Ep 262: Gratitude, Growth, and Endings: A Tribute to the Unschooling Movement

What happens when we eulogize an elder who has guided us on our journey of unschooling, decolonizing education, and raising free people? Join me in this heartfelt final season as we celebrate the transformative energy of unschooling and the legacy of Self-Directed Education.

Together, we'll explore the three containers of explainers, affirmations, and insights that will guide us through this final season, reflecting on the wisdom and experiences we've gained from Fare of the Free Child.

As we embark on this extraordinary season of gratitude, growth, and endings, I'll provide you with clear direction for ways to move through this body of work, ensuring that the closure of this podcast is a continuation for you and your journey to be and raise free people.

Throughout this season, I'll use three containers: explainers, affirmations, and insights to cover the core themes that we have wrestled with, realized, reclaimed, or released since our very first episode in July of 2016.

All season long, you will hear my recommendations for ways to walk alongside this work of raising free people, based on your particular location in this journey, whether you're brand new and just getting into it, or you're in it and it's shifting you all kinds of fast and furious, or you rocking with it, grounded and grooving, I gotchu!

So, gather around the elder one last time as we celebrate our collective liberation and the legacy of self-directed education. Let's revel in the power of unschooling, personal leadership, and spiritual growth as we embrace the transformative energy that has brought us to this point.

LINKS:
The Raising Free People Practice Card Deck
https://schoolishness.com/market/rfp-a-practice-deck/

Peek at the details of Personal Manifesto Path (will be available exclusively through our make-it-happen family on Patreon)
https://www.rfpunschool.com/p/manifesto

Our Youtube channel
https://www.youtube.com/@fareofthefreechild

The Village:
https://my-reflection-matters.mn.co/

Transcript

Akilah S. Richards: 0:00

Make sure you listen all the way to the end. End of this. I saved you a well what was at the time an impromptu affirmation for those moments when you just need to remember what you are. You know what I'm with it. I was walking to my car and this showed up. So listen to the end. Let me know how it feels for you. I'm going to pull from the deck. It's been really interesting to learn about the ways that different people use this deck, how their intuition and their emotions play together. Let's see, The card is Emergence. It says. It is to prioritize wisdom within you and wisdom beyond you, Wisdom that invites you to relate really relate, as an emergent and consensual process. This is for somebody. May you receive it. This deck is available at schoolishness. com And if you already are working with this deck, please leave a review directly on schoolishness. com to invite and inspire other folks to work with this particular medicine too. You can't keep using tools of oppression and expect to raise free people.

Juan P. Perez: 1:49

Welcome to Fare of the Free Child, the podcast that ignites sparks of liberation in conscious parenting, personal leadership and spirituality. Join host Akilah S Richards as she invites conversations about the power of unschooling skills as a way of life, a way of decolonizing education and a pathway to nurturing our souls. Each episode delves into the challenges and triumphs of unschooling fostering strong, trustworthy relationships with our children and reimagining success beyond traditional standards. We embrace alternative forms of assessment, acknowledge the wonder in every child and rethink notions of achievement.

Juan P. Perez: 2:34

But Fare of the Free Child goes beyond parenting and education. It's a compass for personal leadership and spiritual growth. Through heartfelt conversations and Akilah's insightful offerings, we encourage you to reclaim your authentic self, navigate life's complexities and embody the powers of personal freedom and collective liberation. Together we create inclusive communities that honor our individuality, our differences and our interconnectedness. We embrace the transformative energy of unschooling, freeing the full potential within ourselves and our families. So take a breath with me as we embark on this extraordinary season of gratitude, growth and endings. This is Fare of the Free Child, where the skills of liberation, not the tools of oppression, inform our capacities to be and to raise free people.

Akilah S. Richards: 3:46

Peace and love. Akilah here, it's so good to be back in touch with you. I found a story, gathered a story throughout this long, lovely pause in between seasons, and I wanna share that with you now. This elder showed up at my house. The elder told me that they were from the lands where sovereignty, in the form of self-directed education, thrived. The elder's energy had already been working through my children, with them claiming their right to sovereignty, bringing resistance to the spaces that lacked consent. As we got familiar with this elder, i knew intuitively to open the door, make it an open public space so that people could come and sit with this elder, so that people could come and recognize the familiarity of the elder. And then I noticed that the elder was being called into assembly by us. It was we, the people who gathered around the elder, who were affirming the elder's wholeness as we filled in all the pieces with our stories. So together, the listeners, myself included, acknowledged and affirmed and assembled this elder.

