Rethinking Self-Directed Education

It’s our second season! It’s been a year since we started doing THIS thing and we are excited to celebrate the start of our second season.

Bria and Daveed share their perspectives on your questions, and musings on the underlying anxiety that affects our roles as caregivers and facilitators.

Join us as we talk with Meghan from The Unschool Files about cancel culture and its relevance to the SDE movement, ways we each approach differences in opinions and values, especially with other other unschooling and SDE folks, and when we do feel it’s important to call someone in and invite a conversation.

We also chat about redefining what “public education” means, and ways we can envision increased SDE accessibility.

As always, let us know what you think. This was a hard one to tease out, so expanding or conflicting idea on this one are absolutely invited and we would love to hear from you.

In this episode we chatted with Rocco, and his mom, Chestnut, about his decision to try out public conventional school, how they approached the decision, and how they have navigated conventional school as a family. Rocco also shared what drew him to this decision in the first place, and compares his experiences at conventional school with his experience at Village Free School, and SDE center in Portland, OR.

This month we were joined by our friend and co-conspirator Domari Dickinson (if you aren’t already following Domari on Instagram you’re missing out @domaridickinson)

The biggest part of SDE facilitation, and parenting, is knowing when and how to support the young people. But the lines between supportive nudging and coercing can be blurry, and is especially dependent on our relationship with the young person. In this episode, we explore what nudging can look like, when we would and wouldn’t nudge, and the complexities involved in figuring this out as adults in relationship with young people.

We also share a “spicy” situation and talk about the ways in which other adults often treat young people in the world, and how we stand up to them in defense of young people.

This shit is hard and complicated, and we are here just sharing how we do things and why. Please feel free to share with us how this looks for you — we are always up for feedback, ideas, expansions, or even (especially?) disagreements.

Flying Squads: Existing Without Expectations

In this episode we talk through and process a definition of boundaries that pushes on the ways we are used to thinking about our boundaries.

We then go deep on various aspects of boundaries within SDE and ourselves, such as how this shows up in community and the complexities of upholding boundaries within an SDE space (especially when values or needs differ).

Note: credit goes to KC Davis (@domesticblisters on Tik Tok) for the short audio clip about boundaries that we shared in this podcast. You can view her video here: https://vm.tiktok.com/TTPdAxF7SP/

To deschool ourselves is to truly decolonize ourselves, schools are the first places where we learn untruths about ourselves. Where we question our abilities because we are being constantly graded and compared. Where we let someone else dictate our worth, where we learn untruths about our histories under the colonizer's lens. In this first episode, we explore questions and ideas related to this statement.