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When I received a request for Imagining Learning Listening Session planners, I said, "Why not?" and agreed to organize one. Months later, after numerous emails back and forth Charles Kouns (the founder of Imagining Learning) and Mr. Bo Adams (my old teacher who was helping me put it all together), I filled out my consent to be recorded form and knew that the day was finally here.
When I arrived at Unboundary for the "Listening Session," full of energy but unsure of what to expect. I'd heard that a Listening Session was an opportunity to share ideas on what we, as students, imagined school should be. What I found was a fun, small, thoughtful community, bursting with ideas and jokes and smiles. With 6 other students from schools around the metro Atlanta area, led by Mr. Kouns and his partner, Stella Humphries, we started the process of cultivating ideas.
Personally, I hadn't been so sure how easily 6 strangers and I would interact over a topic that lots of people shy away from. But as soon as we started the first round of sharing our responses to 8 journal questions Mr. Kouns had created, I could tell this was going to be something special and exciting. On some questions, our answers were extremely varied, on others (including the unlikely question who was your favorite person as a child), the answers were repetitive, creating connections between us.
The second part of the Listening Session involved telling a story about something you heard (or read) that influence the way you live your life. Here, the experiences were all over the board, but the underlying ideas were pretty similar. Things that stuck in our heads were those that motivated us, pushed us to keep going, or to get back up when we fall.
The final part of the listening session definitely made us all come closer. Stella Humphries of Imagining Learning, led us on our education journey, in our heads, which was to help us collect and roughly visualize all our thoughts. After that, we split into two groups to collectively brainstorm our ideas of what school we wanted in an ideal school and how we visualized that happening. To share our thoughts, we "immortalized" our visuals on paper, painting, drawing and sponge-ing our school to life. Below are photos of our "masterpieces"- the tree that contains the values that group deemed most necessary in a school and the "No Boundaries" Roller-Coaster School. One of my teammates remarked that, "he had never felt prouder of something he'd made."
A big thanks to Mr. Kouns, Ms. Humphries, and Mr. Adams for first and foremost, listening, and for all the work that you do to help make school a place where all children want to go.
I had a great time at the listening session. I gleaned lots of new ideas on what other students actually want in their schools and made new friends in the process. I'm excited to potentially organize one again.
My Listening Session Experience
by Tara Subramaniam
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