Akilah S. Richards: 5:35

We call Fare of the Free Child, an elder of the natural learning way. We sat at this elder's feet for seven years, from summer of 2016 to the summer of 2023. Seven years across generations, across pandemic, across all the sacredness of the number seven, a number sacred in time and space, a number that some folks know to be important because our choices today impact seven generations forward, as native indigenous people have taught us, and my people have always taught me, that the choices that we make bring healing to seven generations back. And now, at its seventh year, the elder is being laid to rest, seven earth years old and has run its earthly course, but the work, of course, lives on. So I will rest, the podcast will die, but the commitment remains. We, the ones who assembled this elder, called them in through our own relationships, some with children, others with inner child, others with something else just as relevant. We are committed to a legacy of reconnecting people who want it, families who want it, communities who want it, reconnecting them to this elder energy that is rooted in self-directedness in all forms, rooted in trustful, consensual relationships devoid of coloniality's, shrapnel, and so we eulogize this elder all season long And we invite the characteristics of this elder to show up through our conversations going forward.

Akilah S. Richards: 7:50

This last season really is an encompassing of all of the seasons and some ideas of how to engage the episodes and use them as breadcrumbs for more of this work, more of this liberty, more of this reclamation of what we have always been and can now get right back to. The story ends with the elder being laid to rest, but the ecology that you were part of lives on. So throughout this season, I'm gonna use three containers explainers, affirmations and insights to cover the core themes that we have wrestled with, realized, the reclaimed or released since our very first episode in July of 2016. All season long, you will hear my recommendations for ways to walk alongside this work of raising free people, based on your particular location in this journey, whether you're brand new and just getting into it, or you're in it and it's shifting you all kinds of fast and furious, or you rocking with it, grounded and grooving. All of that I got you. This season is about both closure and continuation. The closure is mainly for me, and I needed to stand in that out loud, but the continuation is mainly for you. So you will know by the end of this season these different ways to engage the work, and we'll talk about that in more detail all through. All up and through the next few months, we'll also recap seasons one through nine and you'll have clear direction for ways to move through this body of work that I've contributed to this larger movement that's been happening long before me, long before you, of being and raising free people.

Akilah S. Richards: 10:05

I gave it this language, but the energy of it has been living, so that is what I'm pouring into all season long, closing out for me, continuing for you, and we have a three-point focus that I want to name here And I feel so good and grounded about this because I was able to tap into the wisdom and the desires of our Make It Happen family over on . patreon. com/akilah, come through. I shared what I was thinking of doing for the last season and, with insights from our family, i was able to really refine that and get specific about what folks are wanting and needing for now and moving forward. Also, we'll use explainers just recordings that I've done over the past few months to share specific things that feel so much like a result of this focus that I've had for these years on unschooling and related to that, decolonizing. You'll hear those explainers. I also brought affirmation music into the mix because I've been doing that since 2013-2014 and it also will give you bits of flavor of the personal manifesto path, which is one of the courses that I'm transitioning into as I move out of podcasting in this way. So it's really important that I use affirmation music, because that's how I got here. What I did in 2013 and 2014 worked. It walked me to starting a podcast in 2016 and that worked, because all of that walked me to and through so much of the life experiences that allow me to show up for you, for my family, for myself, in ways that I just I've got to share. I got to continue to share, and the podcast is one medium, and now what I'm doing with personal manifesto path is another. So I want to make sure affirmations, with some hot beats behind it, because that's how I get down, is a part of the mix.

