EU368: Curiosity-Led Learning

Exploring Unschooling

In this episode, Pam, Anna, and Erika talk about curiosity-led learning. We thought this would be a fun topic to dive into during this back-to-school season! Focusing on curiosity—our own and our kids’—can be so grounding.

In this episode, we explore the definition of learning, how school-based learning looks different than learning through unschooling, and how we’ve seen curiosity at play in our families.

We hope you find our conversation helpful on your unschooling journey!

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

The Living Joyfully Shop – books, courses, including Four Pillars of Unschooling and Navigating Unschooling Wobbles, coaching calls, and more!

The Living Joyfully Network

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about navigating relationships and exploring unschooling.

Sign up to our mailing list to receive The Living Joyfully Dispatch, our biweekly email newsletter, and get a free copy of Pam’s intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling?

We invite you to join us in The Living Joyfully Network, a wonderful online community for parents to connect and engage in candid conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling. This month, we’re talking about seasons—in unschooling and in life. Come and be part of the conversation!

So much of what we talk about on this podcast and in the Living Joyfully Network isn’t actually about unschooling. It’s about life. On The Living Joyfully Podcast, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia talk about life, relationships, and parenting. You can check out the archive here, or find it in your your favorite podcast player.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

ERIKA: Hello, everyone! I’m Erika Ellis from Living Joyfully, and I’m joined by my co-hosts, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia. Hello to you both.
ANNA AND PAM: Hello!
ERIKA: And before we get started, have you checked out LivingJoyfullyShop.com yet? Our online shop has Pam’s unschooling books, lots of helpful coaching options and online courses such as Four Pillars of Unschooling, which is great if you’re newer to unschooling and Navigating Unschooling Wobbles if you’re finding that back-to-school season has gotten you feeling unsure about things.

We also have courses on validation and on navigating conflict. You can also learn more about the Living Joyfully Network there. We’re so excited to be creating a one-stop shop to support you along your unschooling journey, and we hope you’ll check it out.
Pam, would you like to get us started with our topic for today, which is curiosity-led learning?

PAM: Yes, I would love to! Because I feel like this is one of the first big paradigm shifts that people encounter and that I encountered when I began exploring unschooling in earnest. But even if you’ve been unschooling for years, I would not be surprised of just listening in on this conversation reveals yet another layer that you can peel back around the value of curiosity-led learning.

Like, “Oh, it applies here, too.” I’m still getting those little layers. As you encounter it out in the wild in our lives, there’s always, always more layers.

But culturally, the message is that learning must be led by curricula, that there’s a step-by-step, linear process that needs to be followed for “real” learning to happen, and that learning is hard, that it’s challenging. Here’s the next step. Learn this. Here’s the next step.

And what unschooling does is encourage us to ask ourselves, is that the only way to learn? Because some people pick things up that way. We all went through school that way, and we learned what we did. And then it’s always fun to look back and think, how much did I remember? How do I define learning? Is that really learning? If really I can just do it on a worksheet, but I have no idea how to bring that into my days and into my life? It is just a beautiful, beautiful paradigm shift when you start looking, oh, are there other ways to learn? Is this other learning that I’m doing just because I love this thing, does it discount the learning I’m doing about it? If it’s not hard, is it learning? There are just so many ways to look at it.
And then when we give ourselves enough space to start questioning it and start looking at, okay, well, I know this was really fun, but I have been learning lots and it’s been useful learning for me, does that count? And just start looking at it through that lens and recognizing things like, oh my gosh, it doesn’t feel hard. Even though you may notice other people saying, “Oh my gosh. How did you learn all that? That depth of knowledge,” et cetera. And they’re talking about it being difficult, whereas it feels much easier to us because we were interested in it in the first place because our curiosity was guiding us and we’re like, oh, yes, I want more. I want more. I want more.

