Calling on makers, designers, healers, dancers, musicians, poets, writers, inventors, entrepreneurs, activists, anarchists, filmmakers, philosophers, students, artists, corporate stiffs, and slow learning geniuses.
I’m looking for a few brilliant and creative people who are interested in joining me in this adventure I call Slow Learning. The following is a list of some of the possible actions we might create together. Look it over. What calls to you?
To respond, use the comment box or email me patricia@playthink.com.
1. Join a community of learners. Meet regularly with other people who are on a self-styled learning path. Discuss. Support. Question.
2. Create individual learning plans. This is a plan you would create with support from an individual or team. Your learning plan is a flexible document that includes goals, focuses, deadlines, timelines, incentives. Updates regularly with a coach, mentor or other witness.
3. Attend workshops, retreats, and intensives. Determined by interest of the group. May be led by other learners or hired from outside. May or may not be open to the public. May be didactic and specific, or may use democratic forms of facilitation such as Open Space Technology.
4. Learn and work in real-world settings with support: mentoring, shadowing, and apprenticeships. Finding and maintaining relationships with expert practitioners in areas of interest. Breaking and entering into the insider network of established communities of practice. May be paid for directly, brokered by a coach, bartered, or gifted.
5. Engage in learning exchanges: Bartering arrangements made within the Slow Learning community. Example: I teach you how to knit, in exchange, you teach me how to use Photoshop. Or I coach you on your public speaking and, in exchange, you fix my bike tire.
6. Give or receive learning gifts: Offers or requests for learning/ teaching with no expectation for return. Example: I edit your drafts because I want to. Or I update your Wiki because I know more than you do.
7. Set goals, refine goals, support for accountability: Part of your learning plan Revisited often.
8. Refine your social networking: The real kind, with meaningful exchanges and face-to-face meetings. More than FB friends and Linked-in acquaintences.
9. Learn about yourself: Enneagrams, dream work, expressive arts, healing circles, divination. Who am I, anyway? What’s so special about me? What’s my purpose/calling in life? What is my most important work?
10. Coach and receive coaching: one-on-one listening and learning from a committed, disinterested (not your bff) listener. Somebody who can offer you some tough love (call you on your shit) from time to time. Offer the same for someone else in the community.
11. Create alternative forms of accredation/ initiation/ certification.