Educating Otherwise: UnConference

Educating Otherwise: UnConference 27 April 2024

We are hosting an UnConference on non-mainstream education.

Families, educators, and curious people are welcome to attend for free. Travel grants and prizes available. We aim for 100 curious people to come along.

Date: Sat, 27 April 2024 | 9.30am to 4.30pm

Venue: Conway Hall, London (near Holborn Tube)

The non-mainstream education community is large but fragmented. There are few routes to share good ideas and best practices in person. There is little focused on the young people themselves. We aim to:

• enable the non-mainstream education community to share best practice ideas
• build a network for home education and non-mainstream education generally to enable talent and diversity to thrive
• potentially link up peer mentors, career and university mentors to help young people explore all the options open to them
• identify and ascertain particular needs and opportunities

Unlike traditional conferences with pre-set agendas and passive listeners, an UnConference invites all attendees to participate actively.

Everyone is encouraged to propose topics, lead discussions, and contribute to conversations in a meaningful way.

While a conventional conference treats attendees like a passive audience to be entertained by the organizers, the UnConference format gives everyone a say by building something together.

UnConferences are choose-your-own-adventure. At any moment there will be multiple talks happening.

The UnConference board is the centre of the event. The board is a large grid representing the schedule. The time slots start out blank. We fill them in the opening circle but they can change and combine throughout the time (especially in longer sessions).

Example UnConferences are:

• Devoted and Disgruntled for Theatre in the UK,
• Chatham House Sustainability Accelerator;
• the Google-hosted Sci Foo

Further notes on an UnConference from Devon Zeugel are here. Ben Yeoh’s notes available on request.

The UnConference format is well suited to self-directed people and is inclusive of young people and some atypical needs.

This offers a unique opportunity for young people to meet up and contribute to the UnConference. There are few forums for them to do so.

The format is good at people-matching. Those with similar interests may go to the same talks. The loose structure is good at surfacing unusual ideas as people are encouraged to raise their own ideas and have conversations.

Everybody! In particular we would encourage young people and their families to attend but anyone who has an interest in education will enjoy coming along.

The non-mainstream includes many educational ideas that range—non-definitively—across: Home education, Education Otherwise Than At School, flexischool, unschool, microschools, digital education, pedagogy in isolated and refugee situations, independent research. Really anything to do with education and learning counts.

There is no minimum age but young people will need to be accompanied by a guardian. The venue is mostly accessible (see the venue guide for wheelchairs; the format is neurodiverse friendly). We will try to be accommodating but won’t have special quiet rooms or baby feeding spaces. That said, there is plenty of space to be with a baby amongst us.

We will also be looking for volunteer helpers to set up and tidy up on the day. Let us know if interested in this.

You can book tickets via our eventbrite page. The event is FREE but we ask that you cancel if you can no longer make it so you don’t take up a space from someone else.

We are offering up to 20 travel grants of £50 for those who would otherwise struggle to attend. The form to apply is available here in early 2024 and should take less than 10 mins to fill out. If there are more than 20 applicants then grants will be decided by lottery.

Likely questions are: Why are you interested in coming to the UnConference? (Tweet length)

(Optional)

What projects or ideas are you working on?

What is something you think you understand about the world which is often misunderstood?

What change would you make to Home Education in the UK to make it better?

Anything else you’d like to share?

We are offering up to 10 prizes of £100 for work relating to the theme of non-mainstream education. Everyone is welcome to take part but young people are particularly encouraged to submit entries and at least 5 prizes are intended for young people.

These could be essays, videos, blogs or talks about non-mainstream (or even mainstream pedagogy) education.

Submissions are open in early 2024 and will close end of March. More ideas here.

You could use your blog or essay as the basis for a session at the UnConference if you come.

Winning entries can be shared online after the UnConference to allow as many people as possible to take part in the conversation.

Ben Yeoh gained a grant from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures to host the UnConference. There is no particular organisational endorsement or sponsorship for the event. Ben’s family has one son in home education. He writes a Substack, Then Do Better, and hosts a podcast where he chats about a broad range of topics. Two podcasts in this area are his chat with Naomi Fisher (self-directed education) and his chat with teacher Jade O’Brien (mainstream primary).

Catherine Oliver swore she’d never be a teacher—she saw what hard work it was by watching her own mum. But she fell in love with home education during the pandemic and hasn’t looked back. She writes How We Homeschool, where she shares what home education can look like for families all around the world. The aim for How We Homeschool is to bring home educators together to share what works, and the Educating Otherwise conference is the perfect way to make this happen ‘in real life’.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Conway Hall, Red Lion Street, London, UK, United Kingdom