🔮 Prompt: 

A love letter to a speculative liberatory learning environment

Gently explore your imagination and think about the following prompt. 

• Imagine a space that can hold you and those you want to learn with.
• This space is need not be like any learning environment that exists. It does not have to be realistic or adhere to laws of physics.
• What kinds of rooms, interconnecting hallways, or gardens could be grown? What kinds of activities would learners do in different spaces throughout the space?
• What kinds of subjects would be taught there? Are their teachers and students or some other set of roles?
• Do the roles ever change?
• How is time measured?
• What small moments of routines do you practice here?
• What are the bathrooms like? How about the furniture? Are there laboratories? Playgrounds? Napping rooms?
• Consider the kinds of relationships you would like this space to hold & how people could relate to each other differently based on the proximity and content of their learning?
• Consider how you would like to share space with others here and how different parts of the space are accessed and by whom?
• Are there grades? How are people separated into groups if ever? What are the taxonomies? For ex: traditional school systems will group people by categories such as age, class, geography, "ability", "behavior", and able-bodied-ness.
• Consider the ephemeral aspects of the school as much as the physical aspects.
• In this space, how do you communicate and care for each other?
• What are the emotional qualities of the space?
• What is the weather like?
• Consider the many forms it could take,
• A memory palace with many rooms. In each room a memory of something that someone learned in this room.
• A forest of learning gardens where each participant is a flower and insects carry knowledge back and forth between them.
• A multi-generational interconnected courtyard boarding house with rooms for climbing, rooms for growing, rooms for cooking, rooms for singing.