Melbourne Immersion: Primary Focus
Recently, we had 28 people from across all 3 regions come together in Melbourne for our final Free to Flourish immersion of the year.
We spent 2 days at Woodline Primary where the focus is on using Reggio Emilia inspired inquiry to place wellbeing and research though play as the lens for learning.
Our third day was spent with the leaders of Newmark Primary challenging us to rethink the purpose of education and the role it plays in children’s lives, in the afternoon we got to see their vision and purpose in action as we spent time observing and engaging with year 4/5 children working on their Project Ventures designing solutions to help Yarraville Community Centre reduce their energy consumption and the Year 6 children working on their personal social enterprise business that will be launching in Term 4 with stalls at the Purpose Precinct of Queen Victoria Markets.
On Thursday we visited Dr Esme Capp and her team at Princes Hill to learn about their collective inquiry model that utilises community experts to leverage projects into the real world. It was inspiring to hear about the wayfinding project that began with helping Prep learners learn the stories of the playground and has evolved into working with local council to design new signage in and around the school site as part of community wayfinding. The week concluded with a workshop for attendees at the LEVNT office to reflect on and process learning into tangible change for their own community by leveraging an Experimental Design Canvas.
All schools that we visited were vastly different, but the message was united around the concept of clarity of identity and purpose. Something that the group reflected we have been gifted as a system in Growing Deep and Free to Flourish.
Feedback from participants:
