 Good afternoon, and welcome to another episode of Pacific Partnerships in Education. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, here on Think Tech Hawaii. Welcome, and thanks for joining us. Pacific Partnerships in Education is all about some of the amazing work that's happening in the region, all sorts of different educational efforts and endeavors we've featured here, and today we have a very, very interesting group here. We have Nina Blanco. Welcome, Nina, and Dyson Chi. Nina is a former art school student. She's been involved in all sorts of interesting things. She's a former executive director of Agile Learning Centers. Dyson is a student. He was a graduate of Honolulu Waldorf School, right, and has had homeschooled since then. What are you talking about? Self-directed learning. Now, I guess the obvious place to start is let's get a definition here. Nina, maybe you'll give us a quick definition of what you think of self-directed learning. Sure. Self-directed learning, I think, essentially, to me, it's creating one's own life. By that, I mean you're in the driver's seat of your learning. You're making choices based on your interests. You're making choices based on the things that call to you that you may be passionate about, or what you might be curious about. Self-directed learning in a nutshell is an experience, a very personal experience, a very natural process that we all experience as human beings and just, you know, no different than a child learning to walk just by being in a world of other people that walk. Sure, sure. Dyson, Nina. I think for me, the very literal term is just being able to, as the learner, being able to decide how you're going to learn, because it is your own education, therefore you should have at least some say in how you're going to be learning. Right. And you see, that's very different than what many of us went through, right? I mean, for many years, I went through schooling and was just, you know, I was sort of told, open your textbook here, read this, learn this, do this. It was, nobody asked me, do you want to do this, you know, would you like to do this or that? Nobody sort of said, let's think about when we'll do these things. They just sort of told you, and it was very structured. And so what you're talking about here, and yet at the same time, I guess I have to say, learning by its very nature is inherently a self-directed process. Nobody can sort of actually force you to learn anything, right? You're going to learn something because you want to learn it. Now you may be driven to learn it by external or internal factors, right? Something about pay you or give you some incentives to learn, right? Right. So, but you made a good point, Ian. This is very much, I mean, it really is how we are obviously sort of built to learn. Infants learn languages without anyone telling them, sit down and read this book or look at this alphabet and do these kids learn to talk, right? And they learn to talk just fine without any real formal training in it, right? Yeah. So what sort of stimuli did your interest in self-directed learning? How did you get involved in it? Well, I remember really not liking school growing up. I actually hated it, but I had a great social life though. I loved my friends. I had positive relationships with teachers. But I, you know, when it came to classes and grades, that was just not my priority. I actually remember when I was around, younger than Dyson, around 14 or 15, and I was like, Mom, hey, what's homeschooling? Because whatever that is, I want it. I don't want to be here at school. You know, and I ended up going through high school, but I got to a point where I knew I was so clear I did not want to go to college. But, you know, after a lot of convincing from my parents, I did go to art school. And I didn't know why at the time, but I was drawn to creating spaces and designing spaces for learning and for healing. And I didn't know, you know, what that was about. But later on, after I graduated, I, you know, I kind of dove back into it and started to research more about designing schools, designing, you know, what's really happening, you know, what's innovative right now about designing schools. And I realized, wow, there's a lot of changes that are happening, happening in education across the board, you know, pedagogy, just different alternative education models. And when I realized, you know, alternative education is a thing, I was just blown away. I was like, wow, if I knew that these options were available, as I was a kid, then, you know, I think that life would have been very different. But all good, you know, and ever since then, I really just realized, you know, self-directed learning is how I've lived my life and how I've seen my life, you know, through, you know, through that lens. And so I've been an advocate ever since, ever since then. And Dyson, you've experienced this, right? You've, for a number of years, you've been essentially a self-directed learner, right? Yeah, I mean, I guess right now you could say I'm a self-directed learner. But how it came to me, I think it started a lot with, as you said before, I went to older school. And so it started with that mindset of being open-minded to other alternatives, other forms of schooling. And then once it started homeschooling, it just came to me really naturally. I never pushed for it in particular, nor did my parents. It was just something that I evolved and adapted into. Yeah, but