Marianne Osorio from Wondering School on liberating education

Lisa: Marianne, can you tell us a bit about the Wandering School project and where did the idea come from?

Marianne: Yes, so Wandering School is an independent research project that me and Charlie, we started two years ago. We were visiting some democratic schools in the UK like Summerhill and Sands schools, and I was doing also my master’s research in Brazil in two schools, also democratic schools in Brazil. Charlie, he’s a filmmaker, I’m a teacher, and he offered himself to come with me and help me to collect data in my research. So he was there filming the interviews and filming the dynamics of the schools, and then we realized that we were a good team and we wanted to keep doing this kind of investigation together.

So from that point onwards, we continued this journey, going to schools, visiting, volunteering, experiencing for sometimes, always trying to find some answers to some questions that we have, like: how can we practice liberation education? That’s a big question for us. So our main drive was to find examples of liberating education in practice and also discover how we could build a learning community that was also free for all. Well, we visited many places, but I honestly have many more questions now than answers, so that’s part of the journey as well.

Lisa: And when you say liberating education, what do you define as liberating education and why is that important?

Marianne: I really love this question. So for me, liberating education is really the education that can change the world, that can transform the world, and for me that’s what defines what it is. The reference that we take for liberation education is Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator.

Well, it’s just important to say that liberating education, you can also refer to it with different words. So we can also call it humanizing education or emancipatory education, problematizing education – there are different terms, right? Because it’s also important to not carry a flag as if it was like dogma that we have. So that’s important to problematize that.

But what liberating education is, is an education that happens through dialogue with people, mediated by the world. So what does it mean? It means that we are becoming conscious of the world and becoming conscious of ourselves so we can find our role in this world and transform it. So it’s really based on finding limit situations, so oppressions that we live in ourselves and also that we see in society, and acting towards liberating us from these constraints, from these oppressions, these limitations. So it’s really a process of becoming more conscious, more human, more aware.

And there is no method, there are no prescriptions. Quite often when I mention liberating education, people want me to tell them some techniques, methods, and there are just none. It is dialogue, and dialogue we need to throw down, we need to invent ourselves and really build horizontal relations. And that’s really, really hard. It’s an ongoing process, and it takes a lot of work, a lot of love, a lot of humility, a lot of trust for each other.

So well, that’s why it’s really meaningful to me because the way I understand it, when we are practicing this education, we are already transforming ourselves in the world. And this happens, this can happen all the time, this can happen here in this conversation that we are having. So that’s why it’s important to me – education through dialogue.

Lisa: I really like that. Yeah, that’s the essence of it. And the reason I came across you was because I discovered the Kickstarter campaign for the documentary that you’re making about these schools in the Netherlands who use sociocracy. Could you tell us a little bit about first of all what sociocracy is in a nutshell and how these schools that you’ve visited are using it?

Marianne: So sociocracy is a method for organizing ourselves and also involves making decisions together. It’s a method that is being used in organizations, in communities, and schools. Charlie and I, we also use it in Wandering School, just the two of us, and we can also use it within ourselves as individuals. It’s something that I’m also learning.

It’s a process that is centered around hearing all the voices involved in the organization, in that group. So how can we hear all those voices and really access the collective intelligence of that group? And there are some techniques to do that. One of them is to hear, to make sure that you literally hear everyone’s voices in the ground. And the decision making is then through consent, which is different from consensus. So people don’t have to agree 100% with a proposal for that to happen. So they don’t have to be in total agreement, they don’t have to think necessarily that’s the best thing, but no one has any objection. So then that’s the final consent – no one has an objection for that proposal.

And the objection is really interesting. It’s a really interesting concept because we really feel it in our body. So when I have an objection, I can really feel it. It manifests through our bodies, it’s a sensation that we have, and it’s telling us that there’s something missing, something wrong. So when we really hear these objections, they need to be seen as a gift to the group. They need to be seen as a word of wisdom. If we didn’t have that objection in the group, then the decision that we made would be worse than it could be. So we need to really appreciate those objections. They are not blocks for the proposal, they are ways to make the proposals better.

