At the top of this episode, I share the pre-order status for my book, Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work! If you enjoy this podcast, this is your kinda reading party right here. Pre-order your copy today.
In this second deschooling release party session, we will be sharing thoughts with college professor and unschooler mother of five, Kelly Limes Taylor about the effects of our current times on all institutions, schooling and leadership issues being among the plights that we are urgently being called, as a society to face.
Kelly invites us to consider the ways that our own patterns in life are often conduits for deeply valuable lessons. She shares her experience as a single mom, moving from a metropolitan area to a small town, moving on from divorce, and holding space, as an educator, for students who are feeling overwhelmed by the sudden shift in how education, outside of conventional school context, is being handled today.
Kelly also speaks to the relevance of naming our failed structures, and how these structures, built on a settler-colonial framework, were not sustainable to begin with, and yet are reinforced through conventional schooling. Indeed, what learning actually is, and how it happens is not seen as a human approach, does not work in a reciprocal way, and we can’t limit that to academics, we are talking about connection of the whole self, not just the information-gathering self.
Here’s an opportunity to relearn and reinventate; to observe all the ways the structures we’ve held on to are crumbling; here’s an invitation to notice a space to pivot and to heal.
Image Credit:
Photos of Kelly by I. and C. Tiller (her daughters)
LIBERATION WALK
- Listen to Kelly on Episode 105 (Love, Trust & Identity).
- Call Kelly by phone 706.314.9225; here’s her blog.
- Check on Kelly’s 2020 Voyage ATL Interview.
- Latinx Parenting supports parents in raising children with compassion & connection, while honoring ancestral roots, values, and strengths. Leslie Priscilla (Leslie Arreola Hillenbrand), wrote this epic piece with mad resources and zero sugar coating. Give Leslie her flowers.
- Organizations like Metro Atlanta Mutual Aid Fund are organizing collective help for Atlanta’s BIPOC families affected by COVID-19 – Please donate.
- Support the show at patreon.com/akilah
- Join our Facebook group
Great conversation, as always!