This week, I’m joined by Adele Jarrett-Kerr; a mother, writer, home educator and breastfeeding counsellor, originally from Trinidad and Tobago, now living in Cornwall. Adele also works with her family’s small, regenerative farm near Falmouth and hosts a podcast about human connection called Revillaging.

Join us as we talk about the importance of developing critical thinking, what our children teach us, experiencing colonial dismissal, deprogramming from the dominant culture, different ways of accessing knowledge and the problematic nature of academia, partnering with nature in farming and so much more!

If you haven't already, be sure to join our Facebook community to connect with other like-minded queer folks and allies.

Find out more about Gem Kennedy and Queers & Co. 

Podcast Artwork by Gemma D’Souza

Resources

Find out more about Adele’s work on her website

Listen to the Revillaging podcast

Check out Soul Farm

Follow Adele on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter

Listen to Adele’s podcast for the Freedom to Learn Forum, Address the Harm: Self-Directed Learning for Decolonisation

Full Transcription

Gem: Welcome to Queers & Co., the podcast on self-empowerment, body liberation and activism for queer folx. I'm your host, Gem Kennedy. I'm a transformational coach, as well as creator of the Queers & Co. community.

Gem: Hey folx, welcome to another episode of Queers & Co. I don't know about you, but lockdown fatigue has really set in in the last week or so. It gave me a lot of hope, actually imagining people listening to this in like six months or a year, and hopefully lockdown being a thing of the past, or at least things being easier. So yeah, if you're listening in the future, well done you. For everyone who's listening now, in February 2021, I hope you're all keeping safe and managing to look after yourself. I wonder if there's anything that you could do today that would help your day feel a little bit easier, maybe help you feel a little bit more supported. I'm really conscious of that at the moment, because as I said, locked down in our household is really becoming tiresome. The children just want to see their friends, and we just want to be outside seeing all the people we love. So it's feeling really frustrating.

Gem: Luckily, I have a really great guest for you today. And it's someone that I spoke to back in December and oh it was so good. When I listened back just now when I was editing and transcribing the episode, I just had so many thoughts, there are so many things that we touch on. And I'm really hoping that she's going to come back and talk to us about some other things that will become clear as we go through the episode. I think you're gonna really enjoy it. And I'm sure that you'll get lots from what my guest has to share.

Gem: One of the things I'm conscious of with the podcast is that I know lots of people who listen don't have children. And I feel like there might be a tendency to switch off when there are sort of children's rights or unschooling specific podcasts or guests who are working in those fields. But I really would encourage anyone to listen because not only do we talk about the ways we are with our children, there's so much learning that comes from how we think about education ourselves and how we allow ourselves to discover knowledge. And I think what my guest had to share around that was just really fascinating, and I learned a lot.

Gem: So without further ado, let me introduce you to her. She is a mother writer, home educator and breastfeeding counsellor, originally from Trinidad and Tobago, and now living in Cornwall. She also works with her family's small regenerative farm near Falmouth and hosts a podcast about human connection called Revillaging, which I'd highly recommend you have a listen to. Introducing my excellent guest, Adele Jarrett-Kerr. Hi, Adele, thanks so much for joining me

Adele: Thanks for having me, Gem. I've been really looking forward to this conversation.

Gem: Me too. And we kind of already jumped in before we started recording. So we decided that we better start recording so we can capture what we're talking about. And really, we were talking about sound quality, but actually kind of what the subtext was like unschooling and queering things, I guess. And so it'd be really interesting if you're happy to just introduce yourself and how you identify in sort of various ways.

Adele: Yeah, sure. That's good. Yeah. So my name is Adele Jarrett-Kerr. I am originally from Trinidad and Tobago, and I live in the UK. I've lived here for 15 years. So I'd say that that is a huge part of my identity. I'm an unschooling parent of three kids who are nine, six and four. And we have always done life without school, but have kind of transitioned more and more towards unschooling, as I've learned more about children's rights, but also decolonizing myself, that's been a huge part of our process. And we run a farm, and I'm one member of a team of four who run a farm here in Cornwall. It's a no-dig farm, which uses regenerative practices, although I'm always a bit cautious of using that word, because it is a word that comes from indigenous and African cultures. And we are trying to embody that in all ways, not just in the sense of the way that we do agricultural practices, but trying to get into the philosophy of that and living regeneratively. Yeah, because it's become a bit of a whitewashed buzz word. So it's like a lot of thing and I sure we'll get onto that at some point. I'm trying to think of what else would really say? Yeah, I dunno I think that probably covers a few things. I have been working as a breastfeeding counsellor, well volunteering as a breastfeeding counsellor for quite a significant portion of my life now, last almost 10 years, but I'm kind of taking a break from that but I feel like that has actually informed a lot of the things that I do as well. So it is worth sort of mentioning. And I'm not sure if there's anything else, I probably can't be neatly packaged, like most of the things about us and will probably emerge as we have the conversation rather than me saying I'm Adele and I'm this, this, this and this.

Gem: Yeah, I think it's really useful place to start. And there's so much already that I'm like, Oh, I wanna know about this, I wanna know about this. And our paths have crossed over the last year or so in different spaces, but not enough. So I'm really keen to find out more. So you came to the UK 15 years ago, and your journey to the children not ever going to school and also decolonizing your life in general as well as education... Yeah. How did that kind of journey unfold? And was there like one thing that catalysed it? Or was it a very gradual process?

Adele: Which bit of the journey? Cos there are quite a few things that you've just mentioned there.

Gem: There are, aren't there? I'm wondering... I guess my question is around you had children and did you always know that they weren't going to school? Were you already kind of in touch with children's right and understanding decolonisation at that point? Or was it later on? I guess, because for me, the real catalyst was having children...

Adele: Well that's the case for so many of us, isn't it? Yeah. having children is just such a profoundly transformative experience. I don't want to see that in the sense of... because some people like to say that you can't fully experience life unless you become a parent, which is just not true because there are lots of different pathways into these things. But because it is, I guess, because it's hard in a lot of ways, it does kind of speed up the process for those who experience it anyway. Although there are other big things that can bring us into that. Yeah, for me, it definitely was... I had always known that I was going to home educate actually because I hated school myself. And I had the fortune which a lot of people don't have of knowing people who were home educated when I was growing up and envying them. And also because, well... as I didn't grow up here, I guess the rules probably would have been different here, but it was quite laid back in terms of whether I went to school or not.

Adele: So actually, for much of secondary school, my mother, she just allowed me to just not go if I didn't want to. So I would go for like the bare minimum, and then just not go for quite a lot of it so I guess that would