Weeks 6 & 7 2024-2025 IN REVIEW
Dear TCC Families,
As we consider these first seven weeks we've been together and also look ahead towards growing, we ask - how are we as a community creating, connecting, collaborating with one another? We recall the conversations about vitals, the improv and theater games in the glen, pick-up games of baseball, pop-up Dungeons and Dragons, the WORDS offering series, the insects and animals that sparked our curiosity, the conflicts that burst open and then were resolved, the forest that calls to us and breathes with us, the humor and playfulness that flows among us.
We're reflecting also on our recent, lovely, whirlwind visit with Alex Khost. He came in with a flurry of thoughtful inspiration, energy, ideas, and kindness. He left with mutual invitations to collaborate and build together. We're full of gratitude for the playfulness and care he showed, as well as for the awe he expressed at what we're creating together (see week six's photo album for a snapshot of what he shared publicly about his time here).
We've shared several of Alex's writings in the past, including some that we ourselves return to again and again. He prompts us to consider that although all Self-Directed Education environments are different - because the people that comprise them are different - healthy communities share some key qualities. One is trust.
What does the notion of trusting children bring up for you? What does it look like? What does it mean for us as adults to be trustworthy? On this recent episode of the Exploring Unschooling podcast titled "Building Trust with Our Kids," the hosts remind us that trust takes an incredible amount of time and intention to build - and that it's about our actions, not our words (for those who don't enjoy podcasts, this episode has a written transcript). To build trust, we might ask ourselves: do we follow through? Do we mean what we say? Do we listen without judgment? Can the young people in our lives come to us freely with questions and for insight, or can they expect us to disapprove and steer or coerce them toward experiences that feel more comfortable to us? When we make mistakes (we ALL make mistakes!) do we apologize and center repair? Building trust is not about perfection; it's about our capacity for reflection.
Play has a role of its own in building trust.
Alex Khost writes about the role of play - in this case, role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons - in healthy Self-Directed environments. Play in these forms nurtures elements of "structure," imagination, ethics, and intention.
"I may not be able to put my finger on it exactly, but I have a sense, just as I cannot definitively explain a healthy self-directed environment, but I know one when I see one. I know that when it is genuine it comes from the young people, not from me. And it has a wonderful structure to it that can be pulled down at any moment and rebuilt or left undone by all of the contributors, just like D&D, serious day or not. And it has so much to do with starting with our imaginations and working together from there in cooperation."
How is trust interwoven here?
When we say "trust children," what do you hear?
Eli Hartwood, therapist and author of Raising Securely Attached Kids (@attachmentnerd) recently shared an affirmation she returns to that carries the theme of what trust means to us: "I am not in charge of making my child develop. I'm in charge of creating the environment, both practically and relationally, that allows them to grow when they are capable and ready."
We, too, do not see our responsibility to the children in our care as being one of "making." Our responsibility to them is to create the conditions that allow them to unfold on their own, when and how they will, as the whole people they already are and will be. And to be in right relationship with them, walking alongside, remaining curious accomplices to their unfolding.
What an immense privilege and an immense gift it is to bear witness in this way.
We'll close with a quote from Mister Rogers: "There's a world of difference between insisting on someone's doing something and establishing an atmosphere in which that person can grow into wanting to do it."
They may want to do a given thing, or they won't, and that isn't actually up to us to decide. We can simply remain connected, and reflect on the relational conditions we create, and trust. When trust becomes challenging for us, it's an invitation to turn inside, and remember that this work doesn't happen outside of us. The work isn't in our kids.
The work lives within us.
With gratitude and care,
Emily, Sarah, and Zoey