it's much easier in that situation, right? Because you're sort of negotiating all the time with your mentor then about what should we look at today, what should we focus on now, rather than a teacher sitting in front of a class of 30 people trying to sort of keep chaos to a minimum. And so much, I think, of the classic model really is it's teachers trying to control a class and keep it from erupting into chaos. And of course, nowadays, as you point out, you know, the change is teachers actually welcome a certain amount of that chaos in a classroom, like some teachers, and sort of make it work for them, right? But it is a... So talk a little bit about these agile learning centers. You were the executive director of a pilot here a couple of years ago. Yeah, a couple of years ago. So agile learning centers is a network of intentional communities. And I think that these communities have this profound respect for young people. And I think they embody that and they promote that. And, you know, we create a space where people come together and simply learn with and from each other. So the emphasis on building healthy relationships with each other first, right, being human first. And then along with, you know, supporting self-directed learners, there's agile tools that are put in place, you know, and also created by the groups to sort of make it so that, you know, how can we collectively create the space together? How can we also, you know, do our own thing as individuals and follow, you know, what we're interested in learning about as individuals, but also with each other, right, in a safe way? Right, but how does that work? I mean, isn't there some curriculum you're supposed to cover? I mean, some set of information that your students, if you will, are supposed to deal with? So if somebody sort of says, I don't want to deal with math, you can't just sort of say, oh, that's fine. You never have to deal with math, right? You've got to do something with it, right? Well, I think that's an interesting question, because in agile learning centers and from my experience in alternative education models, that's not really kind of the question that comes up because the learning is already happening and usually it doesn't look like it. You know, sometimes it looks like it, like, you know, some students do choose to read out of a book or join a class, whether it's online or in person or create a class themselves, you know. So some of the things that they do look like formal learning, but most of the time I would say it's more natural and organic and they're learning from really just being present and being surrounded by other people that are self-directing their learning or supporting that, yeah. So there's no fixed curriculum in these centers, I guess by its very nature that it can't be, but still I sort of wonder how do you assess, how do you evaluate the success of that learning experience for somebody? I mean, for me personally, the evaluation of success isn't necessarily your grading, it's what you've learned and how you can apply that learning to real life because right, those grades, you know, it's nice to get good grades, I'll say that, but does it help you in real life? Because ultimately, when you're learning, you're trying to further your own, you're trying to make it better for your life, right? If that wasn't the point, why would you be learning? And so that's the success right there. If you were able to use that time whatever you learned and you can apply it into your life, whether it be now or 10 years later, it's worth it. Yeah, that connection that you speak of is really, I think, a critical part, and that's what, at the same time, that's really the motivation, too, is you have to help learners see those connections and give them a reason to want to explore some topic or some field, right? Yeah. So they understand this is not just an arbitrary thing, but math, again, perhaps it's fitting in with, you know, if they're studying the coral reef. Again, you're probably going to be counting things, you're going to be doing surveys, you know, all of which involves math. Right, there's layers and layers of different subject matters that are constantly interacting with each other, and so, you know, when something doesn't look like they're learning, but really, you know, maybe they're at the beach and they're real, they're learning, you know, about the ocean. They're learning about, you know, just being out there and observing and being around the people that study the ocean or enjoy being there. I know Dyson's always had a love for the ocean since I've known him, you know. Yeah, and there's no reason you can't learn anything you need to learn. I had a render teacher some years ago who, one year, their physics textbooks they had ordered before they left on vacation and just didn't show up, and they suddenly came back with no physics texts for their high school physics class, and so this teacher took their class out and started wandering around the campus, and they came across a mud puddle and started talking about this and what was going on in this mud puddle, and apparently he spent the better part of the first term actually studying the mud puddle and using that as sort of the basis for their physics class, you know. There's a lot of stuff, you know, surface tension, there's evaporation, there's entropy, you know, there's all these different kinds of things you can get into and discuss. So, yeah, it is... And that sort