An important read for advancing the wellbeing of children and youth.
Flow to Learn: A 52-Week Parent’s Guide to Recognize and Support Your Child’s Flow State – the Optimal Condition for Learning
by Carmen Viktoria Gamper
Published in March 2020
342 pages
A question that often arises during discussions with parents is: “What do you want for your children?” A frequent response is: “I want them to be happy.” Generally, parents have in mind a deep rooted sense of wellbeing from which life can be embraced with enthusiasm and its challenges faced with strength and resilience.
Flow to Learn is a guide to preserving and cultivating this form of happiness. It addresses the questions: “Why aren’t more people happy?” and “When exactly are people happy?” We need only to look at school-age children for signs that people are unhappy. The rates of bullying, depression, mental illness, racism, hate crimes and suicides attest to this. From this evidence it can be concluded that teachers and school administrators, as well as parents would benefit from reading this book.
COVID is challenging us to rethink how our lives are unfolding, and some of the views once held as “the way things are,” are being replaced with visions of how things could, and need to be better. We need to recognize children as natural learners, biologically wired to learn what they need to know for the culture in which they live. We need to serve as models of how to live as equals with young people in learning environments based on human rights and democratic principles. Flow to Learn helps us to understand what this means.
While teachers can serve as examples for parents of how to live democratically with children, parents can serve as examples for teachers. Unschooling School, a strong voice for public education, is encouraging parents to consider having their children designate themselves as “Free Learners”. One might ask: “What does a Free Learner look like?” The perfect answer is: “Experience Flow to Learn.”
Heather MacTaggart is the founder of Unschooling School and she used the term “responsible subversive” in the book she co-authored with John Abbott, titled Overschooled but Undereducated. Derry Hannam, author of Another Way is Possible – Becoming a Democratic Teacher in a State School, picked up on the term and in a short video he describes the kind of responsible subversive” that Free Learners need to encounter in their community schools. They are people who understand that to be happy, children need to have a meaningful say in matters that affect them, they need the freedom to find flow.
The transformation of public education requires change deep within ourselves and it takes time. Flow to Learn has been written with this in mind. It is not the type of book you read in a weekend and then put aside. It is a guide for working at changing ourselves over the course of a year. Instead of chapters, it is divided into 52 weeks. Each week is a short read presenting the theories of flow followed by a “Try this” section designed to help people develop the understanding and behaviours necessary to live with children in ways that foster their happiness. As we become better at establishing the relationships and environments recommended in Flow to Learn, we can expect to see far more children radiating a sense of wellbeing.