Learning in Community and Community in Learning
We source metaphorical settings from collective human wisdom and extend them into the
immediately accessible material field. Once we arrive ‘there’ we aim for perfection in improvisational expressive arts. These learning arenas challenge more than mind alone and are infinitely flexible in what they can facilitate. Learners grow as independent thinkers and empathic participants in community. Each learner becomes also an educator, and each educator learns.
All ages may be present, and maximum age diversity is a plus. The culture of adults will become the education of children.
We develop skills that serve safe cooperation and fair competition to manifest the space and pace for each learner’s unique process and group action reinforces individual learning gains. While all the work and gains occur, the learners are having the most fun, immersed as directors and actors in a world of their own creation.
Music and art help us go deep to the foundational influences on our choices where our social-emotional decision making processes meet our flight-fight-freeze responses.
Thus we strengthen the intuitive group reflexes and bring subconscious reactions into the light as conscious responses. As a group social-emotional identity crystalizes, we experience solidarity and discover new powers and new agency in service of better homes, communities and institutions.
The formula looks like this:
The [freedom to self-direct ones own life]
balanced with
[behaving for the welfare of one’s community]
This education model is built using Paulo Freire’s concept of Authentic Education in his work Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Many structures for group improv and warrior dances are adapted from the historic Quilombos cultures of liberated Africans in resistance to colonialism in South America, particularly the art of Capoeira Our education director is Macaco Nova Yolk.
