New Unschooling Videos

I've posted my latest talk, Self-Directed Learning: Challenges and Concerns, below for viewing. I think this is a good overview of how we can support parents to work with young children. By leveraging children's natural inclinations to build relationships and understand their world, adults can help children learn and grow without short-circuiting a child's exploratory zeal.

I presented this to the New Mexico Association for the Education of Young Children on March 1, 2014, and it was a lively session. You can download the bibliography of books discussed and/or shown in the presentation here.

Self-Directed Learning: Challenges and Concerns from Patrick Farenga

Dr. Carlo Ricci has created a new video about Holt's book Learning All the Time. In just under 9 minutes he and his co-creators present Holt's words against a background of photographs, accompanied by The Logical Song by Rodger Hodgson (who supports Holt's work and granted permission to use his song) and Flowers are Red by Harry Chapin (song used with permission of Warner/Chappel music).

This video is a compilation of quotations from John Holt's book Learning All The Time in which he argues that learning is as natural as breathing. Special appreciation goes to Roger Hodgson (‪http://www.rogerhodgson.com) for supporting the work of John Holt by donating his song "The Logical Song" for use in this video, as well as to Warner/Chappell Music (‪http://www.harrychapinmusic.com) for the use of Harry Chapin's song "Flowers are Red".

Last year I helped organize and speak at an event at Harvard University, the Alternatives To Compulsory Schooling conference. You can read my posts and watch all the speeches here. However, my speech, Homeschooling and Unschooling, required coordination between the podium and my slides and the slides were not captured on the video. While putting these videos up I learned about a way to synchronize the video of my talk to the slideshow, which I've done using the free service, Zentation.com, here.