Where have we been and what have we been doing?
“The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn't make sense to be hopeful.”
― Paul Hawken
About 2 years ago, over a hot chocolate at a local coffee shop, I hesitantly asked my mum if she would help me start a school. She had just taken leave from her role as an assistant principal at a primary school and honestly, she was pretty wrecked. What she really needed was rest and lots of it. But she said yes anyway, and the Reimagining Education Project (REP) was born.
Our goal was to co-create a school with our local community in Port Phillip, Naarm, grounding learning in people and place, and centring young people in their education. That was the tag line anyway. Mum and I had worked and/or lived in the Port Phillip area for over a decade, and we thought it was important to start where we were.
Additionally, unlike the majority of other independent schools, we really wanted our school to be as accessible as possible to whoever needed it. Australia has one of the most unequal education systems of any OECD country in the world, and we’d had countless conversations with people who were unhappy with their local public schools but didn’t have the means to send their children to an alternative. It only made sense that if we were going to co-create a school with our community, all people in the community should be able to attend, should they so desire.
When you decide to dream up a different way of doing things, you usually face a whole lot of resistance. People say you are naive, idealistic, impractical, or radical. You’re told that you think too much, that it’s just the way things are, and that things will never change. Some people get offended that you’re even challenging what exists. Mum and I believed we needed to come up with incontrovertible proof of what we already knew to be true—that reimagining education was not only possible but necessary for so many of our young people and our community.
So, we got to work interviewing parents, educators, young people and experts. We held a workshop to imagine what our community might look, feel, sound, smell and taste like 20 years from now. Mum read all the ‘boring education books’, as I call them, and I read books about systems change and social and environmental justice. We listened to podcasts, watched videos, read articles and even attended a Democratic Education conference (the best conference either of us has ever been to!). We looked into schools that were already offering an alternative to mainstream education, here in Australia and overseas. Both Mum and I share a love of learning and an inability to know when enough is enough. So, to say that we have done some thinking about this is an understatement.
In the process of this research, we were surprised and humbled to discover that our ideas weren’t all that original or radical. People across the world were daring to reimagine and then bring to life alternative learning settings for young people. And this wasn’t even a recent thing. There were examples of people doing this work for decades and in some instances, centuries!
We planned to distil and present all of this research in a report that would then be submitted to the Department of Education with our application to start the school. We would also take bits and pieces of the report and share them across social media to help folks understand what we were thinking and doing. It was important to us that the information was accessible to as many people as possible, including young people, parents, carers and educators.
And then I got sick.
In late 2023, I came down with a virus that left me with ongoing fatigue and migraines. My life was turned upside down. I had very little energy for anything beyond what I needed to do to survive. Things like walking the dog and visiting the supermarket became epic challenges. Mum was also still struggling with ongoing health issues and had decided to retire. Neither of us was in a state to start a school. We were reluctantly forced to slow everything right down.
Since then, we’ve been writing, talking, and dreaming about what could be and slowly healing. We’ve had the gift of space and time to sit with what we’ve learned, and now we have a fairly clear idea of what we want to do next. There are just a few hurdles we need to work through:
Trust – For parents and carers to feel brave enough to go against the grain and sign their young people up to learn with us, they need to be able to trust us. So, how do we build that trust?
Time and Energy – While my health has significantly improved, I still have good days and bad days. More often than not, I need to nap to get through. On top of that, Mum and Dad are planning to travel around Australia in a campervan from next year, as is the right of every retiree. So, how do we make REP happen within those time and energy constraints?
Money – We still want to make whatever we do as accessible as possible. I’m not interested in doing it if we can’t make it available to everyone. But we live in a world that requires us to make money to exist. So, how do we pay the bills?
We’ve decided the first step towards addressing all of these hurdles is to start sharing some of the research, thinking and learning we’ve been doing. Admittedly, we’ve been keeping things very close to our chest, searching for the ‘right’ way to present our findings at the ‘right’ time. We’ve written thousands and thousands of words and shared exactly zero of them, until now.
This is the first in a series of weekly posts that will provide some insight into our work. In my job as a communications manager, two of my go-to catch phrases are ‘people don’t read’ and ‘use less words’. So, it feels a little antithetical to be drafting up this sort of content. I’m crossing my fingers that I’m wrong in this instance and people will take the time to engage with what we’re putting out there.
We hope that together we can grow a community of humans who are excited to reimagine education and willing to work with us to make magic happen. So please, share this post, tell all your friends, sign up for our newsletter, follow us on Instagram and Facebook, and email us if you’d like to have a chat. We’re open to all your questions, comments, concerns, or interpretive dances (especially your interpretive dances).
