Unschooling is a term coined in the 1970s by John Holt whose books Learning All the Time and Teach Your Own (among others), have empowered parents for decades to homeschool their children in a liberating way. Rethinking the definition of education, schooling “outside the box,” is as unique as every parent and child. It is apparent to those who observe young children that learning does indeed happen in every moment, thus children are naturally their own best teachers. Unschoolers see the community as their school.
Posts filed under Education
Unsiiciyapi, Wawoohola, Cantognake: Humility, Respect, Love-- Healing through Service
What do you get when you merge a life called to support adolescents, spiritual awakening that all are one, and an ongoing relationship with the Lakota people? Omega Commons and a staff that lives to serve in higher truth and humility.
The Creations and Howls of Darryl "Barking Dog" Brown
There is a frenetic energy. There is also a stillness. There is a shape propelling into infinity. There is a cluster of dots, bound so tightly together it makes a heart ache. Here, in this painting, the creative freedom of dreams is restricted only by canvas size. Darryl “Barking Dog” Brown paints to create works that “connect us to the spirit world, through which we may learn to live a more sustainable life on planet Earth.”
Raptors to the Rescue! Wildlife Ambassadors Teach Lessons in Conservation
Like many people I know, if you told me in the summer of 2020 that the pandemic would probably drag on for two years or more, I would not have believed you. In fact, I would have thought you were a negative, defeatist person, and I would have avoided you like—well, the plague.
Hand Crafting: Wet Felted Vessels
Wet felted vessels: Looking for a fun craft to make with the kids or an easy to make, but beautiful, gift for a friend? Learning to wet felt a small vessel is quick and easy. You just need a few supplies, many of which you already have in your home!
Green Living: Putting Our Yards to Bed For Winter
Over the past six months, we’ve witnessed the transformation from last winter’s dormancy into a lush and verdant summer. We’ve been enjoying the fruits of Nature’s labors—beauty, food, and shade from flowers, vegetables, and trees. Now is the time in our cycle when all this foliar production returns to earth. What has increased must decrease. For leafy life to begin anew next spring, all this green must become brown and nourish the soil.
How a Pandemic Transformed My Life After High School--Perspectives and Resources from a 2020 High School Graduate
For the past eight years, music has been my life. As I progressed through high school, I began feeling pressured to say yes to opportunities because I felt like I needed to—for college applications, for my future career as a professional musician, and even as someone that couldn’t let my teachers (who had invested so much into my musical development) down. This pressure came from what I call the “Ann Arbor Excellence Phenomenon” (A2EP) – a force that values external accomplishments more than happiness and well-being.
Crazy Wisdom Kids in the Community: Remote Programs in 2021
What programs and groups are available for kids to connect during social distancing? It’s a problem that has continued to evolve this year as conditions shift, especially for younger ones. I was concerned when after a long spring and summer in semi-quarantine, my daughter seemed a bit sedentary and missed her friends. We enjoy being home, but we’ve never been home for months on end before. So, I started looking for programs that were flexible which we could join now or through the winter.
Book Review: Being at Your BEST When Your Kids Are at Their Worst By Kim John Payne, M.ED.
Have you ever felt the “red mist” (of frustration) rise in you regarding something one of your children said or did? Did it soon follow with saying or doing something you later regretted? Author Kim John Payne understands this experience from the perspective of a parent, but also as a child that witnessed such behavior.
Kids Book Reviews, Winter 2021
New books for kids, winter 2021
What Should We Ask Of Our Ten-Year-Olds?
It’s no secret that it’s a challenging full-time job to raise our children to be capable, contributing adults, especially during a pandemic. Yet, we don’t want to miss that critical middle ground to develop our children’s life skills—the window between the delight of infants starting to walk and the anxiety of teens starting to drive. Since we all have much more time at home with our kids right now, it’s a good time to practice these practical skills. When my own kids started to launch into their adult lives, it was suddenly and starkly apparent that the base of any competency had started years ago.
Preserving the Emerald Arc: The Legacy Land Conservancy Celebrates 50 Years
In 2021, the Legacy Land Conservancy will be celebrating its 50th anniversary. The Conservancy is a nonprofit, the first certified land trust in Michigan and one of the first in the nation, was originally named the Washtenaw Land Trust (WLT) and was founded in 1971 by a number of people in Ann Arbor to protect the Bird Hills Nature Area and other land along the Huron River. Legacy has grown from that modest beginning to holding 82 conservation easements and seven nature preserves, protecting over 9,200 acres of land in Washtenaw and Jackson Counties.