When we start to notice all those little different aspects of it and start to bring that all together, we start to play with, what does curiosity-led learning look like? And wow, it’s pretty darn amazing. It really is valuable. It’s like all the things. And we can start to replace what is curriculum-led, what somebody else thinks we should be learning with what we’re interested in learning. And it just opens up this whole box. It’s just removes the box on what learning can look like for us. Can’t it?

ANNA: Yeah. For me, I think what’s so interesting is I feel like this is actually the natural process, how we all, as adults learn. Like, “Okay, there’s something that I want to do and so what do I need to know in order to do that thing?” And so, then it’s the relevant pieces that maybe I want to take up this hobby and I need to learn this, or maybe I want to take this particular job and gosh, I better learn these things. But it’s so relevant. So, for me it’s about bringing that “relevant” piece to it.

And you kind of mentioned this, where the retaining comes in, because when it’s something that we’re using every day or is relevant to something that we’re interested in, we actually do retain it, because we’re practicing, we’re using, we’re tweaking all the time. And so, I think that piece is so interesting that school has kind of separated that and made it very irrelevant.

So, we’re learning and putting things on a piece of paper. We don’t really understand why. And so, what I learned in school was really how to do that, how to take and memorize information and give it to them in the form that they wanted. It’s interesting to me now as an adult, sometimes I’ll think about something that was covered in school and I’m like, that’s why they wanted that to be covered, but it meant nothing to me in the 30 years in between. But now I’m like, now that it’s relevant, I can go back and refresh. I don’t remember it from then, but I can go back and refresh. But I thought, oh, how interesting. Because somebody somewhere thought this was important in their life. And so, they wanted kids to know it. But I don’t feel like humans learn that way.

ERIKA: Right. It’s so interesting, isn’t it? I just feel like what has happened is that the way that schools do things has become the definition of what learning is, but if you really think about it, it doesn’t work. Our brains do not work that way. But if we think learning is, someone tells you what you need to know, it’s in this order, it’s these important things, these facts at this age, whatever, then the curiosity part, it never even gets looked at or considered. It’s not even a consideration at all.

But we know from ourselves, from watching our kids, just from looking at people, like you’ve seen the glazed-over eyes of kids in class. Certainly. I mean, certainly over the years I have seen that as a teacher and I’ve seen it as a student and information is not getting in there. So, as far as just choosing to teach someone something that they’re not interested in, that’s not causing learning to happen. And so, I really think we need to just change the definition. Don’t call it learning if all you’re doing is having someone lecture to someone else about something that they don’t want to know. That’s not learning.

And so, I feel like a lot of the “learning” that I did in school was that temporary, memorize it, cram it in my brain, get it out onto the paper for the test, and then it’s gone. And so, now I can look back and just be like, what was the use of that time for me, other than, like you said, learning to memorize, learning to take tests, that kind of thing?

Thankfully, when I was in school, I was so interested in doing well in school, that that itself kind of became my interest. And so, learning the things in class to do on the test, that process was more my interest, because I wanted to get the good grades. My kids do not have this personality. And so, with them, it just has to be curiosity-led. I can’t see another way. They don’t want to learn things that they’re not interested in. And so, then the fun part is then how fun, natural, easy, all the things, they will dive so deeply into things that they’re interested in. And so, now I see it as the only way for learning to happen is through curiosity.

PAM: Yeah. It’s really how you define learning, right? Is learning the regurgitation piece for the grades, is it the retention piece we’ll get to? And for those peeling back more layers, do we even need to look at learning? That’s a topic for another conversation. But there were two or three pieces that I really wanted to pull out, Erika, from what you said there. One was, let’s call it something else. And you know what popped to mind was, let’s call that teaching.
Just because teaching is done doesn’t mean learning is happening. Teaching is somebody else telling people, you’re going to know this and this is the process to get this answer, and this is a noun, etc. And so, the teaching happens whether or not the learning happens, like you’re saying, Erika, I love the distinction of, what came to be my interest was getting good grades, which is then again, another conversation. But that is what helped you move through the school process, exist in that environment, take stuff in from the teaching, and then spew it out on the test for the grades. Totally, totally fine.

