Green ALF OVERVIEW Training

Join us in the first module of the Agile Learning Facilitator training programme: OVERVIEW

Overview is a 2 days training course where people interested in Self-Directed Education and Agile Learning can have an intensive immersion in the theories that are at the basis of this form of education.

This event is the first module of the Green ALF training course – the main theoretical framework being explored in these 2 days.

Staring Monday, kids and teens will join the group in a typical Green School Agile Week so the participants can continue learning by diving in the full mixed age learning experience. The participants can make requests and offerings (including clarification of theories applied during the week).

Overview gives you many of possibilities to meet people from around the world and discover the values of Self-Directed Education and the foundations of Agile Learning with them. We will meet every morning at 9.00, have a light breakfast together and set intentions for the day. You can create or join different offerings in order to have a good day and to learn according to your own intentions. At the end of the day we reflect on our processes and we express final thoughts for the experiences. Our facilitators, children and 3 of the Green School facilitators will make their offerings around the topics: education, learning, schooling, pedagogy, andragogy, Self-Directed Education, Agile Learning, Agile Learning methodology and tools, forest education, green schooling, EQ games.  

You can participate in Green ALF Overview without participating in the Expansion training, but you cannot join the Expansion training without the Overview. 

The topics that can be explored in Overview are:

Among the offerings you can find:

• Agile Learning – the tree model,
• Agile Learning tools and instruments,
• Self-Directed Educational philosophies,
• Flying Squad – place-based education & education in public,
• Circle Of Security and attachment theories,
• Children’s needs,
• Forest Education,
• How to start an Agile Learning Group,
• How to start an Agile Learning Centre, 
• Communication and public relations in a new ALC,
• Financial aspects of a start-up group,
• Woodcrafting, 
• Junk/ Free play,
• Roleplaying,
• Biomimicry and others.

Before enrolling take a look at what is Self-Directed Education (SDE), what is the Agile Learning model and how learning in nature can have amazing benefits for people.

Facilitators:

Alexander Khost – is a youth rights activist from New York City, now living in Cluj-Napoca where he volunteers for Green School.
He has founded several projects focusing on providing youth with rare opportunities to self-manage, lead and delegate the decisions over their own lives.

He most recently co-founded Flying Squads, a youth liberation and anti-oppression collective that believes in the abolition of divided spaces between young people and their community.Previously he co-founded and co-ran the junkyard playground, play:groundNYC and founded a democratic free school.

He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Tipping Points, the book and magazine publisher for the Alliance for Self-Directed Education.

He has three children of his own that all are raised in a trustful parenting, Self-Directed Education environment. 

​He is a certified K-12 fine art teacher in New York State, holds an MFA from Parsons School of Design, the New School University, and a BA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He has taught internationally through various English as a second language programs.

Ancuța Chibulcutean – passionate about Self-Directed Education, mother of a self-directed child that learns with Green School Romania, participated in the Green ALF training in 2022 and in different SDE events with practitioners, facilitators and parents, through SDE Friday – a Green School project. In the school she is part of the Educational Working Group, working on the Living Library methodology and on planning SDE events for youth and young adults. Outside of the school Ancuța is Head of Product, Solution Architect, Scrum Master and Engineering Manager. She is a people advocate, passionate about learning, leadership and mental health. 

Sonia Khost – co-founded Green School after gaining her PhD in Educational Sciences (2013) from University of Bucharest and University of Vienna. She started to study and research the value of nature-based education programmes in 2003 and, with time, became an advocate for Nature-Based Education and Self-Directed learning.

She participated in multiple international training events in non-formal and formal learning contexts and in 2018 she did her ALF Summer training in New York with NY ALC, after creating already Self-Directed learning contexts.

In 2021 she returned to the US as a researcher studying ”sense of belonging and emotional security and wellbeing in SDE”, as a Research Scholar in University of Delaware. Sonia is an educational animator, trained in the French system (in Romania and in France), with extensive socio-educational animation experience, being specialised in theatre (shadow theatre and black light theatre) and animation for inclusion and anti-discrimination. Trained in psychodrama, Sonia is using her experience in creating learning spaces for children, youth and adults.