Education is a key player for our society of tomorrow. As a facilitator that nurture the collective intelligence in our organisation and a radical safe collaboration where anyone has a voice, Coemerge sustains the initiatives that think education different. Here is the testimony of Ludmila, a 20 years old woman, my daughter who participated to a couple of events that want to shift the education mindset for a more inclusive world.
Education Differently
by Ludmila
Last summer I’ve participated in a Hackathon on Education organised by Cocoon Projects during week-end in Rome.
To participate, one had to join an Educational project team an register it. The selection process for the event included a game we had to play on their site. I enjoyed this gamification approach, and it had motivated me a lot for what was following.
I was part of a team of 3, me included. The other members of my team were an Italian nutrition professor … and Vincent who is a programmer. I’ve met Vincent a few months before, at a similar event called “Work Revolution Party”, organised also by Cocoon Projects in Rome. I had been to that first event with my mom who works as facilitator for fuelling Agile Leadership in teams .
The event started on Saturday, when we met everybody and discovered how things were going to be developed. Our project had to follow 3 rules :
- be a continuation of what education already has,
- Include an idea of an other team, and
- Have an ability become viral.
Each team had their own working and presentation space,. Each team could make a ”A stop” to just go to another team, and ask them either if they need help or simply asking for help. A stop was encouraging us to communicate and exchange ideas.Every team was helped by a facilitator.
We followed the rules of 2 steps:
Step 1 : Walk from stop to stop as much as possible, to help communication (what is a stop?)
Step 2 : A “thanks” box was available . For everyone who was able to help another team, 100 thanks were allocated.
Unfortunately, I felt we didn’t have a great communication in my team, we put onto ourselves a big pressure to deliver and our project was late. At the end, we kind of agree to create lectures on emotional education.
On Sunday, we presented our project to the jury. We had good feed-backs.
The winner was a Fab Lab project and though I don’t remember well the name of the projects , I do remember 2 projects that highly inspired me:
- A project on Gamification, developed by a team of two Spanish people (…) I strongly support that project because I believe gaming is one the fastest way to learn. By the way, I’m a fan of the book Reality is broken by Jane McGonigal.
- The “Sedeo” project, that wants to develop also an approach of Emotional Education. Sedeo, which means, “sit and think”. The project team was formed by 2 members and I was so found of this idea that I joined them later for their first event in Barcelona, on October.
This experience was very helpful, as I’ve met people and learned. I learned more about different types of education. I’ve aknowledged Parallel Schools, that offer an open environment for self-education in a flat horizontal knowledge exchange with no teacher, and Democratic Schools, where everyone has a voice and is responsible, decisions are taken by pupils and teachers altogether. These types of schools are that are similars with Montessori schools. The student can be the professor.
This how we tried to hack the Education in Rome.
I’ve joined the Sedeo Educational project in Barcelona. The project vision is that Education includes helping students to find what your purpose in life is. We worked on our own purpose. By questioning our chosen direction, and our life direction. The workshop was lead by Martha and Noha.
I’ve appreciated the quality and power of the questions, nevertheless it was a little bit to spiritual for me.
This is my whole experience with Hacking Education. I thing that changing the current approach of school that tempts to put all people in a pre-set set of boxes, and asks students to provide compliance with these set of boxes, to a school that adapts itself and empower students to grow their own natural curiosity is a priority for our generation.
Leanovation Agile @ cOemerge 