RESOURCES
Taking the leap into Self-Directed Education can feel daunting and isolating. Even with intentional choice, itβs often a lonely path in a world that overlooks childrenβs autonomy. We can buoy ourselves and one another by exploring liberatory, youth-centered approaches to education and prepare to embrace these choices by diving into resources that inspire and inform us.
We'd like to highlight from the Alliance for Self-Directed Education two key elements of healthy SDE spaces: first, the six optimizing conditions that allow SDE environments and the children in them to thrive. Second, the four educative drives - curiosity, playfulness, sociability, and planfulness - that humans innately possess and that should be embraced and nurtured.
We strongly recommend exploring several of the resources below as you consider enrollment at The Childrenβs Community. We hope they equip you to better understand the philosophies and key ideas that frame why and how we do what we do here. These resources are ones that have shaped our own learning, growth, values, and culture.
Start hereβ¦
ASDEβs book publisher and online magazine, Tipping Points, is also full of stories and first-hand experiences from diverse perspectives. Spend some time there, with those voices!
THESE are some of our favorite WRITTEN pieces:
Ours First by Kelly Limes-Taylor Henderson - on whiteness, its pervasiveness in SDE spaces, and shifting our paradigms
(Self-Directed) Education is a Political Act by Alexander Khost
Self-Directed Education and the Role of Care by Kelly Seacrest
A Thousand Rivers: What the Modern World has Forgotten About Children and Learning by Carol Black
Conscious Bodies: How Self-Directed Education Creates Alive and Aware Individuals and Communities by Kelly Seacrest
The Real Schedule and the Shadow Schedule by Mel Compo
Becoming Yourself: Neurodiversity and Self-Directed Education by Naomi Fisher
Role for Initiative: An Examination of Role-Playing Games as a Microcosm of Healthy Self-Directed Education Communities by Alexander Khost
A Mathematicianβs Lament by Paul Lockhart
College Admissions for the Alternative Schooled, Homeschooled, and Unschooled Applicant by Antonio Buehler
We recommend truly anything by Akilah S. Richards, especially her book Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work. This text isβ¦everything. Akilahβs work and contributions to the world of unschooling are essential for understanding the deeper work of liberation that Self-Directed Education can offer us all. Her voice has guided us on our path toward leaning into and centering relationship and connection and trust, and decentering what she refers to as "schoolishness." On her website, she shares that for her family, βunschooling is a tool for decolonizing our education and liberating ourselves from oppressive, exclusive systems.β Unschooling can be more than a departure from school and schoolishness - it can be a way of relating; a way of life. Please join us in supporting her work as Patrons and engaging with and learning from the myriad offerings she brings to the world from her podcasts to her webinars to her workshops and on and on.
We also want to highlight the My Reflection Matters Village as a space that has shaped our understanding of SDE - or intuition-led learning - as a liberatory practice. The village is a "virtual community that provides the conversations, supports, resources, and healing necessary for caregivers and educators choosing liberation-centered self-directed learning and living." The village centers BIPOC families seeking support in raising and educating free people, and, the village is open to anyone eager to move away from colonial frameworks and to lean into reflective practice and growth. Please join us in supporting the liberatory work that takes place there. Chemay Morales-James, founder of the village, shares that "To evolve is a revolutionary act. Our children's liberation depends on our human revolution." Unschooling as decolonizing work begins within us.
BOOKS
Trust Kids! by carla bergman and Dani Burlison
We're grateful for so many different voices contributing to the same call for youth autonomy and liberation, and an end to adult supremacy. We especially love Antonio Buehler's essay called "Changing the Context."
Untigering by Iris Chen
This book clarifies so much about how this work of deschooling ourselves and unschooling alongside our children is community work, is justice and liberation work, and requires our thoughtful intention to ensure we are sharing power and empowering young people. "Freedom, not license" and "mutual harmony" are ideas well-described here.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds BY ADRIENNE MARIE BROWN
This book has transformed us, and with each revisit, transforms us yet again in a new way. This revelatory text offers a framework for how change happens - within ourselves and beyond ourselves. "
Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity Through This Crisis by Dean Spade
This short, accessible, revelatory text highlights the ways we can and already know how to show up for one another, to practice horizontal care, and empower ourselves to divest from oppressive systems to support one another in thrivingβ
All About Love by bell hooks
bell hooks offers us such liberatory frameworks for being in relationship with children. She invites us to center love and decenter and dismantle dynamics of domination, power, and control. She invites us to consider that every human child be treated not as βthe property of parenting adults to do with as they wishβ but as their own person with their own rights.
We Do This 'Til We Free Us Mariame Kaba
Mariame Kaba guides us in this text through various offerings to consider how we create futures without punishment, prisons, and policing. How can we bring the lessons of abolition into our work with young people, and move with accountability and justice in those relationships, and beyond?
