Today we began our ‘class’ with the adolescents and the immediate difficulties were evident. The school was very disorganised being their last week of term and students had little to do and most were in the hall watching DVDs. Why start a new ‘course’ when you can just hang out?
From the original Grade 10 volunteers for our ‘course’ only 2 pitched up and the one enthusiastic teacher gathered together 15 children who said they wanted to attend but mostly from grade 8. Since I have an understanding of neurological development I knew they were too young for what I had planned. We decided to go with what was emerging. One of our main guiding principles was to be where the need was and not impose our own demands. We wanted to practice emergence and believe who showed up were the right ones. So we found ourselves with a smaller group than anticipated, a huge drop out from the original learners we had had an introductory class with, a cold unused and dusty classroom, a large age difference and too many young teens.
My lesson plan on Ecological footprint involved discussions and facilitation and this did not flow so I replaced some classroom time with practical and more light-hearted exercises like checking the bins, discussing what had been thrown out and beginning a school audit of energy use. I had prepared a power point presentation and used an apple to demonstrate just how little arable productive land is left.
Charles did some great imaginative exercises for stimulating creativity that worked. We both realised that we prefer psychological and philosophical ways of working which we will have to be careful about. It seems self-reflection and question asking and taking initiative has not been encouraged by the school and the group have few skills in working in a more personal group setting. It will be necessary to relocate the course next week off campus if we hope to inspire relaxation, enjoyment and story telling. the classrom sets up definite roles of student-teacher. I need to find ways to facilitate self-reflection as it appears these students only expect to receive teaching and not to discover their own needs/wants and styles.
We made a list of possible practical exercises for next week which they could all rate. This was a success and we will be out planting trees, planning a school veggie garden, doing a full school energy audit, creating an ‘eco’ rap song for video and doing a clean up of bottles for Joseph’s plastics project. We are still hoping to include a deep time walk with some evolutionary information. We have had to adapt considering it is school recess.
So we will have a good solid eco-club! Not an in-depth ecological awareness group. The group named it “Eco-crew”.
Charles and I completed some ‘focusing’ exercises (Gendlin) with each other after the group. I did some training years ago on a Psychology conference and then used it again on the Natural Change facilitation course in Scotland very effectively. This will be useful for our own self-reflection going forward.
The issue of burden came up for us after the focusing. For eg. school poverty burdens, our price of privilege, my guilt burden, burdening the teens with planet problems that they did not know about before, carrying the burden of sadness over our inability to change fast enough, the burden of the next generation to ‘save and protect’ our resources, the burden of our own incapacities to meet the children on their level. and so on.
This is just a quick summary…We’ve planned an outdoor wilderness experience for tomorrow. We will be using ‘songlines’ (a poor remake of the ancient Aborginal method of sharing directions and sacred places through song) and sensing/perception exercises and some Goethean science with plants.
Overall we learnt a lot and we will post up our self reflections as we go…….
Endless River: Transition in the Overberg 