And what is super interesting, and what I found, like you mentioned too, Anna, is that the retention just isn’t there when you’re not using it or interested in it. Because for me, one of the big shifts with this shift to curiosity-led learning was looking at learning from my child’s perspective. That helped me start to recognize when it was actually learning I was talking about and not teaching. And to make that distinction between the two. Sometimes my kids are interested in learning something and want some information, but the interest is there first and then they’re going to soak it in. They’re going to ask questions. They’re going to ask, but, but why, but how? And then you get into that conversation, they pick up what they’re interested in. That helps them make that next connection and that next connection and then they move on. And it doesn’t have to be a week’s worth of worksheets and repetition, because they were ready to soak that in.
And then the other piece that I really enjoy when I think about learning, because so much of the school as we were talking about, is that linear curricula. You learn this and then learn this and then learn this. Like, this is the best way to put this knowledge together. But my preference over the years has really become thinking of learning more as a web of connections of like, oh, there’s this piece and this piece and this piece. Because truly, when you break subjects down, there is really so much crossover in the real world. There is math all over the place. There’s math in poetry, in words, there’s math in geography. There’s just so much crossover. Once you start breaking them into the silos of subjects, you lose that richness, whereas when you’re following your curiosity and just seeing where it leads you, you may end up over in one subject for a couple of days and then back into another subject, but you are making connections between it all.

There’s just a much bigger, deeper richness to the learning that happens when you’re following the things that you’re curious about, the things that you’re interested in. It doesn’t mean that you’re not going to do the hard things. I think that’s one of the little stumbling blocks that can come up when people are first learning about, well, if we are just going to follow our interests, we’re never going to do anything hard, because if something looks hard, I’m not going to be interested.

Well, look at your kids. And actually notice, so often, when they’re frustrated, that’s because they’re wanting to do something that’s hard for them right now, but they want to do it, so they’re going to keep going. Even if you wish, like, okay, let’s go do something else for a while because you’re uncomfortable with the frustration. But no, there’s beauty in that frustration as well. And of course, we want to support, give space, hold all those pieces for them. But it’s not wrong to be frustrated. It doesn’t mean they’re not a good learner, because they’re frustrated. It means none of those things. It means, oh they’re really determined in this moment. And how can I help them, if they’re looking for some help, to start putting something together? What’s that little connection they’re missing in their web, right?

ANNA: Yeah. Something you said, Erika, it was about the learning. I think it’s really helpful if people find themselves saying things like, I don’t think they’re learning anything, they’re playing games all the time, or they’re building forts all the time, they’re not learning. I think this is really important to really ask yourself, what do I think learning means? Am I only looking at it through this lens of, “Well, they’re not sitting down doing fractions or times tables,” because really, learning as humans is so much broader than that.

And so, I loved how you pointed out that we’ve taken this system that’s really a subset and hasn’t always been around to define this concept that is just really innate to humans. We are just learning machines. How do we survive the day? How do we get through this? That is what we do.
And so, I think when you hear yourself saying things like that go, oh wait a minute. What am I defining as learning and why? And this is important. There’s no right or wrong answer. It’s just a little examination. I think it’s important.

One of the things I also wanted to say was about the doing hard things, because we said it’s easier when it’s led by our curiosity. But it can be hard, right? It can be frustrating. It can take time. And that’s okay too, because what you’ll see is there’s this drive to figure out and sometimes walk away from it and then sometimes come back. But it’s just so much more natural and I love that.