And for this to happen, we really need to trust that we’re more intelligent together than we are individually. So that’s a lot of work as well. And the way I’ve been seeing this practiced in schools, this comes from the documentary, all of them make decisions through consent. They are organized usually like other democratic schools, so they have the general meeting in the school in which the students, the teachers, and the staff come together to make decisions around how the school should work. So they can bring some proposals to implement or some issues that they want to problem-solve. So they bring all this to the circle and then they discuss and decide through consent. So that’s basically how the schools practice, and this general meeting is open to everyone. So people can come or not, it’s open, so it’s not compulsory.

And they also use sociocracy for conflict mediation. So when there is an interpersonal conflict, they also use sociocracy to hear all the voices of the people involved in that conflict, and then they try to find a way to mediate that, to resolve the conflict through the rounds. So it’s also really beautiful to see this happening.

There is one of the schools, they also practice the circle organization, which is another fundamental part of sociocracy. So the whole organization can work in a fractal pattern. So there are circles linked to other circles, and this could happen on a massive scale. And there is one school that does that. So they have smaller circles with the students, and then a representative and a delegate from each circle come together in a bigger circle. And then a representative and a delegate from this circle comes together with other representatives and delegates from other circles.

So it creates, how to describe it as well, as if it was – I like seeing it as veins, like capillaries and then leads to veins and then arteries. I like this analogy. So they have like a teacher circle, a student circle, staff circle, parent circle, and the representatives from these circles come together in the center in the school circle. So this is the school that works differently.

And they also put into practice the double link, which is characteristic from sociocracy. And in this school, everyone is already in a circle. So once you are in the school, you are in a circle. It’s not about – it doesn’t have the big meeting room that you cannot not participate. Once you’re in the school, you’re in it, and you’re responsible for taking part in it. So I really like this approach.

And for me, the bigger benefit, the greatest benefit of it is it really relies on the dialogue, because I see sociocracy as a great, great tool for practicing dialogue, which again connects to the liberating education. So if we really have a good facilitator that is really holding the space for this dialogue to happen, magical things manifest in that circle. And it’s really beautiful to see that and to experience, because when you are in a circle and you say something about your opinion, and then you hear everyone after you, and then when it comes back to you, you change. You change your mind, or you’ve already changed your perception. Now I can see from a much wider view. I was able to notice my own blind spots and my own limitation.

So from this point, we are really opening up for – I think there is – we are opening up for immense power. And this process also allows us to break polarity. So it’s all about integration and coming together to really access this collective intelligence and find what we can do together that suits for all of us. So that’s the greatest benefits that I see.

Lisa: That really stood out for me in what you were talking about. You said people become responsible for participating in the school, in the organization, and for students in particular to be active participants in deciding how things are done and how we are as a school. It seems to me like a real paradigm shift in the education system.

And I’m curious as well because sociocracy is one example of a tool or a practice, if you like, that as you say helps facilitate these dialogues and helps facilitate a decision-making process. And I’m wondering what other tools or practices that you’ve come across to help that, because I think in many ways these are skills that we haven’t often learned in traditional schools or traditional workplaces. And I had heard of sociocracy used in organizations, but I haven’t heard of it used in schools before, and that was what really intrigued me. So I think any tools and practices that we can share with each other to help unlearn and relearn these skills of being together and having dialogues together are really helpful.

Marianne: Definitely. I really want to bring attention to what’s happening in Brazil and South America because I see that there is a great movement happening there, which is not being really shown on TV or in the mainstream media. And there are some great examples of how liberating education is happening. So I really would like to tap into that.

For example, there is one school, which is a school that I researched for my master’s. They have the students do individual researches. So each student can choose a topic to do individual research every semester, and they have also a tutor that helps them to go through this path. And they also have study groups, which the themes are decided by the students and by the teachers together, and they tend to find things that they would like to explore in that topic.

And there is a very interesting story that I wanted to share because I think it illustrates a bit how liberating education can happen. So there is this girl, the student, and in her first semester of research, she wanted to do a research about cute animals. She wanted to share like pictures of cute animals. And the teachers back then were questioning: “Is this really a research topic? Should we – how can we support her to do her research?” Anyway, so they gave space for that to happen.

And then the second semester, she started to investigate why some animals were treated so well while others were treated so badly. She started to notice that there was a big division. There are a lot of animals being abandoned and suffering violence, and many other animals have been treated like princesses. So she started to pay attention to that. So you can see from one semester to the other, she really developed critical thinking. She started to go deeper in her research, and she also developed a methodology to investigate that. So she did interviews, she went to pet shops, and she came up with a method for her research.

