Last week the Galilee School celebrated its 25^th year. You can view some celebration pics here: https://www.facebook.com/GalileeSchool

In 1995, when I completed my PhD and was lecturing in the Philosophy of Education at the University of Canberra, I was focusing my attention on alternative approaches to Teaching and Learning. I wrote about this in Tackling Risk, A Field Guide to Risk and Learning (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/tackling-risk/). So, I had finished my PhD and was wondering what to do, where to go next and an opportunity arose to establish an alternative school for high-needs young people.

So, in 1996 I started a day program on a farm and in 1999 registered it as a school. We started with 12 young people who were ‘high-risk’ and I described the nature of the group in Risk Makes Sense, Human Judgement and Risk. The school has been very successful and you can read about their ongoing work here: https://www.commsatwork.org/services/community/galilee-school/ and here: https://the-riotact.com/galilee-school-to-offer-students-the-chance-to-complete-year-12/417443

What an opportunity, to establish a method of practice and demonstrate its effectiveness. It’s one thing to lecture about learning, education and teaching in alternatives to traditional schooling, and quite another to demonstrate that it is doable in practice. It’s one thing to have a collection of slogans and aspirations and quite another to develop a method of doing (https://safetyrisk.net/how-do-you-do-safety-differently/).

The nature of the curriculum I established and the method of education was so successful that I was asked by Government if I could do the same inside a Youth Detention Centre, which I did. Later, I was drawn into Government as the Manager of Youth, Family and Community Services but that’s another story.

This week I was invited back to the school as the founder, that now has 120 young people and is led by a visionary educator/leader Tim McNevin and amazing staff – teachers, social workers, psychologists, community workers, youth workers and a chaplain. You couldn’t work at this school unless you had extraordinary understanding of the high-risk lives in which these young people live.

On 12 September 2024 we celebrated the occasion of 25 years with many supporters, businesses, politicians, bureaucrats, young people and past students. After speeches and formalities, we cut a cake in celebration of those years. Everyone shared in the cake as a symbol of shared meaning and ceremony of success. You can see in the photo, the past Director, myself, past students cutting the cake, Executives from Communities at Work and the Principal, Tim.

I look back fondly at all I learned in risk from those days however, at the time they were tough and challenging. The stressors in the job were extraordinary and three years was all I could do under such stress.

It was back in the 1970s that I first read about Espoused Theory and Theory-in-use (https://aral.com.au/resources/argyris.html). In my first degree I cut my teeth on reading all the ‘deschoolers’, ‘freeschoolers’ and alternatives to traditional schooling. The work of Argyris and Schon (Organizational Learning II (1977) and Weick’s work (The Social Psychology of Organising (1979) were foundational in the way I approached learning, education and teaching. All of this led me to understand that ‘triple loop learning’ was the optimum mode of learning (https://chaturvedimayank.wordpress.com/2021/08/11/single-double-and-triple-loop-organizational-learning/). Unless learning progresses through the triple loop, its just training.

Unless learning moves and changes embodied personhood, it’s just training.

I have written before about the difference between training and learning: https://safetyrisk.net/what-theory-of-learning-is-embedded-in-your-investigation-methodology/; https://safetyrisk.net/safety-learning-by-doing-and-learning-by-theory/. This is why methodology and method are critical for learning.

Unfortunately, you will read none of this in the mono-disciplinarity of risk and safety. When you see the word ‘learning’ used in traditional safety (eg. in HOP Learning Teams https://www.learningteamscommunity.com/) this is not about learning but more collection of slogans. Reasoning is not learning and most of what is constructed in this model of training is not established by anyone with expertise in learning and education.

Stringing together 5 slogans focused on performance is not learning. Organisational behaviour is not a foundation for understanding learning. Brian-centrism is not about learning. Systems and performance are not about learning. Shifting cognitions is not about learning. Data recall is not about learning. Entertainment is not learning.

If you are interested in the nature of learning, methodology and practice then you can look here: https://www.humandymensions.com/product/tackling-risk/

If you are interested in understanding a methodology and method for tackling risk, you can look here: https://www.humandymensions.com/product/spor-and-semiotics/