CW Kids in the Community: Love You From My Head To-ma-toes: Ann Arbor’s Immersive Farming Programs For Kids
In a busy age, and now in a time that encourages outdoor activities and social distancing, how do parents help their kids get the most out of outside play time? I recently looked into starting a small cut flower farm on land next to our home. It’s an amazing opportunity to expand my daughter’s knowledge—from watering plants around the house to a full-scale growing operation. This plan may take a few years, if we ever get through the experimental stage, but it got me thinking about how modern parents can get their kids involved in gardening if they don’t have a lot of space in their yard or schedule. Now that Covid is in the picture, we also wanted to check in with local educational and farming programs to find out what is still scheduled for kids.
Great Lakes Herb Faire -- Learning and Sharing The People’s Medicine
Cool wind whistled through the white pines, bringing the first hint of winter on this early September day. I was west of Chelsea, visiting the Great Lakes Herb Faire. The Faire provides classes for herbal and naturopathic practitioners and students, shared ceremony, and time for community meeting. Successful since it began in 2014, the Faire draws herbalists from around the country to speak and present, but its focus remains the Great Lakes region, its plants, and practitioners.
Roxane Chan--A Warrior’s Path
By Debbie Wollard
“Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone… Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good. If it doesn’t, it is of no use.”
—Carlos Castaneda
Dr. Roxane Chan has been a nurse all of her career. She knew that she wanted to be a nurse early on, and even though, as she says, she was naïve and idealistic, somehow she also knew that nursing was a key part of her emotional and spiritual journey. She sees her role as nurse as a vocation, as a piece of who she is, rather than merely what she does for a living.
Chan grew up on the south side of Chicago in a family with a mixture of joys and dysfunction. “In my young life, with the struggles in my family, I didn’t see a clear path to happiness and wellness, until I discovered nursing. Somehow I knew that nursing was going to be my path from dysfunction to health.”
Chan has strong Italian roots and a deep faith shaped by her upbringing and broadened by her life experiences. She tells the stories of how two key women in her life set her on a spiritual and an intellectual path, and helped her link head and heart in all that she does. Her Aunt Shirley gave her books about strong women and encouraged her to read and to learn, giving her a very different message than she received from her teachers and parents. Neither her high school teachers nor her parents expected her to go to college, nor did they encourage her. She sent her own applications off and surprised them all when she was accepted into Northern Illinois University. Four years later, she received her bachelors degree in nursing, and again surprised everyone when she graduated with honors. “My parents were continually startled throughout my graduation ceremony, because I kept standing up as they called my name for honors. In contrast, they were very excited that I was in the NIU Marching Band, and told their friends with pride of that achievement.” Submitting her own college applications, and following through on her acceptance into college by going, was the first time that Chan can remember advocating for herself and charting a course with intention and conviction.
The second woman of note in Chan’s life was her neighbor Angie, who shared her spiritual practices openly, and showed Chan for the first time that there were women priests. Although they didn’t call themselves that, she recognized Angie as a spiritual teacher and watched her carefully. Angie burned palms and said prayers in such a way that it helped Chan begin to create her own rituals. She was raised in the Catholic church and was drawn to the practices of that faith that gave her peace and a firm foundation.
Read related article: The Crazy Wisdom Interview with Dr. Molly McMullen-Laird and Dr. Quentin McMullen, Founders of the Rudolf Steiner Health Center, on Anthroposophic Medicine
She went to public school, but for first communion and confirmation classes the public school students joined the Catholic School preparations. The Catholic School children all wrote “JMJ” at the end of their names on the top of their papers (for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph). Chan wanted to write these initials too, but they weren’t allowed to do so at the public school. She used to say the rosary every night before bed. “We learned that if you fell asleep before you finished the rosary prayer, your guardian angel would finish it. That was magical to me, and I believed it.” Her experience at the Catholic School was so compelling that she wanted to be there every day, to be with the nuns.
As a grown woman, Chan continues to be a woman of ritual—she knows how to set a sacred space and how to hold that space. When I asked her about this, she said that it started at a young age. She would go to church for the special prayers, and she loved to spend time with the nuns. She remembers only kindness from the nuns, and their calm, patient demeanor. These women were the antithesis of what she had at home, and she found comfort and peace there. She told of how she would soothe
herself by reciting the rosary, and how at a young age she would pray for others using the rosary. While Catholicism is not the faith that she practices now, Mary and the Rosary are still important parts of her spirituality.