And then on the third semester, she was in a study group about the Cold War, and the students choose which groups they go to. So she was in that, and what caught her attention in that group was the story of Laika, the dog who was sent to space and the dog died in the mission. So she got really – she felt real emotion at the story, and then for some reason, Laika caught her attention and she got interested in understanding more about socialism and capitalism. So that was the theme of her research in the third semester.

And then in the fourth semester, there were big protests happening in São Paulo to reduce the bus fare because there was a proposal to increase the bus fare, and there were massive protests around that. And the teachers from the school were going to these protests for public – for the right for public transport. And she got so interested in that. So then she started to go to the protests. She interviewed people in the streets, and her fourth research was about this movement that was happening.

So I like to tell this story because, well, of course there is the dialogue going on there between the educators and the students, right? And the teachers really had to allow the student to follow her interests, and they trusted that she’d find her way to just follow her interests and that she would at some point go deeper and deeper into reality. But this only happened because the teachers facilitated this. It only happened because they gave space.

And I’m very close to the teachers, and I know that they’re very critical people. They’re really reflective. They are constantly reinventing their practice. They’re constantly questioning: what are we doing here in this school? And I think because of those questions and those reflections, the students also practice that. So we need to be models.

So I don’t know if – I don’t know any other specific tool for dialogue, but I know that it’s all about being together and investigating together, sitting next to each other and investigating. Yeah, it’s just investigating together, finding the questions and the answers that we want to learn more about. So this was the results of this.

Lisa: It strikes me that there’s a lot about those teachers that you know, while working in those schools in Brazil and South America, there’s a lot about their way of being and moving away from this paradigm, I think, of teachers as experts and much more towards teachers as facilitators, or as you say, people who hold the space for people to inquire into things.

Marianne: Yeah, I don’t think that the methods, even sociocracy, if we learn sociocracy as robots, we’re not practicing liberating education either, you know? We – it’s about humanizing ourselves. So we really need to be doing work within ourselves. What human beings do we want to be? How can we become more than we are now, when we admit that we have so much to grow? So that’s the starting point.

Lisa: I don’t know if you visited along your tour of these schools, if you visited ESBZ in Berlin?

Marianne: No, I haven’t, but I’d love to go there.

Lisa: Yes, because it makes me think of when I spoke to one of the teachers there. All of the staff at ESBZ have trained in nonviolent communication, the Art of Hosting, Team of Teams based on General Stanley McChrystal’s work. So there’s a real focus there on personal development and starting with yourself first.

And I was also learning from them about how teachers there really do regard themselves as facilitators and sometimes even just timekeepers, because they have slots where children can choose their lesson for that session. So they have these kind of prepackaged units of learning that they can choose from, and then they can work together or alone. There’s lots of flexibility about how they learn together. And if they have a question, they have to first ask two peers, two fellow students, before they ask a teacher. So there’s a real focus on social learning.

And also to your point about liberating education being bigger than ourselves and looking at community and looking at the impact that we have on the world, at ESBZ, their whole curriculum is designed around the UN goals for sustainability. So students there do projects following a sort of similar process to the design thinking methodology. And they – so there was one group I was learning about of students who were looking at refugees in Berlin. So they spent the first kind of empathize stage of the project interviewing people in their community, immigrants and refugees, and understanding their struggles. And then they start to think about how they could prototype some kind of project or service or product that would help these people feel more integrated. So there was really much more of an emphasis on students as citizens, I suppose, of the world.

Marianne: That’s beautiful. I love to hear that. I really care. I’m keen to go there. I heard a lot of great things about this school.

Lisa: I’d love to hear some more stories or examples, maybe some of your favorite discoveries as you’ve been researching different schools around the world. What are some stories that you could share with us about liberating education in action?

Marianne: Well, I think the stories that I just shared were on this line. What’s happening in this school called Politeia, it’s really interesting because they are all the time reinventing the way they work in the school.

I can tell my story. So for example, in this school, when I was there, they were having a meeting in which a student brought this proposal. She wanted to sell old stuff, old materials that she had in the school so she could get money to buy her – to buy an iPhone. So she was bringing this proposal to the circle. And I found that was really interesting because you can see that she was really driven by this individual interest. Like, “I want to sell my things, and I want to get my money to buy maps or to buy my iPhone.”