Akilah S. Richards: 12:18

And the third container is insights insights from and inspired by our listeners, and what I'm going to do is really just use these next eight, maybe nine episodes to talk about how to use these containers and how to use all the episodes from seasons one all the way through season 10, because these episodes are not just about stories and conversations. There are actually ways that you can locate yourself. You can tap into someone's story and locate yourself inside of that, find and hear and notice and witness things that you were not able to hear and notice and witness before, for whatever reasons. Sometimes stories invite and invoke parts of us, so that's one way that you'll be able to use these episodes. Another one is that you could use it to up level your listening. So when you hear other people talk about how they weren't listening to their kid or how they noticed that they weren't being listened to, that specific thing around listening is something that you can pull from and use those examples in your own life. So much more on that, so much more as we continue journeying together this season.

Akilah S. Richards: 13:38

But I wanted to be really clear in this first episode that explainers, affirmations and these reflections and insights from our listeners and from raising free people book actually those are really the things that we'll use all season long to bring you ways to use this beyond the podcast in your real life every day. So what we're doing in June, July and a little bit of August, we are sending off Fare of the Free Child, eulogies, trusts, palliative care, like all the things. We're going to lay this podcast to rest. Then we're going to talk to you about where to get the work now right, any space where you can listen to any episode of the podcast, as well as things that came from the podcast. We'll tell you specifically where to go to get this work now. We're going to talk about the Fare of the Free Child Village. We're going to talk about our YouTube channel. We're going to talk about our Make It Happen family. We're going to talk about our shop, schoolishness. com.

Akilah S. Richards: 14:44

The last thing that this season is for is for these how to guides. I touched it a little bit already when I talked about listening and tapping into stories, but we're going to go all in the details about the ways that you can use this body of work, not just the podcast, but the things I've written before it, the things I'm a right beyond it. We're going to talk about these sort of like how to guides for navigating all of this info that I've put out over the past decade, really. So we're going to use a beginner's path as a guide. We're going to talk to our beginners. We're going to use a home school to more confident, autonomy, centric practices guide. So for people basically unschooling without the label, how it was for our family, maybe three or four years in, we're also going to expose you to a for me, not them path for folks whose kids have no interest in leaving school, but you, as a parent or caregiver, you want to be less schoolish and more direct in facilitating confident autonomy while your children are in school. So we'll be doing things specifically around that path. We're also going to be offering insights for whiteness centric work life path for folks who are all in the mix, where that pervasive whiteness lives and thrives in a school, in a job. But you want to face your power over framing in all of that. You want to tap into unschooling practices as a way to notice and witness how whiteness centric work life paths are influencing you so you can move different, because now you know And then, lastly, we're going to be talking from this been unschooling, ready to deepen my shit path for folks who want to get all up in more of the spiritual aspects of this work.

Akilah S. Richards: 16:45

I am building my noticing skills and I am building my witnessing skills, and they are most definitely different skills. The way that I use it, the way that I understand it, noticing is one that is more action driven. To notice is an invitation to make a change in something, to adjust, whereas to witness is to allow and to accept something from what. It is not necessarily to accept it for you, but to accept it, so you could be a witness to someone choosing something that you do not necessarily agree with, but you can notice something about, say something you tend to do that you want to do differently. You can notice in efforts to shift and you can witness in order to be more informed about the realities that you're working with. So when we talk about our personal leadership skills and developing a personal manifesto as a point of orientation, it's really important to be clear about the difference between noticing and witnessing. We'll talk more about these personal leadership skills, these glow-ups in personal manifesto path, a framework for orienting yourself toward consistently feeling exactly how you want to feel.

Akilah S. Richards: 18:18

Available only on patreon. com/akilah at all donor levels. Come check it out. Make sure you are subscribed to our YouTube channel. That link will be on the show notes page, raisingfreepeople. com. I'm so looking forward to connecting on this final season of Fare of the Free Child. I'll see you guys very soon and much love. Chat to you next week.

Akilah S. Richards: 19:16

I am light. What I am is connected to everything else. that is, the decisions I make are never made in a vacuum. I'm never rooted in any one emotion that I might be experiencing. I am vast. I am made of the same components of the universe, And so I draw from resources far beyond the ones that my eyes can see, my nose can smell, even the ones that I can sense. far beyond my intellect, far beyond my trauma, far beyond my issues with whoever, whenever, whatever. I'm vast. Audio by raisingfreepeoplenetwork.