Chan’s journey in nursing has always included care for the marginalized populations and care for the caregivers themselves, and she has committed her life to working for social change. Early in Chan’s career she was the Nurse Manager at the County Hospital in East Los Angeles, and she is proud to have been part of creating an award-winning unit in the face of low/no funding and minimal basic necessities (no clean water to drink, no air conditioning in the hottest months). Her work with this unit transformed them into a team that was called on to train other teams across the country. “It all started with a large piece of butcher paper hung on the wall with one question: What would you like to learn?” Chan said. “I was thinking they would answer with skills they wanted to learn, but the nurses took the question broader and wrote all kinds of things on this large piece of paper.” Chan went on to say, “Once this happened, and I saw that there was a lot of valuable information written down, they began to trust me, and we began to listen to each other and talk to each other. No one had ever asked them for their thoughts and ideas before, and I opened the flood gates. Talking and listening to each other matters!”
Chan has continued to broaden her “lane” from patient care, to nurse care, to teaching nurses about advocating for patients and being present to patients in a way that only nurses have the opportunity for and considering nursing as a vocation with breadth. She did all of this through her work as an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University in the College of Nursing. She tried to convey her experiences in such a way that the students who were training to become nurses didn’t miss the beauty, complexity, and importance of their role as caregiver. “As nurses we get to be in situations that are very intimate with patients when it comes to wound care and care for their bodies and our presence in their time of need.” Chan got misty-eyed as she tried to convey this complex idea of presence and continued by saying, “I could sit for days and days and think of one beautiful, powerful, meaningful exchange after another. It has been such a privilege to be with people in this way. In our medical model today, the newest nurses could miss this beauty, and I don’t want them to miss it—to overlook the things that remind us that we are all connected.”
After six years at MSU, Chan has finished her time in this role. In reflecting on the things that she is really proud of accomplishing at MSU, she cites examples like how she used innovative and creative methods to teach integral processes for patient care and the medical team approach. She started a holistic student retreat that gave the students the building blocks for not only patient care, but key ingredients and encouragement for self-care. She used her love of, and extensive experience with, drumming circles to teach the students the “Team Steps” process for calling out when they recognize that something isn’t going right in a patient care process.
The drumming circle gives them practice in making “a big noise stop and using their own voice to name what they see is happening.” In a drumming circle, even though the students felt silly sometimes, she had them all (30 plus students at a time) on drums, drumming together, making a big noise and then one by one, they made a grand gesture with their arms or their vocal voice to make the sounds stop. Then, to get the sound restarted they shared a rhythm on their drum that they have made up (representing their own voice), everyone repeats that rhythm before continuing around the circle, giving each student practice to stop the loud noise and start with their own “voice” (drum). Because the students mentioned her name repeatedly, it peaked the Dean’s interest enough to seek out Roxane and ask about her creative teaching methods. This gave Chan comfort and lifts her heart when reflecting on her time at MSU. It is confirmation that the students were understanding her message. She has been glad to be a voice in the MSU program. She has been told that she is “too creative” on more than one occasion. Chan takes that as a compliment.
As she contemplates this time of transition, Chan feels a new wave of work rising, which she calls “Warrior Nurses.” She doesn’t see this as a training, but more of a movement—a movement that, in her minds-eye, has thousands of nurses wearing Warrior Nurses T-shirts and showing fierce compassion for themselves, their patients, their fellow nurses, and society as a whole.
In the workplace, a Warrior Nurse would take the time that they need to eat, go to the bathroom (there are many circumstances where nurses go long periods of time without ever relieving themselves), and the time needed to be present with each patient—fully present. Warrior Nurses would meet difficult circumstances with compassion and be present to themselves and others more fully. “Holding a space of peace is much harder than war or conflict.” Chan is a Mindfulness Self Compassion (MSC) trainer and sees this as key to not only caring for patients, but caring for ourselves. “Acceptance, or meeting people where they are, can only happen because I can meet myself where I am.”
Read related Article: Expanding the Scope: First-Year Medical Students at U-M Shadow CAM Practitioners in the Community
Chan says that “the connections of past experiences with current moments are often surprising. Seemingly random opportunities come back to be meaningful in a current experience.” Navigating transition times takes a lot of energy when done with integrity and intention. She is opting to, as she said, “Go back to the building block skills of first things first” and ask herself the question,“What do I need to do right now?” over and over again.