And I really loved the discussion that unfolded from that because one of the teachers brought the questions: “Is the school the space for this? Because what community do we want to create here? And when you bring this proposal, there are some – we need to consider there are some students here are not going to be able to pay for the things that you bring. Some students here don’t even deal with money yet. And should we – do we want to create this division in this school?”

And he proposed to do some swap fests in the school so they could be swapping. And they also said to her, “You can also do this online. You can put your things to sell online.” Of course, it’s nice to encourage as well this autonomy from the students so they can be more entrepreneurs and find ways to get what they want as well. But maybe isn’t – we need to wonder, like, is the school the space for that? And what issues can we identify from this proposal?

So if we’re looking at the situation from a sociocratic perspective, he had an objection to this proposal. And I found it really interesting to see. And then I was interviewing this teacher at some point, and I asked him, “Wow, I found this dynamic really interesting, and I can see that you and the teachers, you have an ideology, a vision of education, right? And you are also very inspired by Paulo Freire. And then when the students bring certain proposals and issues that maybe challenge this vision that you have, how do you – how are you with this? Do you experience any contradictions?”

And he said, “Yes, I experience contradiction every day. It’s always a challenge because I want to allow the space for the students to bring proposals and be autonomous, but I also have my own political views. I also have my intention as an educator for education.”

So this is a constant contradiction playing that we need to be really reflecting: what is the role of education? What is the role of school? What is the purpose of education? Because there’s a lot of alternatives coming up, but I feel that there’s a lot of disconnection from the reflection: what’s the purpose of school? Why are we creating this in the first place?

Lisa: I’m curious what your answer to the question “What is the purpose of school?” would be.

Marianne: Well, it would be to practice liberating education. And then what liberating education is, again, is to transform the world. So for me, we need to be practicing education in itself. For example, what Freire calls liberating education, Dewey calls just education. So if we see that the school is a place that can actually practice education or liberating education, is this the place that was set for this, that allows this education to happen – for me, this is the purpose of it: to allow this kind of education to happen, to have a space for it.

Because in our daily life, of course, maybe you don’t even need a school for this to happen. But if we look to our daily life, the way we have – we’ve been working, maybe we’ll realize that we need – we do need spaces to come together. We do need spaces that bring the community together. I mean, we don’t need spaces that allow us to learn from each other because we are so disconnected from one another. Then I see that there is a massive need for us to come together and find ways to put this education into practice.

Lisa: I think it’s a real passion of mine to learn more about alternative models for education because I think the current education system is so outdated. And we’re learning more and more that we have no idea in the future what jobs there are going to be, what skills are going to be needed. We know we’re facing all sorts of complex problems, and schools, the mainstream schools today, are not designed to prepare young people for that. They’re designed to kind of – the analogy I like is that most schools today are following the principle of filling buckets instead of lighting fires.

So I love everything you’ve been saying about liberating education and community and transforming the world because that’s really what we need to prepare young people for. And one of my kind of conflicts is that all of these wonderful schools, alternative schools out there that are championing these ideas and liberating education, are in the minority. And a lot of these schools have scholarships, I know, so they do offer places to people who couldn’t otherwise afford, because most of them are private schools.

And I look at somewhere like Finland, and I see that there, that’s an example of a country that has taken some of these ideas, and I think it’s starting to infiltrate the mainstream education system now. But in most – if I think about the UK where I’m from, it’s still a very small number of alternative schools like Summerhill, for example, whereas the mainstream education system is still very rigid and outdated. And I wonder what your thoughts are on how we can make a shift that will affect a larger population of young people that aren’t able to afford these alternative schools perhaps.

Marianne: I know this is a question, and I also have it. And this was one of the questions that drove me to this investigation. And I must be honest with you, I don’t know the answer. I really don’t. I wish I did.

I’ve seen some people building learning communities in a way that they are aware of this issue, and they are trying to make it more inclusive. So for example, there is a school in Brazil that they save 50% of the vacancies, the places for students that can pay, for students that cannot pay. I don’t know if this is enough. This is a possibility. I don’t know if it’s the best, but it makes me wonder, it makes me reflect, because we also live in a world that some people can pay a lot actually for education while others can’t. So this is a way to maybe compensate that, I don’t know.

