Our lockdown learning journey has come to an end with our final episode of our podcast this week, we hope that you’ve enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed making it. We’d like to also say thank you to all our wonderful guests that have given us their time and shared their thoughts with us over the last few months, we couldn’t have done it without you.
For our final episode we wanted to look to the future. What will our education systems look like in a post COVID-19 world? As we all rush to get back to ‘normal’ as lockdown measures are eased, many people are questioning what that normal should look like and many teachers, parents and children are voicing their desire to take this opportunity to change the way we learn for the better. We asked a wide variety of guests what they hoped that future had in store, we hope you enjoy hearing their dreams for the future of education.
Guests: Artemis D. Bear, Kezia Cantwell-Wright, Sophie Christophy, Je’anna Clements, Kate Coleman, Kimberley Cooper, Marc Gallivan, Derry Hannam, Christel Hartkamp-Bakker, Anna Hobbs, Harriet Pattison, Antoinette Reid, Heidi Steel, Danny Whitehouse
Find out more: Our guests from this week’s episode are involved with a wide variety of wonderful projects, here’s a brief summary of each one and the links to find out more:
Artemis D. Bear is the founder of The Garden, a self-directed learning community in Bristol, UK, for Home Educated children.
Kezia Cantwell-Wright, Kate Coleman and Anna Hobbs are staff members at East Kent Sudbury School, a self-directed democratic setting for Home Educated children, aiming to become the UKs first Independent School based on the Sudbury model. They all write regularly on the EKSS blog.
Sophie Christophy is the CEO at The Phoenix Education Trust, a charity which supports both alternative learning spaces and mainstream education providers in providing learning programmes which support student’s voice. Amongst other things, Phoenix prepared an education strategy pack to help school leaders through the COVID-19 pandemic. Sophie also co-founded and works at the self-directed consent based setting The Cabin and regularly writes and about and runs workshops on consent based education and parenting, see her blog.
Je’anna Clements is the founder of Riverstone Village a self-directed learning community in South Africa, children’s rights campaigner and writes about self-directed education.
Kimberley Cooper is the founder of education consultancy Holistic Learning and a teacher at King Alfred School, London.
Marc Gallivan, as well as being the co-host of The Lockdown Learning Podcast is a staff member at Sudbury model school Alpine Valley School in Colorado, USA.
Derry Hannam is a retired deputy head teacher who consistently worked to bring democratic practices into the mainstream, which he has documented in his recent book ‘Another Way is Possible – Becoming a Democratic Teacher in a State School’. He has also worked as a school inspector and advisor to the government on citizenship in schools, writing the Hannam Report.
Christel Hartkamp-Bakker has founded and worked as part of the staff team at several democratic schools in The Netherlands, most recently SudburySchool Harderwijk, she also have the recent TEDx talk ‘Can we trust children to educate themselves?’
Dr. Harriet Pattison is a senior lecturer in Early Childhood Education and researcher at Liverpool Hope University. She is the author of Rethinking Learning to Read and co-author of How children learn at home. You can also read her recent research here.
Antoinette Reid is an unschooling parent, her daughter attends EKSS part-time, you can follow her on Twitter @Antoinette_R_.
Heidi Steel is a former teacher, now unschooling parent, she writes about unschooling, learning and play on her blog Live, Play, Learn.
Danny Whitehouse Chief Executive at the Charles Burrell Centre, guardian member and company secretary of The Phoenix Education Trust and co-founder of Reimagining Education Norfolk.
We hope you’ve enjoyed the series. You can still listen to all the past episodes here as well as on your favourite podcast service, just search for Lockdown Learning.