of freedom, I think, is maybe growing now, even in the formal education system, right? Yeah, I think that there are formal education, you know, private schools and public schools that are realizing, wow, you know, there's something that we need to change about what the system is, and, you know, it's arguable to say whether or not that can be reformed or changed, but I think, yeah, people are definitely accepting of the fact that, hey, we need a new paradigm, we need something, a new model to work off of, and now the question is not so much do we need it, but how do we do that? How do we implement it, you know? Right, again, it gets us sometimes called learner-centered, right, instead of being focused on what the teacher is putting out, is focused on what the learner wants, needs, can do, will do, right? Yeah. How the teacher can best support that and provide resources for knock barriers out of the way, right? That's good. And so this obviously has clear benefits in terms of, certainly, the learner's motivation, right? The learner's feeling of control, right? Suddenly as much more, the locust control is all on you, right? You get to say, hey, let's pursue this, right? Which must be a great feeling if you find something that's exciting, right? Yeah, totally. I mean, like, if you think about it, you're in control of my own learning. My learning is my life, right? I'm responsible for it. So very much it's tied into what I do, into my life. Right, so, but again, did you ever find, maybe this would be a question for your mom, your dad, your mentors, did you ever find that they had to sort of help pull you in other directions a little bit to help sort of give you some breadth in your learning? That's a very good question. I would say, I mean, maybe I've just been really lucky. More often than not, I've been able to decide which path I wanted to take and my mentors, my parents, they've been able to help me the entire way. They've approved of it right then and there. But I suppose it could happen where your mentor tries to influence which direction you're going. But for me personally, I've been very lucky, yeah. Yeah, just in terms of trying to create a sort of well-rounded person, right? You do have to know a little bit about a lot of stuff to be well-rounded, right? I've got no sound language, have some communication skills, have some quantifiable computational skills, have some knowledge of how the world actually works around you, have probably some appreciation of artistic stuff, music, etc. But, okay. So, one of the issues I know sometimes asked about self-directed learning is how does that work with more technical, didactic, obscure stuff? So, nobody is going to sort of stumble other than a few random geniuses. It's going to stumble on something like quantum mechanics by themselves, right? They're not going to like, oh gee, I really want to learn about quantum mechanics. So, do you just not deal with stuff like that? I mean, if it doesn't come up, you just don't deal with it? Well, I'll start off by saying I actually, I'm not a genius but quantum mechanics is pretty awesome and I love studying it. But yeah, no, I think that when it applies to the learner, if it's along their interests, if it has to do with their environment or issues in the world that pertain to them or their family or their community, then I think it kind of comes naturally that they go in-depth into something if it really concerns them on a personal level. I think Dyson can definitely speak to this with Project Ocean with the environment, the effects of global climate change and just we live in the middle of the ocean, so that absolutely pertains to all of us. Excellent, and we're going to get to Project Ocean but right now I'm being told we have to take a quick break. Oh, okay. Ethan Allen here, your host for partnerships in education. Nina Blanco and Dyson Chi are with me here. We're talking about self-directed learning and we'll be back in one minute. My name is Emmy Ortega Anderson inviting you to join us every Tuesday here on Pinoy Power Hawaii. With Think Tech Hawaii, we come to your home at 12 noon every Tuesday. We invite you to listen, watch for our mission of empowerment. We aim to enrich and lighten, educate, entertain, and we hope to empower. Again, maraming, salamat po, mabuhay, and aloha. Aloha. This is Winston Welch. I am your host of Out and About where every other week, Mondays at 3 we explore a variety of topics in our city, state, nation, and world, and events, organizations, the people that fuel them. It's a really interesting show. We welcome you to tune in and we welcome your suggestions for shows. You got a lot of them out there in some studio here where we can get your ideas out as well. I look forward to you tuning in every other week where we've got some great guests and great topics. You're going to learn a lot. You're going to come away inspired like I do. I'll see you every other week here at 3 o'clock on Monday afternoon. Aloha. Welcome back to Pacific Partnerships in Education. I'm your host Ethan Allen. With me today in the Think Tech studios are Nina Blanco and Dyson Chi. We're talking about self-directed learning. Just before the break, we were getting into a certain example of some of the sort of outputs, the projects that you can get involved with. And you've got this thing called Project Ocean. Maybe Dyson, tell us a little bit about what Project Ocean is. Yeah, totally. So, Project Ocean, before I talk