Learning and teaching techniques have been created, new policies have been established. What now? Now it's the time for understanding. Here we tell our stories to help the educational system connect to difficult" people. This website shows how we experience life; understanding our life situations might help people understand our reasoning. Addressing the student's need is simple when people are connected. There are no mass solutions, proactivity is only possible if we are all connected. What happens to those whose learning style and life path don't match the mainstream schooling system? What is surprising in the manners and values of this schooling system from the "difficult" student standpoint? We are 18 to 55 year old adults who returned to high school; we were there together to study how to learn. In this website, we disclose our experience through conversations and stories, bringing different ways of reasoning; challenging values and beliefs that have been taken for granted in the school environment. We invite you to take a fresh look on these values and beliefs. Parenting, managing or teaching tasks are about intuition, conversation, flexibility, self-discovery, openness to learn with the learner and being transformed. Our conversations reveal directions and suggest solutions to complement the worries about excellence, morality, and safety in classroom with fairness, innovation and care.
Some findings from our stories:
Despite all the teaching techniques and information we know about youth biology and different learning styles, few students say they have fun learning academic subjects in class, classes formatted in adult and left brain manners are common, they follow the brain style of the most of the educators and policy planners. "Act to entertain", "ask to understand", "connect with the students and the principal", "innovate" and "suggest system changes that makes school a caring and joyful place" are rarely teacher's main tasks. There are opportunities to enrich the teaching job.
Lots of school information that could be publicly available are only available through the school staff. When a student misses an information session, he needs to wait until school staff or a friend are ready to inform him. There are opportunities to innovate the school information system.
If the student’s life pace doesn’t follow the mainstream school's expectation, alternative schools are creating innovative ways to accommodate his specific needs. There are daily opportunities to innovate.
If a student has a special talent or interest, he will have to learn first what the school planned for him; he needs to learn the academic "language" to get the privilege of learning more about his talent. There are schools where the student's beliefs are not recognized. The challenge of personalization is here, now, to be addressed.
There are schools where the students don't know the school's reasons for not allowing them to wear their beloved hats or piercings, where students can not miss more than 4 classes while his teacher is allowed to miss many more and send a replacement who doesn't know the class subject. There are schools with no community parties and no diversity celebrations. Proud in belonging is missing.
There are schools where one teacher knows the personal issues of a student while others don't have a clue. Collective responsibility is missing.
The school is not designed around individuals, it is designed around progress and success for the whole. But many people who have been comfortable in this design are ready to give away some of their comforts to get the feeling of accomplishment and belonging; they want to understand diversity and act on inclusion because the side effects of the modern concept of "success" and "progress" are becoming devastating.
The school professions are much more complex than just delivering content. In order to improve the school business structure, business planners and unsatisfied clients need dialogue. As educators and students live in different worlds, both need to use their intuition and imagination.
Main Page(Introduction)
Dialogues&Stories (Life, School, Classroom)
