How I developed the ideas for a New Story of Education

Since the mid-1960's, percolating within my consciousness has been a fascination with the process of learning. This interest has primarily been an exploration of how to bringing teaching practices into accord with what human life and human learning actually are.

Over my life, I have been fortunate to work on quite wonderful projects involving children's growth and development. Among these were the following :

• Being a team member of a multi-year project designing environments for children at an architecture school's research center
• Conceiving and conducting an environmental education field trip program for an elementary school
• Acting as the Resource Guide for our son's 10-year course of independent study

In 1999, after our family's 10-year experience with independent learning, I found I wanted to continue working in some way to help further the development of this approach to learning.

From the various threads of my work in the area of children's growth and development, an image was coalescing in my mind about how the future of education could look. This emerging image reflected a fundamental re-conceptualizion of both the physical and social architectures of education.

I have found many educators and other colleagues - - both locally and nationally - - with whom to brainstorm ideas about independent learning and the Communities of Learning model. The following ideas summarize our sessions :

• Having to deal with the dead weight of educational bureaucracy gets in the way of teachers and students doing great things.
• We all have the desire to live in communities where life is full of people happily learning.
• The phenomenon of informal affiliations of teachers and students has already been in existence for decades in local areas all over the U.S.
• These groups of people need to be more coherently connected.
• We need to develop a conceptual model for further developing this approach to learning - - to help it become increasingly viable, legitimized, and funded, but neither centrally administered nor regulated.

With all of these ideas in mind, I embarked on writing this proposal and website.

For more complete descriptions of these projects, see my Lisa Lindberg portal page.