about what it is, I'm going to get into why I got into it. So, I'm a big ocean guy. I love snorkeling, school diving, bodyboarding. And so, the beaches, more often than not, I'd see plastic on the beaches. Stuff that people leave behind or stuff that came from the ocean. And so, I eventually got to the point where I just thought to myself, okay, something needs to be done about this. And so, being a homeschooler, I think I have the time, I can take up, I can take up this issue. And so, that's where Project Ocean started, basically. And so, Project Ocean, it's focused on the issue of plastic pollution. And I do a lot of work going out to schools, doing education to other youth my age. And just trying to raise awareness and support for this issue. Because we are living in Hawaii, we're surrounded by the ocean. And we depend on how the ocean for our very survival, for example, like 50 percent, over 50 percent of our oxygen comes from the ocean. You lose that. It's not going to go well. So, yeah. It just came out of a need that I saw. Okay. And what does it do? What does Project Ocean consist of? Consist of, you know? So, basically, I mean, I'm the founder and the only member of Project Ocean. It's just an individually run project, non-organization, nothing fancy. And we do a lot of, like, just basically taking up this issue of plastic pollution, but showing other people, other youth who are my age who might feel kind of either overwhelmed about this issue or feel like they can't do much about it. It's to show them and be the proof that they can do something about it, that everyone can do something about this issue. We all have the power to do so. Sure, sure. That's great. That's very much part of learning, right? One of the fundamental things is gaining that empowerment and that realization that, yes, I can make this happen. I can do this if I want. I can do that if I want. That option. So, this is then very much this gets the whole issue of sort of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. And in traditional schooling, it's a whole lot of extrinsic, right? There's grades, there's gold stars, there's slaps on the wrist, you know, these different kinds of rewards and punishments. But in self-direct learning, it's really all, do I want to do it? Does that feel good? Does it make me happy to do this on my board with this now? Yeah, definitely. For me, like I said earlier before the break, the main motivation is that it's my life. I know that what I'm learning is going to directly impact what I do. Therefore, I'm motivated to keep on going. Not only that, because I get to choose what I get to learn, it's usually already interesting. If I'm choosing the first place, I'm already, I already have the will to learn about it. That's the main thing. Yeah, you're already short past the big thing. The early stage of any learning is that engagement, right? Because you're sort of almost automatically engaged with whatever you're studying. Now, teachers often struggle to get the students up to that first, over that first hurdle, right? Where they care about a subject, where they care about an idea, a topic, enough to pay any attention to it. And I think also extrinsic motivations also tend to be that carrot-on-the-stick mentality where you're striving and chasing after something that isn't, you know, something that you've called forth to begin with. It could be grades or gold stars or even particular jobs or a certain income, right? So, I think self-directed learning, what that does is that it kind of brings us back into the present moment and that's a powerful thing. You know, when you have people like Dyson and young people who are just just really focused and honed in on the things that they really care about, they're able to really go in depth in that and take it as far as they want to go. Right. So, we've been talking about this a lot from the perspective of the learner, which is critical, but shifting gears for a moment, it strikes me that this puts very different burden on a teacher, on a mentor-teacher, a facilitator of learning, right? I mean, their traditional teaching preparation really is of questionable worth, maybe in this case, to guide a self-directed learner, right? So, how do you deal with that? I mean, are there training programs for teachers of self-directed learners? There's a contradiction in terms, right? Yeah. No, that's an interesting question. I think that there's definitely support out there. There are more and more programs coming up that do support facilitators, is the word I would use, facilitators, co-leaders, mentors. These are the kinds of roles that adults play when it comes to self-directed learning as opposed to a teacher that's the authority figure, right? So, the adult kind of becomes this, self-taught learner and someone who is a guide, right? And is available to the learner when they need them, right? And so, when you have these guides around you, you have access to information. We all have the internet. We have access to a lot of information. So, it's just about, first and foremost, having trusting relationships and then from there, anything is possible. Yeah. Yeah, and in that sense, it really is a way if you think of it that is how before the advent of formalized schooling, how people did really learn and was right with older community members had a store of knowledge they had gained through experience, they had gained from their elders when they were younger and they