Calendar and News

Learning journey

MoveMakers are on the MOVE!

LAB1: NETHERLANDS 22nd to 28th of March, 2015

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In the last week of March, 35 educators from The Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Germany and Denmark made their way to Schoorl, a lovely spot next to the highest dunes of The Netherlands. The goal of this meeting was to launch the first LAB for MoveMakers – get to know some of the innovators within the MoveMakers group as well as across Netherlands and find some questions and answers around the theme of innovation in adult education in Europe.

LAB1 embraced participatory leadership as its working approach, so that participants could plant the seeds to co-create a sustainable learning community. The programme was a combination of excursions, deep dialogue and individual/team reflection around the fundamental issues that each country is dealing with in education.

MoveMakers LAB1 Poster

* Graphic recording by Maaike Boumans

After spending a full week together, most participants agreed that in order to create sustainable change and innovate in education, educators need to slow down, place more focus on the process and create space for reflection.

Participants’ feedback highlighted the potential that MoveMakers has in helping shape the future of adult education:
“There are wonderful things emerging in eduction and MoveMakers has great potential to step in ad add to it!”

Others found inspiring insights about the importance of making mistakes in learning:
“It is ok to mak mistakes! The future of education is in self-directed learning and the teacher’s role in it is mentoring and coaching. Sensing is important! Reality is the best teacher”.

And finally, participants seemed to have enjoyed the first leg of the journey very much!
“Beautiful balance of traveling, acting & reflecting, sense making”.

See a small gallery of LAB 1 here and the short movies created of our learning journey here

BERLIN MEET-UP 3rd to 6th July, 2015

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During the first weekend of July a dozen of MoveMakers met up in Berlin. The idea was born in Netherlands 3 months earlier as some of the participants saw the need to meet up more often than just every six months. The long weekend was designed as a sensing journey into Berlin – experiencing the city space, meeting the different organizations and individuals active in education innovation and having dialogues with the activists connecting the city space with learning.

An important part of the long weekend together was also to take more time to build the network and relationships among the MoveMakers – to focus more on the experience that each of us has and the internal processes of change that can bring about larger changes in education. As MoveMakers we have decided to take on more the emergent rather than planning approach of change which requires openness, curiosity and time.

As part of the learning journey we also visited an exhibition about the Black Mountain College, an experiment in education in US from 1933-1957. We realised that a lot of the needs for change that we see today were already spoken of and experimented with three quarters of a century ago. What does it take to make it happen on a larger scale? And why did the Black Mountain College initiative not sustain?

Finally some reflective and explorative questions that arouse:

– What would we do if we weren’t afraid? What would your life be like then?
– What is unnecessary in our work and in our life? Make space for the new!

See pictures of Berlin Meet-up in the events gallery here or in a Facebook album here

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