introduce unnecessary complexity. Combine many principles and intentions into a single tool or practice, instead of trying to maintain more of them.
Support, Don’t Interfere: Remember that support is not direction — it does not mean making decisions for young people or intervening in and managing their processes. Support that takes up too much space becomes counterproductive.
Respect Others’ Time and Space: Hold no unnecessary meetings. Keep all meetings tight, productive, and participatory. Honor commitments, as well as scheduled start and end times for happenings. Check-in before creating work for someone else. Be thoughtful about taking up shared space.
Build Relationships: Be real. Be accepting. Respect differences. Support self-expression, self-knowledge and self-acceptance: authentic relationship is the basis of communication, collaboration, and trust between students and staff.
Embrace Full-spectrum Fluency: Celebrate multiple kinds of intelligence, modes of expression, and learning styles. Nurture multiple literacies. A functional education needs to focus on more than just “book-learning” textual, numerical, analytical, or memorization skills. Social, relational, digital, creative, and problem-solving skill sets are essential; recognize and develop them as such.
Share Value: Be clear and generous as possible with what you’ve been learning. We have much to offer, as individuals and communities, to our future selves, community members, and folks in communities like ours around the world. Documentation shouldn’t get in the way and it’s definitely not cool to mandate folks put more of themselves on the internet than they’re excited about, but there are lots of options. Community blogs, shared photo folders, open mic and showcase nights, personal task tracking systems, voice memos, graffiti walls, newspapers, zines…Find what works for you and shine your light.
12. Make Safer Spaces: Provide an environment of physical, social, and emotional safety. Set and keep critical boundaries. Foster great freedom within an appropriate frame of safety and legality, so that kids’ energy can be freed up to focus on learning instead of protecting themselves. This will require ongoing learning and unlearning, particularly when we’re working against marginalizing and oppressive patterns in the default culture beyond our space. Reach out to other facilitators for resources, guidance, and partnership.