And then another thing Pam reminded me of, so Pam is amazing at technology and systems and all of these things. I am not as much. I’m not terrible, but if you put me in that world, I’m not as good at it. And so, I really don’t retain all the, of all the different pieces, even about things I use pretty regularly, because it just isn’t a passion area for me. And so, I think it’s just knowing about ourselves and thinking, yeah, that’s kind of how it works. If I need to know, I can Google it. I can figure it out. I can ask Pam. She may be like, “She’s asking me again!” But it’s okay, you know?
So, I think just thinking about how we do things and then recognizing that our kids are human, too, doing things, it can really help when we get stuck in this place.

ERIKA: Right, exactly. I just feel like once we start thinking about ourselves and how we actually really learn, it becomes this different way that we can look at our kids. And I think sometimes when we first go into parenting, first go into the idea of how children learn, it’s just old tapes of what we’ve been told over the years of, school is the place you learn. You have to know these things. This is what it should look like. And so, I loved my unschooling journey for that process of questioning that and being like, wait a second. If I can learn things, anything I want, now, they can also learn anything they want at any time. And there’s just a lot of freedom in that.

And then I was also thinking, a lot of people have had the experience, too, in school of like, maybe they do hit on a topic that you might be interested in, and then they say, that’s enough of that, let’s move on to something else. And so, that’s a really huge benefit of unschooling is just like, oh my gosh. I found something I want to do. Can I do more of this? And the answer’s always yes. And they can just dive as deeply as they want. And so, then we meet really interesting children who have so much knowledge in this one super deep area that’s just incredible. And so, they may not have all of their whatever other skills that the school would be looking for at that age, but they have spent their time learning about something that’s so important and interesting to them. And from there, whatever they want to do in life, it becomes obvious what they might be curious about next.

And so, I find that so much with my kids who are now young teenagers. They used to be so focused on certain things and then now it’s different. It’s like they’re in a new phase. They’re finding new aspects of life that now they’re curious about and interested in. Like, how am I going to manage to do this in my life? I want to do this and I know that I need to learn more things to get there. You know? And so, it’s just a very different way. I felt very directed down a path, but it feels like for them, they’re making a path and seeing where they want to go, and then telling me, “I really want to work on my handwriting because that would really help me with this.” And I’m just like, yeah, that makes sense. It’s a completely different approach.

PAM: I want to jump in, because that’s what was bubbling in my head. Erika, you nailed it. There is one thing when you’re making the shift away from curriculum and into curiosity and interests is, it’s fascinating to note how much of the curriculum, certainly in the younger years is skill-based, like reading and math and handwriting, like those skills, whereas that’s not really what you’re going to see very often in unschooling lives, because they’re following their interests.

But what they’re doing instead of learning the skill, like, two plus two is four, and then now let’s take that into the world. Here’s how to read beginner books, now let’s take that into the world. Our kids are, like you said, they’re doing stuff and they’re like, oh, hey, like I’m playing this game and I’ve got these boss statistics I need to manage. I’m going to figure out how those numbers are working and what formulas back there. Or I really want to read this forum and yes, my parents, somebody’s helping me read it for a while and then I’m starting to pick it up, or I’m wanting to try and read because somebody doesn’t have time to or isn’t able to read for me for 12 hours. All those pieces.

So, our kids are doing the things in the world and picking up the skills along the way. They’re not like, I want to learn the skill and now I can finally go and play that game. Or now I can finally go and read this book. Or the handwriting. Yes. Go Anna.

ANNA: Well, it’s exactly this though. I’m just going to take the next step. Because what’s so incredible about that is, if we are really true and really honest with ourselves, we don’t know what skills are going to be needed for the next generation and for five years from now and for 10 years from now.

Because I think about the books that were the standard when I was in school, they probably wouldn’t even believe it if kids today read some of the stuff that they thought we needed to know then. And so, what’s so great when it’s coming the other direction, they’re able to take it way further than this curriculum can lead them, because that’s actually pinning them in. But if they’re following interests and creating new things and making new discoveries, and then getting the skills along the way. Yes, those skills can be foundational, but because they’re foundational, they’re always going to learn them. They’re just going to learn them through something that’s interesting and maybe taking them way beyond what we could have done with the curriculum. So, I love that so much.