There’s also this learning community that I was talking about earlier. It starts as an NGO, and they get funds from the state because they also work with unprivileged communities. So they get funding from the state, and they also get funding from individuals. So they sustain themselves financially like this. So no one pays for this school. So it’s a free school all the way as an NGO. So it’s not a state school, but it’s a free school. So these are some alternatives that I’ve seen.

But I’m more interested in thinking how we can bring this change to the mainstream, how we can start building this transformation from within the state system. And there are many people doing that already. The challenge is when we are doing it alone. I was working in a state school in Brazil, and I felt I was really working on my own, trying to do my micro work in that classroom. And today I look back with a bit of, yeah, a new insight, because I should have come together with more teachers. And there were many brilliant teachers there as well that I’m pretty sure could come together with me, and we could together be more intelligent about what to do.

So I definitely see there are gaps, there are cracks in the system, and we should be searching for those. I know that now I’m in – I keep talking about Brazil, that’s my main reference, that’s where I’m from. In Brazil as well, there is a group of people that are mentoring the transformation within the state system. And there are around 200 schools now that have been going through this process to go from a mainstream school to a learning community like the one I told you before.

So it starts with a nucleus of teachers, not only teachers – sorry – teachers could be with parents, with students, whoever in that community that wants to change school the way it is. They come together and they start working together, developing projects in that context that gradually will attract more people from the community because they will start to see the value of those practices. So I see it’s really possible to do a lot from within. It requires a lot of courage and a lot of trust in each other to do that, but it’s possible. So that’s it.

And when I see what also is happening in Israel now, there are democratic schools, all of them. And in India, there is a massive movement with hundreds of thousands of children running children’s parliaments. And this is outside school. All the way the meetings happen in the schools – the school lets the space for this to happen, but the children organize themselves outside the school into streets, in their communities, to deal with problems, with local problems.

So I am also interested in what is possible to do outside school, what kind of non-formal education movements can we create on the streets and the public spaces that are already available? So there’s also some movements like this that are happening that’s really inspiring.

Lisa: I love the idea of children’s parliaments. And I can get echoes back to what you were saying before about school – doesn’t have to be like the be-all and end-all of education. It’s kind of – I think the value of school, as you say, is that it can become a space and a community in which people can learn and to facilitate those dialogues. But learning and education in general, I really like this much big-picture thinking and more systems thinking, I guess, of education can be many things and in many parts of our lives and in communities and so on, that it doesn’t have to be this limited – you know, you go to school and that is the only place where you do learning.

Marianne: Yeah, it’s exactly.

Lisa: What are your thoughts about the future of education, then? Are you optimistic or pessimistic?

Marianne: Well, after your last question, I think I’m feeling quite optimistic now. But I don’t know if I can say that I’m optimistic or pessimistic. I definitely oscillate between both. There are moments that I feel really pessimistic, moments that I feel really optimistic.

I feel pessimistic when I see that there is a lot of alternative education projects being built all over the place, but in the biggest scale, a lot of the time what’s happening is creating more division between the poor and the rich. And the state’s – the education that’s happened in the state schools, in the mainstream, is really being marginalized.

So well, if I have the privilege to create a school for my son or to pay for this democratic private school here, then of course I’ll choose this for my son. I can understand that. But then who’s taking care of what’s going on in the mainstream, in the state system? And if we keep leaving this aside, then we are actually being responsible for increasing this division. And this concerns me a lot. So thank you for your previous question around this because I see this is a big problem. And I’ve been through this trip, I’ve been really able to see from this wide view, and this is making me feel a bit more pessimistic about the whole scenario.

But when I see what is happening in Israel, when I see what’s happening in India, when I see what’s happening in Brazil, I feel optimistic because I see that there’s a movement, a growing movement that is happening from the ground. There’s really a grass movement that’s happening. And people are really coming together to problem-solve this.

And what is happening in India is literally hundreds of thousands of kids, and there are also neighborhood parliaments there. And they are becoming autonomous in such a way that they actually don’t rely on the state anymore. They don’t rely on that. They are replacing the state control. So it’s really fascinating because they’re creating their own little projects and becoming self-sufficient and sustainable. They are finding ways to deal with local problems in the neighborhood. So well, if we actually manage to do that, we are – yeah, they are really building something great. It’s I’ve never seen anything like that. So this makes me feel really optimistic.

Lisa: Thank you, Marianne.