Wonder-led Learning - An Outline
An easy-to-implement unschooling framework, no matter where you are
When we began to plan our year of travel unschooling, an experiment for curating educational travel was born. First came a curated five-week-long, thematic trip. The overarching idea was to travel so our daughters, who were 4 and 2 years old then, could interact with a wide variety of wildlife, flora and fauna in its natural habitat.
The themes we chose were based on what already interested our daughters at that point. For example, Tahiti was a search for the real Moana and her grandmother, who swam with stingrays in the Disney movie. Melbourne and Phillip Island were a quest for the fabled “black” sheep who features in baa-baa black sheep the nursery rhyme and whose wool keeps us warm in the Canadian winters. They witnessed the very origin of our gloves by taking part in sheep shearing, themselves. As parent-educators, we believed that connecting every experience to their real, day to day life in Canada was crucial.
From those five, slow weeks spent leisurely in and around the Pacific Ocean, emerged lots of learnings and a framework that we would put to use in each of our travel-schooling excursions thereafter.
A framework emerges
We started curating experiences for Sanaa and Samaa in locations unique to their fascinations — Tahiti, Phillip Island, Auckland, Genoa, driving through the US from Toronto to Vancouver, Yellowstone National Park, New York City, Princeton, NJ, Chiang Mai, Mae Sot on the border of Thailand and Myanmar, Bali, Himalayan foothills of Mussoorie, India. Everywhere, we looked for four types of experiences — anchor, hygiene, day-to-day and ambient. Most importantly, the cornerstone for all of these was a single question —
What are our girls curious about at this point in time?
Some themes and ground rules
There have been a few common themes as to what makes an outstanding learning experience for the kids. Our overarching theme was to take them to visit wildlife in its natural habitat. Architecture, scenery and so on did not interest toddlers and preschoolers, so we left those experiences out and stayed as close to our mission as possible.
We did not aim to budget-travel. While we did not always splurge, we were particular about the quality of our lives on the road. The quality of accommodation and the quality of food we consumed (no McDonald’s was a mantra!) was a priority. However, we did figure out some very cool hacks which almost anyone can benefit from — more on that in the section on financing travel education.
We quickly learnt to let go of our rigid plans and go with the flow. Detours became windows to learning. We watched out for them and proactively followed an interesting rabbit hole if it piqued at their curiosity even if it was not part of the original plans or looked mundane to us. Sometimes we even let go of some bucket list experiences.
And yes, so we steered clear of any bucket list destinations my husband and I would have liked to visit. We did not want to dilute the purpose of this trip — education.
We made meeting people a priority. For example, both the girls spent considerable amounts of time with grandparents and great grandparents this year, which resulted in solid language immersion. They already spoke our mother-tongues, but now they can pass off as natives! Sometimes, we also serendipitously bumped into other world-schoolers with kids of similar ages. We made sure to follow up with playdates etc.
Anchor experiences
Anchors are activities or encounters that are unique to the place we visit and those that can’t be done elsewhere. In the context of travel schooling, these would include learning how to make fresh pasta and pesto sauce in Genoa, Italy.
If you homeschool, this could take the form of visiting the nearest national park, a famous museum or a historical site in your town. You would be surprised how many things you could find about your local town that could never be experienced elsewhere. A black sand beach with access only by walking through small sunflower fields, a fully functional village inside a formidable medieval naval fort, a community of Indo-Portuguese descendants who speak a language unique to this town — these are all experiences you could have only in my little known hometown in Western India. Anchor experiences are everywhere; we just have to find them. We decided to travel out to the other side of the world because in those days we could. With the pandemic, we may all have the opportunity to educate our kids with anchor experiences right next door!
The key to making anchors leave an impression on the child’s mind is through reinforcement. It is the repeated revisiting through repeat visits, pictures and souvenirs that helps the kids internalize the experience. For example, we bought storybooks from each major anchor. Or we called everything dirty that one of them was about to touch “Koala poo”. The reinforcement is needed because anchor experiences are so unique that it is rare for them to be repeated. Koalas are only found in Australia. Only Ubud has an entire forest full of monkeys. And tuk-tuks are an exclusively Thai and Indian mode of transport.
Ambient experiences
Another category of experiences is ambient. For instance, when we travelled to Genoa because it has an ancient port with a long (and dark) maritime history, elements of the maritime life had made their way into everything from the architecture of buildings, to the names of shops and even the souvenirs that were sold in them. Everything had to do with sailing, exploration and Columbus. None of these is things that we were looking for. However, these elements create a vibe that results in activities and environments built around that vibe. This is true of the largest of cities and the tiniest of towns. Moreover, this is a holistic educational experience for the kids because they can now observe first hand the local life of a place, a maritime culture and how that culture shapes the preferences, lifestyle and day to day activities of the people who live in these towns.
It is important to make the trip a little longer than it needs to be. Let boredom in. Only when our schedule is not packed with activities, do their minds become aware of such ambient experiences. Like the ringing of church bells, the chirping of birds, the waves crashing on the pier, the gentle cool morning breeze as I write this while watching the sunrise over the last slivers of snow on the mountain tops. The ambient experiences are those you don’t proactively seek, that you can’t consciously seek. They are more than just the vibe of a place. Rather they are interwoven in the fabric of the place. They come to our children and us by being present in a certain place, inhabited by certain people.
Hyperlocal experiences
The next category of experiences is hyperlocal experiences. These are things that are part of everyday life for the local residents but a big departure from our lives in Canada — for example, taking a few hundred steps to get to the port in Camogli, or taking the bus and the MRT trains in Singapore, or even walking along Jalan Sugriva and Jalan Hanuman in Bali to get to our dance classes, yoga classes or local bookshops in Bali. These show the kids that there are different ways to live and thrive.
These experiences may seem difficult to pick if you are the local resident. However, experiencing life as another demographic in your own city can be fascinating. Taking a route different than your usual one to get to school. Or trying out a new mode of transport every once in a while can add so much flavour to their thinking.
Hygiene experiences
Finally, hygiene experiences are those that make the kids feel at-home, no matter where they are. For our girls, we took the effort to find a playground and play structures in every city we went to. Be it an indoor playground filled with plastic balls in Panama City, or a charming playground with wooden structures and a massive splash pad of fountains in Nice, or even a playground constructed purely out of bamboo and sand in the heart of Chiang Mai. Where there were no playgrounds available, we took them to open spaces for hours of open-ended play. Visits to the neighbourhood playground were a regular part of our life back in Toronto. Having a semblance of the same activities in a foreign city made our girls feel anchored and comfortable. In the absence of such experiences, the girls would feel a sense of loss of the things they love to do. The uprooting would make the transition too harsh for their sensitive minds.
Bringing the experiences together
Not every place offers all four types of experiences. With the exception of anchor experiences (which were the very reason for curating a city), most places offered at least three of the four experiences enough for satisfying their curiosity, experiential learning and yet feeling anchored.