PAM: For me, that was another one of the huge shifts, right? It was truly just understanding that, oh, it’s not that I’m throwing out the curriculum, and they will never learn how to spell and they’ll never learn how to read and their math skills will be atrocious. Each of those things is so much bigger when you’re actually in the world. Back to what you were talking about at the very beginning, Anna, about just being in the world and living in the world, and we’re just picking up those skills. And yes, if they are actually foundational to living a human life wherever it is that we’re living, you are going to come across the need for them as you’re living.

ANNA: Absolutely. Right. That’s why they’re foundational. We don’t have to force it. And we don’t have to pull it out, because I feel like the way that schools can separate learning from life and reality almost makes it feel mysterious and difficult. Like, what does this mean? Why am I having to do it?

And like you said, the drills, the drills, the drills.

And what I found so interesting with my girls is, in our state at the time, we had to take a standardized test every couple years, I think. Maybe every year. It’s been a little while. But what was so interesting to me is they would be able to do all of these English things and looking at sentences and picking the right word. And I’m like, oh my gosh. I remember filling out those sheets with making the verb match the tense of the thing. And they never did that. They learned it from talking, being spoken to reading books, having books, read to them, playing games. They learned the language that was around them because they were in the world.

And I think that what’s empowering about that is I think they had a belief. I see it in them as adults, that they can figure things out, they can learn things. Whereas I think school kind of makes it mysterious, like, no, you have to be in this room and someone that’s an expert’s going to tell you, and then you’re going to have to really work hard and practice it to learn it. And I just don’t think that’s true. And so, what I love about unschooling is just that questioning. We can start questioning, is that true it? Does that make sense? Do I see that in my life as an adult? Does it really play out when I’m watching my kids organically learn? And that’s when I think things get really interesting.

ERIKA: I think the school model can just lead to people thinking that they can’t learn. Where really, it’s like, I can’t memorize stuff that I’m not interested in, which I think is just natural. Or like, I can’t memorize stuff that makes no sense to me and I can’t use it anywhere in my life. I think that’s reasonable, but to conclude that, then that means I can’t learn, it’s just so sad that that is the result of so much of school-style teaching.

I see it a little bit just culturally with my kids, where they’ll have some of these beliefs of like, I’m supposed to know this, or, well, in school they do this and I can’t do this, or I don’t know if I would be able to. And so, I mean, it’s interesting that those things still come up, even though they can make their own decisions and learn all kinds of things. And so, it’s just interesting to have those conversations with them about like, well, what are the things that you want to do? And thankfully, outside of school, there are an infinite number of ways to learn the things that they want to learn.

And so, we’re working through some new computer programs with Oliver and he took a look at one the other day and he was just like, I don’t think I can learn this. And I was like, it looks super overwhelming at first, but I’m sure that we can figure it out. Either someone who is an expert who could work with you on it or we could look up videos. There are just so many ways to learn.

I think, in some moments we run into those, “I’m not practiced at learning” kind of ideas that they have about it, but then it’s fun to point out to them, but that’s all you do. That really is what you’ve done your whole life. It just doesn’t feel like what it looks like in the stories or what you hear about with your friends who are in school.

ANNA: Right. And that what’s so important about that piece that you just puzzled there is, what I recognized was that my role was my energy about that. Because I think what can happen is, if you hear your child say, I don’t know how to do that, and this person knows how to do this and I don’t know how to do it, suddenly all of our tapes come and the mother-in-law’s tape and the thing going, oh, we failed them. We’ve done this. But really, it was just what you were saying. I was like, wait a minute. I’ve lived with you all these years. I’ve seen you learn things that I can’t even learn. Oh my gosh. We just need some different tools. If this is something you’re interested in now, then here’s the thing.

