Learning Marathon Showcase Pilot group 2016-2017
Learning Marathon Route Intensive weekends Whole group meet-ups Buddy check-ins
Zahra: Learning design
Get shit done Sundays
Amal: Service design techniques
Diverse peer group
Find a mentor Design your route
Shotgun Weekend Skillshare
Set learning goals Roxana: KJ Ho Japanese problem solving technique
Fan: The role of storytelling (and empathy) in social change
Ali: Gamification and game design Clem: Pitching to investors
Power up Weekend
Rob: Prototyping
Finish line Weekend
Showcase event
Peer endorsement
Laura: Public speaking
Challenges and projects Dan: Scriptural reasoning (& how to apply the insights)
Ellie: Graphic recording
Aliyah Norrish
aliyah.norrish@gmail.com @ali_norrish
“A Learning Marathon challenges you to integrate boundary pushing into your life and work.�
Question I came in with: What role can user experience research and design play in economics social change?
Question I leave with:
What would happen if we saw economics as a user-centred design discipline? Reflection on the experience: Enrol Yourself has enabled me in nothing less than to come to terms with myself as a person in a supportive community where I’ve forged a sense of legitimacy. I want everyone I know to do it, to give themselves the time and legitimacy and self-trust to explore something. To relearn how to see their adult selves as a learner and the lifelong exploration of your mind as a thing which is available to you whatever your circumstances. If I had to sum up Enrol Yourself it would be slow learning. What do you learn from running a marathon? I have developed my mental and physical stamina. I’ve learned how to listen internally and push my boundaries continuously. I’ve learned how to pace myself, with people there alongside me, willing each other to succeed at something unnecessary, optional and important. It’s an opportunity to have radical empathy in your life - to recognise that every day every person is making courageous, embodied choices to try to become their best self.
Question I leave with:
How might we enable the social, cultural and educational integration of children refugees in London?
Designing a better childhood experience: What was your biggest fear during childhood? What kind of support did you wish to receive back then to overcome your fears? I am interested in learning about experiences of individuals who lived in unfamiliar environments; their challenges, adaptation and integration journeys. I am also interested in speaking to people who worked with refugees and/or lived in communities hosting refugees. As I was running my learning marathon and educating myself on the topic of collective consciousness, I realised that human energy is very powerful; its power could be exercised beyond space and time. If human energy is capable to influence water and crystal properties, human beings can definitely influence each other’s behaviour to make the world a better place. When people make minimal changes in the way they think, this tremendously affects the way they live. Consequently, if global communities change the way they think and behave, this would change the world in a positive sense. Exercising collective human efforts is possible when embracing and practicing collective consciousness.
Amal Hmayed
amalhmayed@gmail.com
“This is the place to experiment, live your passion, grow it, nurture it, and just be.�
Question I came in with: How can the design of learning experiences raise awareness of children and youth on collective consciousness and establish it as a cornerstone for making the world a better place in Lebanon and London?
Clemence Tanzi
clemence.tanzi@gmail.com @speakerine
“It’s about advancing your project but also learning how to learn. That’s a skill you’ll have forever.”
Question I came in with: How to create a scheme to encourage inclusion and diversity in the workplace through work placement of young people?
Question I leave with:
How to design and support corporate cultural change towards better diversity and inclusion in the workplace? Reflection on the experience: Being part of a learning marathon allowed me to document my own journey, learn and explore what my own privilege and oppression meant. I developed research based arguments, and listened to others’ experiences. This journey started with recognising the different forms of oppression I was experiencing. Recognising that part of who I was had been determined by external factors was a painful discovery. I did not wanted to feel like a victim. The second part of the journey was about sharing those thoughts and feelings with friends and people around me. I realised I was not alone, but also that the scale and variety of oppression that existed were going far beyond my own experience. I also had privileges, which for the most part had been invisible to me. And that did not feel good either. It has taken me quite a while to draw the full spectrum of the issue I was interested in, and I am still figuring out how to create long lasting change. I want to create a screening process of inclusion and well-being level of a company, as well as a consultancy based service offering tailored experience-based solution to leaders and employees.