A Different Way to Learn: Neurodiversity and Self-Directed Education by Naomi Fisher
We love this comprehensive and thoughtful text about how neurodivergent young people, including those with a PDA (Power Differential Awareness) profile experience both schooling and the world, and the ways in which Self-Directed Education environments can support neurodivergent children and their families in thriving in ways that conventional environments do not.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Robin Wall Kimmerer presents us with a series of essays exploring the push and pull between Indigenous Wisdom and Western Science as ways of knowing about the world. Kimmerer draws together her scientific expertise as a botanist and ethnobotanist and her lived experience as a member of the Potawatomi people to remind us how much we can learn, and always have learned, about the natural world through listening to what it tells us rather than making an object of it, and that we are part of that natural world, not separate from it. At TCC we also have Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults in our library, from which we pull essays for offerings every so often; community favorites include "Asters and Goldenrod" and "Learning the Grammar of Animacy."
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer
This new book from Robin Wall Kimmerer further examines what we can learn about reciprocity from the ecosystems of care around us, and drives home the truth that "all flourishing is mutual."
How We Show Up by Mia Birdsong.
New examinations of what practicing radical care in community can look like, and how change happens: within ourselves and in our relationships.
Laziness Does Not Exist Dr. Devon Price
Our worth is not tied to our productivity or what or how we perform. Messages from dominant culture (which includes conventional schooling) reinforce that to be considered βenough,β we must pursue achievement. This text encourages us to examine how productivity culture harms us, what our notions of βlazyβ really mean - and to consider how we can embrace our lives with more compassion. and rest.
Loving Corrections BY ADRIENNE MARIE BROWN
With characteristic poeticism and witchy grace, amb invites us to examine some common relational patterns and fraught topics, and to hold ourselves and one another with love as we move through the challenging but deeply necessary work of accountability and repair.
Balanced and Barefoot: How Unrestricted Outdoor Play Makes for Strong, Confident, and Capable Children by Angela J. Hanscom
From a pediatric occupational therapist, this researched-based book outlines the critical importance of outdoor play - specifically truly free play - and full freedom of movement.
Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishment to Love and Reason by Alfie Kohn.
This book further explores Kohn's work regarding the harm of extrinsic rewards and punishment, and shows ways to shift to a love-centered relationship with mutual respect at the core. All of the adults at TCC are continually working on ourselves and reflecting on how we show up. We strive to have positive and healthy relationships with ourselves internally, each other, and with young people here.
PODCASTS
Fare of the Free Child podcast with Akilah S. Richards.
We especially love this episode of the Raising Free People podcast with Akilah S. Richards on the Language of Unschooling.
Parenting Decolonized podcast with Yolanda Williams
We want to highlight especially this episode with Ira X Armstrong titled Decolonization: A Harm Reduction Tool for People of Every Color.
Rethinking Self-Directed Education Podcast
We want to highlight a few episodes that have shaped us: Who Is Influencing Our Sense of Self?, What Protects the Autonomy of the Young People in an SDE Center - the Model or the Facilitators?, "Requiring" Social Justice Work in SDE Centers, and Just a Collection of Humans Doing a Thing: SDE Centers and the Necessity of Conflict
The Emergent Strategy podcast
While choosing one conversation to highlight is challenging, we love this conversation with writer, educator, and trainer for transformative and disability justice Mia Mingus called Tending Our Soil.
Radical Learning Talks Podcast
We love every episode here, but want to highlight episode 18 about Unschooling as Social Justice & Liberation Work with Iris Chen, episode 37 about Sitting with Discomfort, and episode 42 Unschooling & Deschooling: From Theory to Practice. Episode 83 on Living without the Shadow of School is a must-listen! These conversations have all shifted us!
Upstream Podcast
specifically How We Show Up with Mia Birdsong. From the podcast notes: "In this conversation, Mia shares how we have separated from one another despite our deep desire for belonging. She explores how we can instead turn towards one another, remembering our inherent interconnectedness, and how we can find connection and support in vulnerability and generosity."
CONSENT BASED EVERYTHING
Check out Radical Mothering's resources, including her Consent-Based Everything Podcast - especially this conversation about Consent in Community with Nadia Erlendson. There is so much here that speaks to how we practice consent in a group. We also love this conversation that focuses on Embodied Learning & Ways of Knowing with Ieishah Clelland Lange. This episode explores Indigeneity, Indigenous ways of knowing, how Western culture and colonization impact consent and relationships, "embodied relational learning," and so on. This is a beautiful, rich conversation!
Blake Boles' resources at Off-Trail Learning
Including his podcast by the same name. We recommend this conversation with Antonio Buehler on Competitive College Admissions for Non-Traditional Students and Self-Directed Education is a Political Act with Alexander Khost.
VIDEOS
Akilah S. Richards' TEDx talk on Raising Free People
What if We Trusted You? by Jerry Michalski
Changing Education Paradigms with Sir Ken Robinson
Self-Directed Learning Fundamentals with Peter Gray
