Learning Exchanges
Luz Shosie (CT) writes:
community where all people are teachI ers and we are all learning all the time. What if we could all learn and teach what we were interested in, work and play together on projects and ideas we choose and we control? We now spend millions of tax dollars on a school system that is open only some of the time to only a few people to do a very limited variety of activities that are strictly controlled by the government. Why not cultivate a community with real learning for everyone and demonstrate that learning doesn't have to be expensive or cut off from the rest of life?
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John Holt advised us to imagine the kind of world we wottld like to live in and then, as far as we could, start Iiving as if that world existed. A couple ofyears ago, Ijoined a learning exchange that was started by Heidi Priesnitz, a homeschooler in Canada. I found a woman in the town next to me who wanted to teach drumming and learn more about gardening, and soon we were meeting and exchanging all kinds of information and skills. It was a great idea, but most of the PeoPle listed in Heidi's learning exchange were far away from me. I wished for a more local resource until I figured out I'd better create one. I started by sending a questionnaire to all the families listed on the mailing list of our group, Unschoolers Support. I asked them to list things they'd like to learn, teach, share, or exchange. Now we have Connections, a list of people from all over Connecticut who want to share their knowledge, ideas, goods, services, activities.
A crucial difference between Connections and school is the matter of choice. In Connections, whatever is learned is at the learner's request. It's a voluntary arrangement. We list what is being offered and what is being sought, and then it's up to each person to use our mailing list to 6
contact someone. People then make their own arrangements about time and place to meet, methods to use, compensation, etc. I don't take responsibility for anything beyond listing the names, and I made that clear both because I didn't want to be in an administrative position and because I believe people can be responsible for whatever they choose to do. That means that I can't guarantee that anyone who is offering to teach something will indeed be a good teacher. That's up to the learner to figure out. They might say to the person who is offering flute lessons, "I'd like to try out one lesson and see how it goes." But it's also a mutual arrangement between the teacher and the learner, so the teacher has the ability to say, "This is what I offer: a series of five lessons ..." or whatever it might be. Both parties have the ability to say what they want and what they will give and to make their own structure. I also don't take responsibilry fbr success or failure of the arrangethe ments. If someone called me up and said, "I tried to take lessons fiom soand-so, but it didn't work out well," I would respond, "It's up to you to end
it if you want to, or to take it as far you want to." I realize that son-re
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people might expect a situation such as what would exist in a school, in which it would be possible to complain to the administration if a teacher wasn't successful. But again, I'm saying that the responsibility for the learning,/teaching arrangements rests with the people involved. I'm simply making the information available so that people can find one another. My husband Ned and I have recently started another learning exchange called Guilford University (Guilford is the name of our town). This one is not limited to the people in our unschooling group; this is open to the wider community. We have published two lists: subjects that people are seeking and subjects requested. In this case, we don't publish the names and phone numbers, because some people might not want that information widely circtrlated. Instead, when someone finds a subject they are interested in, they call me up and I give them the name, address, or phone number of the person who wants to share that subject. We have put notices announcing
G.U. in our local paper, on local access cable TV, and on the library bulletin board, and have gotten some responses. Our goal with G.U. is primarily to get our ideas out. Ned and I had been doing a lot of letterwriting and making videos to put on the local access station, in which we were criticizing conventional schooling. People would ask, "What's your alternative?", so G.U. is a way of showing one alternative. It's a way of getting people thinking about the idea that there is another way of learning that doesn't depend on school.
Exchanging Writing Help, Farm Work, Biology Lab
Visits Diane Metzler is a horneschooling mother who has used the Connections list to uork out seaeral exchanges. We ashed her to tell us about them, and she replied:
I had listed myself as offering help with grammar and composition aud as seeking opportunities fbr a biology
Gnowrsc; Wrrrrour ScHoot-tNc #113 o Nov./Dr<:. '96