Question I leave with:
How to design experiences that harness the power of play to help people think differently about food systems? Reflection on the experience: In terms of key learnings, the process of Enrol has been a humbling experience for multiple reasons. My question started as how to design experiences that create broad behaviour change around eating insects. Firstly, the bold ambition of behaviour change is not one that’s easily achieved. The second humbling experience was my own personal feeling of agency in change, and this was where engaging with the systems thinking work of Boho Interactive was so interesting. Change comes about so much more effectively and systemically when you can change the rules of the system, not just the behaviour of the individual parts. So my new aim was to challenge people to think in this way, from a system perspective. The third humbling experience was my business not getting off the ground. For a number of reasons it just wasn’t happening. Although this was a tough thing to admit to myself, it did give me more freedom to explore other routes and focus on the things that I enjoyed the most, i.e. the educational side of the business.
Daniel Ford
danielgeorgeford@gmail.com @DanielGFord
“I’m enjoying the community so much, meeting all these amazing people with amazing ideas.”
Question I came in with: How to design experiences that create broad behaviour change around eating insects?
Ellie Pritchard
ellie.pritchard@live.co.uk @_ElliePritchard
“It has been such a wonderful experience sharing this journey with the rest of the Enrol Yourself gang - who I know will all continue to inspire me now that our 6 months is up.�
Question I leave with:
How can design become more accessible within society and how can design education play a part in shaping it? Civic Works: My original intention with this project was to provide a way of getting better design to community organisations and charities who, for a variety of reasons, need it. At the beginning this came in many shapes and forms. From residencies to design stands on the street. Over the last few years I have had experience as a design student, a graduate, a community volunteer and most recently a tutor. Each of those experiences have helped drive each part of the project. As a student I was unsatisfied with the lack of ‘real and meaningful projects, stuck in a world of hypothetical briefs it was frustrating to never see these turn into anything tangible. As a graduate I realised my limited knowledge of the opportunities out there, especially those focused around positive social change. Looking back on my experience at university I also realised how little I knew of the people and the area. Students come and go in the little bubble that surrounds the university but I think there are huge opportunities to work with both the local area and the university.
Question I leave with:
What is hope? And can it be designed? Reflection on the experience: This journey taught me about some of the ingredients to the journey towards taking part in creative social action. A key ingredient, for example, is vulnerability. Being hopeful implies a level of letting go, of accepting that we don’t have all the answers about the future. It implies a level of vulnerability. Another key ingredient is community. The initiatives I encountered often started from a personal struggle, but only saw an impact when they turned into a collective movement. A third key ingredient is a sense of belonging. This surprised me, but in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense. Before you can invest time and energy into making a difference to a place, this place has to feel like a home. I now pay more attention to these ingredients in my practice. How can I support people to explore their own vulnerability and find their power within it? How can I help them find a sense of community and belonging, so that they feel more powerful and invested in the idea of having a social impact? More importantly though, through the process I learned that the questions I was asking others were in fact questions I was asking about myself and my place in the world.
Fan Sissoko
fansissoko@gmail.com @whatfandoes
“It’s a really safe space. You don’t feel the pressure to be clever.”
Question I came in with: What enables people to move from empathy or anger to creative and hopeful social action?
Rob Bates
robbie@uscreates.com @robbie_bates
“I’ve been massively humbled by the passion and drive of those on the programme, who are challenging me to really consider the role of ‘goal-setting’.”
Question I leave with:
How might we use a speculative design approach to explore the sustainability of design-thinking as a competitive advantage? Reflection on the experience: Over these past few months I’ve proudly been part of Enrol Yourself, a 6 month marathon for those curious to experiment with what the future of lifelong, self-directed learning might look like. Bringing together some incredibly inspiring and motivated people, Enrol Yourself is designing a peer-to-peer learning model that supports participants to learn at a sustainable pace, providing the network needed to create accountability and the motivation for continuing to learn alongside life. Along the way, I learnt a lot about design and my own practice, but most importantly and a perhaps unexpectedly, the experience is posing a bunch of questions about different ways of learning, how you create accountability amongst peers and the motivations that drive success beyond traditional educational ‘qualifications’. I’ve been massively humbled by the passion and drive of those on the programme, who are challenging me to really consider the role of ‘goal-setting’, how to be realistic about what is achievable, and frankly, to be kinder on myself when life gets in the way of achieving them.
Question I leave with:
Can a micro-hotel be the engine for equitable social and economic neighbourhood development? OursYours Micro Hotel - future scaling and impact The OursYours micro-hotel project to date - from idea, through maker weekend, to live pilot with real guests. I’ll be sharing what we have learnt along the way, and showcasing different ways the project could scale and impact a neighbourhood in the future. OursYours is an experiment in building a civic venture, and seeing how a neighbourhood business can both operate in a socially minded way; and create the space, funds and human capacity to create an ecosystem of new forms of participatory neighbourhood activity for long term social benefit. Stage One was to create a live working prototype, which included fitting out a space, welcoming guests, and creating an in-house store with local products. Stage Two was to explore how this model could scale in the future, in different ways. I have expanded on three versions. 1] The existing model running over 3 years. 2] Opening the model to many more people. 3] OursYours in a larger building, with more functionality.