passed that along basically and the young people discover more and more different things sometimes and build on that and knowledge basically keeps growing and growing. And now, of course, we all have access to the internet and sort of more knowledge and more information at least than we could ever shake a stick at, right? Yeah. And the guiding part, I guess, becomes more and more critical about how do you help someone focus, get them focused to focus on the right sources of information. Yeah, or just be available as someone to because we're not self-directed learning in our own little bubbles. In life, naturally, we're constantly collaborating with other people. We're bouncing ideas off of other people and, you know, it's never just one person learning one thing. Yeah, again, that's a difference. Traditional schooling has been done as a very solitary thing. Everyone takes their own test. You rarely collaborate with your peers. It's known as cheating. That's kind of a bad name. Right. And yet in the real world, a lot of stuff we do, almost everything we do is sort of a collaborative undertaking right from your relationships with your friends to any workplace you're in almost any kind of project in this day and age you're going to have different people. If you're building a car or fixing your boat or climbing a mountain there's multiple people involved typically, right? Yeah, so teaching that, as you said that you're human first and building those relationships becomes really the very central to the whole business. Absolutely. You know, again, this fits very well with what we know about neuroscience in the brain. Really how we're wired to behave or fundamentally a very social animal. Yes. We pay a lot of attention to one another and follow the lead of others. Yeah, excellent. Excellent. So, where do you see this going? I guess it's maybe the next question. Is this going to really sweep the world, do you think? Or is it just always going to coexist with more traditional forms of instruction? What do you think, Dice? For me, I'm no soothed there but I see this as a growing trend. It's becoming trendy because ultimately not everyone fits into just one form of schooling. So, while I don't see the current form of schooling just disappearing I do see both of them having an equal amount, I would say of people trusting in that in that form of schooling. At least that's what I would hope for. Yeah, that makes sense. There are people who probably do pretty well in organized schooling. I did pretty well in it. It's okay with me, you know. I was ready and willing to be led. But yeah, there are people who clearly doesn't fit. The whole story has a famous quote about all the greater mass that people take away from schoolings loathing the schooling, you know. But so you agree that you think it's growing and it's going to become... Absolutely, I think it's like you said earlier it's the natural way before conventional schooling was a thing how many years ago. And we're kind of coming back to that but also with a whole bed of tools and technology to support us in discovering even further human advancements, I think. So yeah, and I think your last question about the formal schooling and how that might pair or meld with self-directed learning. I think that self-directed learners opt into classroom settings or college classes or even online classes all the time. It's definitely an option. It's an inclusive model. I think it's just a matter of how far people are willing to kind of let the old classroom traditional conventional schooling model dissolve in a different way that's useful and make more space for self-directed learning. Right, and then it leaves the key issue you worked out is again sort of the credentialing the grades, if you will, at the end of it which are much harder to determine in a real sense in self-directed learning. But as you say it's, I mean fundamentally if you're sort of happy with what you've learned and you're connecting it well and you're getting the knowledge to work by that demonstration you sort of QED have succeeded, right? You've gotten your A, you know? Yeah, there you go, exactly. Yeah, so real quick I know you had a you run a Facebook group that deals with this. Yeah, Liberating Hawaii's Youth is a Facebook group that I had opened some time ago, I think 2013 when I first started studying alternative education so just constantly putting articles up and new things that are going on in self-directed learning and And you have Project Ocean has an Instagram a link or whatever Yeah, so it's appprojects underscore ocean underscore Hawaii you can just probably say Project Ocean Hawaii and it'll pop up, but yeah, totally follow us because not only do we want to inspire others as part of Project Ocean we also want to be inspired, right? Learning goes both ways. Absolutely, lots of great people doing lots of stuff around the ocean now in terms of trying to protect it, make it better because it needs to happen. Hey, well, this is wonderful. This has been a rich conversation. I've enjoyed it. I feel like I've learned a lot here and I self-directed myself in here. Awesome. Myself. So thank you so much, Dyson. Thank you for taking time out and sharing your experiences and Nina, thank you for being here also and letting us know about agile learning centers and your current work too. And I hope you will join us then in two more weeks when we're back here on Pacific Partnerships in Education once again. Until then.