<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"></figure>

In this episode, Pam, Anna, and Erika talk about curiosity-led learning. We thought this would be a fun topic to dive into during this back-to-school season! Focusing on curiosity—our own and our kids’—can be so grounding.

In this episode, we explore the definition of learning, how school-based learning looks different than learning through unschooling, and how we’ve seen curiosity at play in our families.

We hope you find our conversation helpful on your unschooling journey!

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

The Living Joyfully Shop – books, courses, including Four Pillars of Unschooling and Navigating Unschooling Wobbles, coaching calls, and more!

The Living Joyfully Network

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about navigating relationships and exploring unschooling.

Sign up to our mailing list to receive The Living Joyfully Dispatch, our biweekly email newsletter, and get a free copy of Pam’s intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling?

We invite you to join us in The Living Joyfully Network, a wonderful online community for parents to connect and engage in candid conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling. This month, we’re talking about seasons—in unschooling and in life. Come and be part of the conversation!

So much of what we talk about on this podcast and in the Living Joyfully Network isn’t actually about unschooling. It’s about life. On The Living Joyfully Podcast, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia talk about life, relationships, and parenting. You can check out the archive here, or find it in your your favorite podcast player.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

ERIKA: Hello, everyone! I’m Erika Ellis from Living Joyfully, and I’m joined by my co-hosts, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia. Hello to you both.

ANNA AND PAM: Hello!

ERIKA: And before we get started, have you checked out LivingJoyfullyShop.com yet? Our online shop has Pam’s unschooling books, lots of helpful coaching options and online courses such as Four Pillars of Unschooling, which is great if you’re newer to unschooling and Navigating Unschooling Wobbles if you’re finding that back-to-school season has gotten you feeling unsure about things.

We also have courses on validation and on navigating conflict. You can also learn more about the Living Joyfully Network there. We’re so excited to be creating a one-stop shop to support you along your unschooling journey, and we hope you’ll check it out.

Pam, would you like to get us started with our topic for today, which is curiosity-led learning?

PAM: Yes, I would love to! Because I feel like this is one of the first big paradigm shifts that people encounter and that I encountered when I began exploring unschooling in earnest. But even if you’ve been unschooling for years, I would not be surprised of just listening in on this conversation reveals yet another layer that you can peel back around the value of curiosity-led learning.

Like, “Oh, it applies here, too.” I’m still getting those little layers. As you encounter it out in the wild in our lives, there’s always, always more layers.

But culturally, the message is that learning must be led by curricula, that there’s a step-by-step, linear process that needs to be followed for “real” learning to happen, and that learning is hard, that it’s challenging. Here’s the next step. Learn this. Here’s the next step.

And what unschooling does is encourage us to ask ourselves, is that the only way to learn? Because some people pick things up that way. We all went through school that way, and we learned what we did. And then it’s always fun to look back and think, how much did I remember? How do I define learning? Is that really learning? If really I can just do it on a worksheet, but I have no idea how to bring that into my days and into my life? It is just a beautiful, beautiful paradigm shift when you start looking, oh, are there other ways to learn? Is this other learning that I’m doing just because I love this thing, does it discount the learning I’m doing about it? If it’s not hard, is it learning? There are just so many ways to look at it.

And then when we give ourselves enough space to start questioning it and start looking at, okay, well, I know this was really fun, but I have been learning lots and it’s been useful learning for me, does that count? And just start looking at it through that lens and recognizing things like, oh my gosh, it doesn’t feel hard. Even though you may notice other people saying, “Oh my gosh. How did you learn all that? That depth of knowledge,” et cetera. And they’re talking about it being difficult, whereas it feels much easier to us because we were interested in it in the first place because our curiosity was guiding us and we’re like, oh, yes, I want more. I want more. I want more.

When we start to notice all those little different aspects of it and start to bring that all together, we start to play with, what does curiosity-led learning look like? And wow, it’s pretty darn amazing. It really is valuable. It’s like all the things. And we can start to replace what is curriculum-led, what somebody else thinks we should be learning with what we’re interested in learning. And it just opens up this whole box. It’s just removes the box on what learning can look like for us. Can’t it?

ANNA: Yeah. For me, I think what’s so interesting is I feel like this is actually the natural process, how we all, as adults learn. Like, “Okay, there’s something that I want to do and so what do I need to know in order to do that thing?” And so, then it’s the relevant pieces that maybe I want to take up this hobby and I need to learn this, or maybe I want to take this particular job and gosh, I better learn these things. But it’s so relevant. So, for me it’s about bringing that “relevant” piece to it.

And you kind of mentioned this, where the retaining comes in, because when it’s something that we’re using every day or is relevant to something that we’re interested in, we actually do retain it, because we’re practicing, we’re using, we’re tweaking all the time. And so, I think that piece is so interesting that school has kind of separated that and made it very irrelevant.

So, we’re learning and putting things on a piece of paper. We don’t really understand why. And so, what I learned in school was really how to do that, how to take and memorize information and give it to them in the form that they wanted. It’s interesting to me now as an adult, sometimes I’ll think about something that was covered in school and I’m like, that’s why they wanted that to be covered, but it meant nothing to me in the 30 years in between. But now I’m like, now that it’s relevant, I can go back and refresh. I don’t remember it from then, but I can go back and refresh. But I thought, oh, how interesting. Because somebody somewhere thought this was important in their life. And so, they wanted kids to know it. But I don’t feel like humans learn that way.

ERIKA: Right. It’s so interesting, isn’t it? I just feel like what has happened is that the way that schools do things has become the definition of what learning is, but if you really think about it, it doesn’t work. Our brains do not work that way. But if we think learning is, someone tells you what you need to know, it’s in this order, it’s these important things, these facts at this age, whatever, then the curiosity part, it never even gets looked at or considered. It’s not even a consideration at all.

But we know from ourselves, from watching our kids, just from looking at people, like you’ve seen the glazed-over eyes of kids in class. Certainly. I mean, certainly over the years I have seen that as a teacher and I’ve seen it as a student and information is not getting in there. So, as far as just choosing to teach someone something that they’re not interested in, that’s not causing learning to happen. And so, I really think we need to just chang