This research is based on the assumption that I could pair my expertise in building participatory culture in a neighbourhood, with running a viable social business - to create a truly civic enterprise that would be the engine for equitable social and economic developing in an area. I remain open-minded as to the nature of the business I might like to run in the future, and plan to spend more time following Enrol Yourself exploring my interests and researching options. This project was designed and run in partnership with my husband Ben Haber. The interior of the hotel was designed by Katie Pearce. We have many friends and family to thank for the maker weekend: Richard & Jill Billings, Joe Clark, Valeria Ilies, Zak Butcher, Lynton Pepper, Andy Smith, Sarah Tucker, Zahra Davidson, Jan Matern, Catrine Ballie, Tom Stuart, James Gadsby Malmfrid Bloomfield, Tim Ahrensbach, Henry Hall, Sabine Rogers and Louka Travlos.
Laura Billings billings.lc@gmail.com @laurabillings
Roxana Bacian roxanabacian@gmail.com @RoxanaBacian
“I can’t believe how much I’ve made happen. I couldn’t have done it without the support of the group and the structure of meet-ups.” Question I came in with: How might movement, writing and performance be used to explore, express and overcome limiting thinking habits?
Question I leave with:
How might writing, movement and performance be used to express and recycle self-limiting thinking habits? Reflection on the experience: Zahra and I started Enrol Yourself because we wanted to find a way to continue learning without breaking the bank or leaving our jobs. We also wanted to approach self-directed learning differently by placing individual goals at the heart of a group of people who would teach and learn from each other. I go away feeling more connected, to myself, the group and generally in my life. My brain feels more spacious and able to hold in mind not only my own aspirations and curiosities, but also those of my friends and colleagues. This journey has been the steepest and most up and down learning curve I’ve ever experienced with learnings aplenty not only professionally stretching my leadership capabilities, but also personally exploding my resilience, commitment and ability for discipline. There still a lot of confusion and there is still a lot of fear. And that’s when I am reminded of a friend’s question what is the question that drives you, what is your self-engine? It’s not finding an answer that will lead you but asking the question. ‘If the path before you is clear, you are probably on someone else’s.’ - Joseph Campbell
Question I came in with:
In a future that requires us all to be lifelong learners, how can peer-to-peer and self-led approaches address the lack of accessible, compelling options? Learning marathon museum A tactile exhibit designed to give an insight into the experience of participating in a Learning Marathon. These artefacts tell the story of the journey our first peer group have taken together - and the service that together we’ve developed for future peer groups. I’ll be around to give mini-tours. When Roxana and I started discussing the idea which became Enrol Yourself, we just wanted to participate in it ourselves. We both wanted a learning community - in addition to our work. And we wanted that community to be interdisciplinary and open to people asking different questions. Our intuitive feeling was that this would lead to more stretch and challenge. The question that I brought into the process morphed as I began to see the Learning Marathon itself as a live experiment - through which I could both explore my question and develop my abilities as a designer. The question became more focussed as we tackled the challenges of peer-to-peer and self-directed learning in action. I’ll be taking forward a question which retains complexity, but feels more pragmatic.
Piloting this concept has been an unparalleled learning experience and I’ve been humbled by the participation of the other participants. The Learning Marathon has shed light on how my default method of problem solving has sometimes been to bulldoze my way through, giving everything I’ve got. Whilst this quality can be useful it is redundant under peer-to-peer conditions. You can’t control one another. What you can do is cultivate an environment of unconditional support which people can thrive within. I’m looking for c ollaborators, volunteers, technical wizards, employers, learning and development people - and participants for the next group!
Question I came in with: How can design of learning experiences - and the systems by which they’re accessed and delivered - be tools to enhance interdependence of people and living systems?