But they really look to me for my energy. So, if I brought heaviness about, oh my gosh, you don’t know how to do that and we better do this and that, or we need to jump back into that, I think it really would’ve changed that. And instead, it was just, like you said, just empowering them. Like, you are learning incredible things every day. You can learn whatever you want. Let’s figure out what you need and we’ll do it together. So, just watching that energy and making sure that I’m not letting the tapes from other people come into that relationship with my child.

PAM: Yeah. I think that’s definitely us doing our work and practicing, because, like you said, that just brings back all those messages. Oh, but if they were in school, they would’ve learned this in this grade and this in this grade, and taking that leap to the future as in how we learn as adults.
And I think for me, the shift to just thinking of us all as human beings and wherever we are as a human being in this moment and what we’re interested in learning, and even if it feels overwhelming in the moment, like, oh my gosh, something I continue to do is use your time machine idea, Anna, which is when I’m something like, holy crap, I have no idea. I can just imagine in six months when I’m sitting here and just humming along, that’s going to be so cool. And that just kind of helps me take that next step. It’s like, oh yeah, give myself a bunch of time and I’ll just figure it out along the way. I’ll play with it. And that’s the way human beings learn, as you were mentioning earlier.
So, to be able to take our messages and our fears around school and kids and to be able to just say, this is human beings and learning stuff. That helped me so much anyway to just move through those moments, because those cultural messages are everywhere. It’s not just that we learned them growing up and then now we have them. We also hear them all the time now. In this back-to-school season, we hear them even more. And it can have us questioning ourselves.

So, I think it’s so useful for us to do that bit of processing for ourselves, because as you said, Anna, the energy that we show up with can make all the difference. If we show up with, oh my gosh, something’s wrong, that needs fixing, or, oh my goodness, that looks like a lot of stuff to take in just one bite at a time, as they say, baby steps, whatever kind of language helps for them and helps for you as you move through it to remember like, this is just learning.

And I think it’s threaded through our entire conversation, but I don’t know that we’ve said it loud. We can learn something at every age. So, just because something in school is covered in grade four. I always go back to pioneer times, because that was when Joseph left school. That was one of the topics going on. It doesn’t matter at what age. It doesn’t even matter if, but whatever age something comes up about pioneer times, that that period of history, and they’re curious about it, they can learn it at any time. There is no need for it to be done at a certain age. You can see why that’s useful inside a school curriculum, because you don’t want like three years in a row for the teacher to love pioneer times, and they have to do it for three years in a row. They have to break it up that way, right? So, okay, this is the chunk. There’s often not much more logic than that. We’ve got this many years of history to cover, let’s do this much each year. Same with geography, same with so much of it, right? But we can learn anything at any age.

ANNA: Now I’m super curious what Canadian pioneer times are like. I’m going to have to look it up and learn at 55.

PAM: We loved visiting the Pioneer Village. I found it at the time because I was very new at unschooling and thought, well we can do this instead. This is how we can learn it, outside, because he was finding it interesting at the time. But it ended up being one of our favorite places to go as a family for the first two years. We got a park pass, so we could go any time. There’s no cars, so you could walk around. We would bring walkie talkies (before mobile phones) and play tag. Because we could all just be within this area and it wasn’t huge. We would give clues, I’m beside a big steeple, or I see horses, clues like that. And we would go and find each other and my gosh.
We had so much fun in Pioneer Times for two years, like I said, at least. And we go back there just for the memories. We went a couple years ago. Anyway, so that’s funny. Exactly. Any age, any age.

ERIKA: And any topic! I love that so much. Well, this has been so much fun, as expected. We hope you enjoyed our conversation and maybe had an a-ha moment or picked up some ideas to consider on your own unschooling journey. And if you enjoy these kinds of conversations, I think you would love the Living Joyfully Network. It is such an amazing group of people connecting and having thoughtful conversations about all the things we encounter in our own unschooling lives. You can learn more about the Network at livingjoyfully.ca/network or on livingjoyfullyshop.com. We hope to meet you there! And thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time! Bye!