Looking Out: Rewilding Our Practice and Settings

Three day / Two-night immersive camp

“What we need are totally different ways of envisioning education.”

Diane Reay

Saturday 27 May 2023 @ 2pm – Monday 29 May 2023 @ 2pm

Ivybridge, Devon

Facilitators: Max Hope and Sophie Christophy

Cost: £250

This event is run in partnership with Centre for CBE

You are an educator, a teacher, a facilitator. You are not convinced that the mainstream model of schooling is working. There must be another way, a better way. You want to be part of something that is wilder, freer, more grounded, and more consensual.

But how can we hold spaces for living and learning differently?

It is not always easy to see the alternatives. One of the biggest challenges in creating new ways of educating, teaching, or facilitating is that there are so few models, no clear blueprints. Every setting is different, and facilitators can feel like they are making it up as they go along. What can we each do, in our unique place?

This three-day camp is about developing sound practice. It is not about telling you exactly what to do as that would be impossible. Each setting and every educator is different. What we will do, however, is provide you with a framework so that you can work out, for yourself, what you want to do in your own context.

The Rewilding Education Compass uses four concepts as its navigation points to reflect on our practice: How wild is it? How free is it? How grounded is it? How consensual is it? These seemingly simple questions lead us to a complex and essential array of dilemmas and opportunities for healing, growth, and change, which we will explore in more depth on the camp. Our location, on a working farm in Devon, just next door to a nature reserve, provides an enticing range of wild places which will aid us with our enquiries. The facilitators, Max Hope and Sophie Christophy, will guide the group through a range of activities which model sound practice and enable deep reflection for everyone on how they might use this compass to navigate culture creation and the development of new practices within their own contexts.

We will use the compass to go on a journey together. The journey starts with us sharing about ourselves and our places, reflecting on our own role and settings, working out our answer to the central question – where is the space for me to transform my practice? Every setting, even those that feel restricted or constrained, has some space, some ground where transformation can take place. We just have to work out where it is.

As well as the sessions offered by us, there will also be the opportunity for you to make your own offerings to the group. This may be sharing of your own skill/area of interest, a discussion point, an activity. You will get a feel for how to offer up skills, knowledge and experience in a way that is wild, free, grounded, and consensual, with an option for asking for feedback on how this has been for others.

Throughout the camp, we are hoping that you will find connections, solidarity, support, resources, and networks. We will spend time supporting you to make plans about what you want to do next, and to troubleshoot the potential obstacles that you might encounter.

Adventure awaits!

Guiding Questions for this camp:

• Who am I and where are the spaces for me to make changes in my practice?
• What does wild, free, grounded, and consensual practice look and feel like?
• How might the Rewilding Education compass help me to navigate my own way and what are the limitations of using a compass metaphor?
• What’s my plan and what support do I need?
  

This camp is run in partnership with the Centre for Consent-Based Education. We are offering a plan and a structure and will support you to navigate that plan in a consent-based and self-directed way. You choose what you want to take part in and how you want to participate. No activities are compulsory apart from opening meetings at the start of each day and a closing meeting at the end of the camp. We also ask everyone to take a share in camp duties such as helping with cooking and washing up.

The Looking Out camp can be booked as a standalone experience but it is designed to be twinned with the Journeying Within camp which takes place in April – participants are encouraged to attend both if they can.