Chan marvels at all of her years of nursing care and at her evolution as a nurse, mother, teacher, mentor, companion, and sponsor. A clear path doesn’t necessarily mean a direct path. In Dr. Roxane Chan’s life, the only clear path was in nursing, which helped her move from dysfunction to wellness, from the shifting sands of a life in an unstable home to the foundation-building experiences from which she will launch into her next endeavor. She is a Warrior Nurse on a clear path to changing the world one encounter at a time.
Roxane Raffin Chan, PhD, RN, AHN-BC is currently working at Cristo Rey Community Organization as program director and is a member of an eight-person CREDO faculty team providing wellness conferences for Episcopal clergy through the Episcopal Church Pension Group. Chan also maintains her own practice, Chan Body Energy, LLC, where she works teaching mindfulness and self-compassion workshops with individuals and groups in the community. Find out more about Dr. Roxane Chan, and her offerings, at chanbodyenergy.com
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The Benefits of Winter Weather for Kids
In Michigan, the dazzling fall colors usher in the magical first snowfall followed by months of some bitter cold weather. It can be all too tempting to curl up in front of the fire and head outside only for grocery pick-ups and school drop-offs. Yet, the benefits of outside play for kids happen all year long, even throughout the winter months. Despite the effort it takes to bundle in layers, find matching mittens, and pull on snow boots, it is absolutely worth your time to get kids outside!
In Michigan, the dazzling fall colors usher in the magical first snowfall followed by months of some bitter cold weather. It can be all too tempting to curl up in front of the fire and head outside only for grocery pick-ups and school drop-offs. Yet, the benefits of outside play for kids happen all year long, even throughout the winter months. Despite the effort it takes to bundle in layers, find matching mittens, and pull on snow boots, it is absolutely worth your time to get kids outside!
Sacred Smoke: Smudging, Smoke Cleansing, and Purifying Your Space with Intention
Smoke permeates the air. You can see its path and how it spreads. There can be no place that is missed in a place where there is smoke. In so many ways, the smoke takes our hopes and desires and carries them away to be spread across the world. Given this, it’s not surprising that it has been used in spiritual and religious ceremonies around the world and across virtually all cultures. The first recorded use was with incense used by Egyptians as far back as 2500 BC, but it was also being developed in practices in China at the same time. Religious use of incense is prominent in Buddhist, Taoist, and Shinto shrines. These practices saw the burning of incense to be a way of purifying the surroundings and bringing forth Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and Gods.
Celebrating the Ecology Center's 50 year Anniversary--More interviews!
In addition to the interview with Garfield (see the main article here), freelance journalist Sandor Slomovits contacted a few other people who have been associated with the Ecology Center in the past fifty years and asked them to discuss the history and accomplishments of the organization. To provide a multifaceted picture of the EC, he got in touch with people who worked at the EC during various points in its history, and who held different positions and served in a variety of capacities, from staff and leadership, to volunteers.
Our Southern Neighbors: Holistic Practitioners in Lenawee County
While Ann Arbor may be the center of holistic living in southeastern Michigan, the wave of conscious living has rolled across the state. A major area of growth for conscious living practitioners and educators can be found in the heart of Lenawee County. Just a short journey south and west of Ann Arbor you can visit the quaint town of Tecumseh with its many antique and fine gift shops. A little farther south and you’ll find the historic downtown of Adrian, which has been going through a time of redevelopment. Both towns, and many more surrounding them, are finding new growth, development, and interest in holistic living.
Renewal for the Body, Mind, and Spirit at Grass Lake Sanctuary
Clinical trial. Deductible. Dosing. Pre-op. Protocol. Blood work. If you are familiar with any of these terms, you’ve likely had some encounter with health care services in the United States. However, the traditional medical model – a condition-focused, interventional approach controlled by clinical providers – toward health and wellness has been challenged. In seeking recovery via alternative models, Americans are exploring options beyond the doctor’s office. The Ann Arbor area is a nexus for many of these resources, including Grass Lake Sanctuary, a nature-focused retreat space in Manchester that has served the region for over ten years.
To build your pelvic power, it is vital to de-stigmatize the pelvis and its functions. No one feels uncomfortable talking about their arm, leg, or stomach muscles. There are dozens of classes and machines at the gym for building flexibility and strength in these areas—yet none for your pelvic floor.