Zahra Davidson zahradavidson@gmail.com @ZahraDavidson
Blogging relay One challenge we decided to set ourselves as a group was to write a blog piece every two weeks across the duration of our Marathon. The person who writes selects the one who’ll go next and proposes a question to write in respose to. The (literal) golden baton is handed over each time. Here is a selection of the pieces we wrote. (More can be found if you head to our publication on Medium/enrol-yourself)
Daniel Ford: What’s the difference between eating insects and a learning marathon? Admittedly, this sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. But, alas, it’s not. You might think that eating insects is a bit disgusting. You may even think that starting a learning marathon is a bit disgusting. Personally, I think neither are disgusting. But I do think there are similarities when it comes to the behaviours you need to change and why play might offer some pointers for the transition. This is what generally happens when I offer people food containing crickets: 1) Usually a bit disgusted, they ask whether I’m joking. 2) After being assured that I’m not, they approach cautiously. 3) They look around to see whether anybody else is trying it, still worried it’s some sort of joke. 4) They ask a lot of questions, all of which I answer impeccably with very rational reasons why you might want to eat crickets. 5) They either make the leap or they don’t. But most do. Now, it’s not exactly the same with a learning marathon, but it’s not not exactly the same either. When we started Enrol Yourself (EY), it was, on my part at least, definitely filled with an element of trepidity and I felt like I approached cautiously. I didn’t ask Zahra and Rox whether it was a joke, that would have just been rude. And there definitely wasn’t the same level of disgust.
However, it definitely had similarities in the manner of which people approach something new. Something experimental. It required a similar leap, a similar level of collective validity. An obvious difference is that the Enrol Yourself pilot group wasn’t just plucked off the street, there was a level of vetting and due diligence that took place to make sure we wouldn’t run a mile at the very thought of it, and there isn’t the same cultural barrier to lifelong learning as there is to eating insects. But my mission on this journey is to attempt to better understand behaviours around both learning and eating insects, so here’s a shot at looking at both through the lens of behaviour change. The governmental Behavioural Insights Team has a sort of behaviour change 101. It’s that, if you want to harness behavioural psychology effectively to get people to do something that they’re not used to doing, you’d do well to abide by 4 principles. Make it: 1.EASY 2.ATTRACTIVE 3.TIMELY 4.SOCIAL ( I f you haven’t heard about N udge theory, then this is a really crude example of it. It aims to S lip things into peoples’ unconscious brain, E ffecting behaviour and hopefully leading to C hange T hat S tays at the subconscious level, but leads to lasting behaviour change. Like spelling ‘eats insects’ down the side of a blog article.) [...]
Fan Sissoko: What role should story telling play in public life? This is a tough question, that Laura, fellow learner on Enrol Yourself, asked me. Storytelling is so core to the experience of being human that defining a role for it feels like something nobody should attempt. First, through consuming stories, real or fictional, close to us or from far away lands, we learn about who we are, where we come from, what we should aspire to. We learn about others, we learn from their struggles, their successes, their emotions. We learn to feel connected to a human experience that is bigger than our small sorry self, and that helps us to make sense of the world. Second, through sharing stories, we tell the world about what we value, about how we want to be treated, and about where our limits are. We also tell the world about the complexity of human existence. If it takes an intergalactic war and a few destroyed planets to deliver a message about hope, it’s because hope is a really complicated emotion‌ Third, through making stories, we invite people to imagine with us how the world could be if the premise was different, if the rules were different, if we were different.
And we love it. Sometimes I like to picture each of us like a big flesh bag story monster, swallowing and regurgitating every bit of narrative we come across, never reaching satiety. Because we can’t help ourselves. It’s the way we grow. Jonathan Gottschall, who wrote the aptly named book “The Storytelling Animal” nails it by saying: “No matter how we concentrate, no matter how deep we dig our heels, we just can’t resist the gravity of alternate worlds.” In my job, when I talk to public sector leaders about the power of storytelling, and bring real human stories into the room in order to bring evidence about what works and what doesn’t work about the current system, the general reaction is along the lines of “Oh, that’s nice, an opportunity to feel empathic again, a permission to be human, we’ll take it.” And I think that’s made me a bit complacent. I tend to think that whatever it is you are trying to achieve, you just need to find and tell a good story that rings true. In a way, I still believe that. But lately, I’ve been hurting myself to a new storytelling challenge. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the widely accepted notion that stories require a “willing suspension of disbelief” from the reader or listener. This is of course nothing new, but all this talk about post-truth and alternative facts gives this phrase a new significance. It reminds anyone whose job it is to tell stories of the power — and responsibility — they have. Journalists, writers, filmmakers, theatre people, game makers, communication and media people, researchers, historians, designers… all now seem to have this strange and massive question looming over their heads:
What side are you on? But that’s a distracting question. Instead, I would like to suggest a more constructive set of ethical questions for anyone who is involved in the capturing, producing and sharing of human stories in public life: 1. How do you share stories in a way that is not there just to distract us from real struggles, but to help us engage with those struggles without losing our minds? 2. How do you share stories that help us to see our common humanity rather than emphasise what divides us? 3. How do you share stories that will move someone from having empathy (the ability to feel someone else’s emotions) to compassion (the impulse to help) to acting meaningfully on that compassionate impulse?
