We are not too many, like 10 people, but always a mix of friends and people we don’t know yet. So it’s not always the same group, but new constellations coming up. New people are welcomed full-heartedly. We are often outside in the shadow, not too much sun. Inside we have a spacious room with different corners for different activities, like cooking and library and hanging out. We are hanging out a lot. It is a lot about being together in the same room, but not always interacting. We are bored sometimes, but usually joyful. Just sometimes things happen in these free times.

Then we have moments of concentration. We focus on something, we have active debates or we are engaging in other not so intellectual activities, dancing, things like these. But then we are not dispersed going about our own business, but dealing with something together. Otherwise we are also often alone, doing our own work.

And then there is always a form. What we do, somehow ends up crystallising into something we can share with the world outside of ourselves.

my dream school is either by a beach or by a park. the park or the beach is used alternatively for certain activities and exercises.
it has a common eating place with coffee (this is important) and drinks.
in addition to the common eating area it has at least two rooms. one is where we meet regularly. we are never more than 20-25 people so it's not a very big room. the other one is for things we want to keep. books, visuals, plants etc. (it can be thought of as an archive) when we leave the space what remains of us is there. it's our residue maybe.

i don't love sitting in a circle but I also don't really like the classroom seating arrangement. so the sitting is very arbitrary. some lie down, some sit on the floor, some on chairs/couches. we are encouraged to move very often. no discussion/seminar/lecture takes longer than 1,5 hours.
we don't always have to face the person speaking/presenting/leading.

we can bring in people. we often talk to people through online video/zoom/skype etc. so we do have a properly working technological setup. the space does not look too cold/institutional but also is not representative of a certain identity. it would be nice to have plants.

alternative terms for "school"

A school? I need a different name because I can only do this exercise if it’s ungrounded. I need to think of how what I’m learning is in relation to specific circumstances; relationship with life, quotidianity, community beyond the school. It needs to have a relationship to reality and a place beyond the enclosed community that makes the school. Slow-paced and patient.

It needs to produce something or have a relationship to something practical.

Is not afraid of changing directions, changing methods.
A space for honesty.
No hierarchy between people’s ways and expression of knowledges.

Also to move our bodies.

spaces we cannot inhabit but are longing for

what does our space look like?

how can our digital space look like?

Dream exercise: Dreaming of a school

Susannah Haslam, Forest Rangers at Jupiter Woods

17 June 2020

How to make this space more beautiful without just accepting that this (no physical contact) is the new status quo?

What constitutes this space?

How do we want to transform it?

In what kind of space do we want to meet, how can we create it?

When we first talked about it we were thinking on a digital platform with concerns about the digital as a space and for a while we sticked to the digital for convenience and financial reasons. First time we spoke of the idea of turning it into a physical space we weren't sure where it would take place. Which country? Are we going to be in the same city? It took us a while to imagine our school (we don't call it school now but we did back then) didn't have to be just in one space/city/country/building. We first found the model and then it adopted according to where it was going to happen. Then we needed to tell about it to people. It was another struggle to simplify it and put it into clear words/narratives. It took us months to have proper sentences but that feeling we got when we shared it with someone for the first time and they understood/believed in our experiment it made us believe it was doable. We looked at other models extensively, now looking back maybe we didn't have to spend so much time and energy understanding and scrutinizing what others did. There were endless possibilities. Yet, we underestimated our need for structure and clarity.

school in old Turkish

mektep

school in Arabic

Maktab

ktb

Kitap (book in Turkish)

Katip (to write in old Turkish) 

school: the place where one writes

so much emphasis on writing?

writing a code?

Exercises

References

---------------->>

---------------->>

Thoughts & Questions

References

---------------->>

---------------->>

24 June 2020

Date of meetings

How to document what we do?

Contact zones in learning spaces:
Conflicts and fighting?

A space that is equally unproductive?

Ecologies of attention: Pay attention to differences in rhythm, voice, atmosphere

Key words

Deal with ephemerality?
Grasp what we are doing?

Rethink the term 'school' in connection to word 'book' in arabic?
Transmission of knowledge's link to writing - Can we move away from writing?

---->

Experts

Non-Experts

----line--btw--them---

Fields that allow for multiple expertises?
Examples:
-IG and YouTube: unique knowledges rather than expertise in traditional fields
-Open source projects

---------------->>

---------------->>

---------------->>

03 July 2020

Dream exercise

03 July 2020