Laura Billings: Can you change the way you learn? This is the question posed to me by my Enrol Yourself blogging relay predecessor Clémence Tanzi. To my mind, this question breaks down as: Can you become conscious of the way you learn? If you are conscious of the learning process, can you then do anything to change it? At first I had a large dose of imposter syndrome and stalled. I have not studied this area, I don’t have a qualification in it… I didn’t feel that I had the authority to write publicly about it given I am not an expert. Or am I … ? I can bring to mind 3 significant moments in the past few years where my learning style has changed. So I have decided to write about that. Moment 1 — Leaving employment to be self-employed What a steep learning curve! No administrative structure, no management, no staff learning budget, no colleagues, no set calendar. Just an ambition, a decreasing financial runway, and a blank piece of paper. No-one to say what I should do, or to validate whether I was doing it correctly or not, or to say when it was done. Very different to my experience of school and employment to date. So I found a mentor to give me advice, and offered my time and help to three others whose work inspired me. (One of whom I eventually joined as a co-founder and we ran The Civic
Systems Labtogether for 6 years working to understand and spread new forms of participatory activity to create more equitable neighbourhoods.) Changes in learning: 1. How to feel comfortable learning on the job, while delivering outcomes 2. How to design practical ways to test, pilot and develop ideas 3. How to hold this level of emergence (more or less!) confidently Moment 2 — co-founding Trade School London Trade School is an open learning project, based on barter. Anyone can offer to teach, and request a list of items for pupils to choose to bring for them, in return for their class. I have been to classes on how to make a wormery, sign writing, film editing, book publishing, growing food in the city, ice-cream making, letterpress, cycle maintenance, Danish Christmas cookie baking… The range is endless! I have given back in return fruit, design advice, a favourite recipe, paint, wrapping paper and plant pots. Changes in learning: 1. How to respect that the role of learner and teacher is entirely interchangeable how to use barter (or other sharing mechanisms such as food) as a way to create social exchange and form a peer learning group 2. How to design frameworks to offer anyone the opportunity to teach, and surface an endless range of classes and depth of expertise Moment 3 — joining Enrol Yourself, peer learning marathon I joined Enrol Yourself partly because after years of being self employed, I craved a learning cohort of peers and some external structure again! And for the luxury of the opportunity to learn
without it being directly linked to my income. (Turns out that the time pressures of learning and holding down a full time job also isn’t quite the luxurious pace I imagined… PhD anyone??). Changes in learning: 1. How to develop learning design as a skill, largely by seeing how the Enrol Yourself co-founders have designed the structures and processes that we have undertaken as a cohort 2. How to prioritise self-care alongside learning and working (yes, this blog post is technically 4 weeks late, but I got it done without pulling an all-nighter or giving myself a hard time) 3. How to learn through helping others — sharing skills, resources, contacts and brainpower on other people’s projects, although potentially seen as a less productive way to use limited time if you are very output focused, often creates new trains of thought that impact my own learning question. Conclusions Based on my experience to date — I think that it IS possible to change the way you learn. But it is ultimately easier with peers and a structure to support you, and a wider system that is designed to enable and recognise new forms of learning. So the question I pose back, is not whether it is possible to change how you learn as an individual — but how can we collectively and intentionally change the way we learn for the better; what does this mean for how we redefine our concept of lifelong learning; and ultimately how we re-design our future schools and workplaces?
Enrol Yourself is a platform for affordable, flexible lifelong learning. Over the last six months we have been piloting a peer-to-peer and self-directed learning experience which we’ve called a Learning Marathon. What is a Learning Marathon? A Learning Marathon is a 6 month self-directed learning ‘accelerator’. You pursue your goals from within a diverse, committed peer group - with access to the collective networks, skills and support. Designed for people who are working to integrate learning into their life, a Learning Marathon is a way to harness the power of peer groups, infinite content and a networked world for lifelong learning that is personalised, flexible and affordable. The pilot group Presenting the pioneers of the Learning Marathon, the early adopters, the adventurers who took a leap and got involved in the unknown. Explore their projects and what they have to say about the experience. Find out more Website enrolyourself.com Follow us on twitter @EnrolYourself Like us on facebook/enrolyourself Get in touch hello@enrolyourself.com