Weeks 21 & 22 2025-2026

We embrace conflict here - or, perhaps more accurately - we embrace the work of building relational safety. The process work of navigating conflict and repair is one of many that builds trust and safety, and is at the heart of the small and big moments we spend here. We've gotten a lot of calls lately from curious families - the adults' questions vary, but in this round of calls, the young people curious about TCC have had a primary concern: will there be bullying? (translation: "Will I feel safe there?"), and this question has been heavy on our hearts and minds.

How do we talk about the work of relationship and the role it plays?

How can we share clearly how we prioritize it?

As we processed together and responded to these calls, we heard ourselves say things like, "We take a lot of care to create a culture here - together - where the young people can and do feel safe. We spend a lot of time facilitating conflict, supporting repair, modeling and practicing caretaking communication, and so on. All the social work that creates safety. In fact, it's…most of what we do."

And it is. 

Because without that felt sense of safety, not much else can take root. We learn things, alright, but they're not usually what we intend; they're messages that come from the perceived need to protect and shrink and smallify ourselves in spaces where don't feel safe or will be coerced/criticized/controlled, rather than learning the expansiveness we feel when we can be fully ourselves. We can fall in the mud here and know no one will laugh. Instead, folks will come to us with hands extended and offers to help us get cleaned up. We can say "no" and be listened to and believed. We can express, "I don't want to play with you right now, but I will another time," and be supported in both speaking and receiving that message with care. We can practice the distinction between getting consent and the need to ask permission (abandoning the latter entirely). We can learn to ask and advocate directly instead of dropping hints or hiding an agenda. We can decide together how we want to be and set norms for those ways of being, instead of creating rules and punishments that encourage us to police one another. We learn to hear, “I can see you feel really strongly about doing (or not doing) a thing - what are the considerations related to doing that or opting out that will impact the group?” We can inadvertently hurt someone and rather than worry about the imposed consequences of a rule violation, we can sit with our own sadness that we've hurt another, which is meaningful consequence enough, and then be supported in showing care. We learn that while our intentions may have been pure, our impact still hurt, and for that, we're responsible, not bad.

We can learn what it means to be loved into living our values. 

We learn to care about caring for one another.

We could recap in each of these writings our smattering of youth- and facilitator-led offerings and focus on what's on the Set the Week board. These are the official "learning opportunities," after all. These past two weeks we've had Train Club with O, several culture meetings during which we've continued to process a significant event in our community, as well as the sudden death of a chicken that occurred a few weeks prior. We've had DnD and Digital Studio check-ins, learned new stitches in sessions of Embroidery Intro with Sarah, met to discuss our Book Club readings of Root Magic, discussed myriad topics in World Events Processing, hashed out possibilities for our podcast intro song and how we want to navigate podcast conversations (young people selected a major vs. minor key, for example…), and bridged from that conversation into Music Theory with R. This was all "just" what was on the board.

But as we've shared before, as is the case in other agile learning environments, we have the "real schedule" (see above) and then something we might think of as the "shadow schedule," language that comes from Mel Compo's piece by the same name, informed by their work as a facilitator at ALC-NYC.

"Learning is natural and happening all the time, even when it’s not the learning the schedule says should be happening now. Content and container are not separable. It’s as true at ALC as it was in my conventional high school, because it’s true in all spaces where young people are: learning to be, in relationship with other humans, is always happening, and it is the foundation on which all other kinds of learning happens," they write (emphasis ours).

Early childhood educator Teacher Tom works in a community that centers truly free play. He shared recently about a phenomenon we, too, have noticed: when the confines of a schoolish schedule - children (and the adults that share the space!) being shuttled from one pre-planned experience to another, allowed 15 minutes for recess, and otherwise very little time to just…be together - are absent, young people’s messy humanity bubbles up to be explored and revealed and mucked through. Hopefully with care, hopefully with skill, hopefully together. In fact, it's a necessity, he writes in his piece, "Children Must Bicker As They Play." This work isn't a distraction from the "real" or more important work - the learning we have outlined on the Real Schedule - this most crucial work is what happens in the Shadow Schedule. This bickering, this conflict, the repair, the mess - this is the work itself.

The past two weeks in particular, it's happened in emergent forest walks, in pop-up mud & water play, in invented games (H's 'Banana Tag' rings a bell), in spontaneous chats about what microphones and other equipment we want, during the process of navigating an accidental injury in the rain. The work of relationship rose to the forefront when we buried our recently dead chicken hen, in a somber and loving ceremony guided by the young people's questions and wishes. 

This potent learning and growth is process work we often wish we could capture and share about, and we haven't yet found a way. And also, maybe it's so sacred it's meant to be something that unfolds beyond our analytical gazes, and that we learn and see and feel by being here. This is the work we prioritize in ourselves in our roles as facilitators and practice every day alongside the young people, and you. We hope to do this with genuine humility and care - knowing that every single one of us has work to do in this realm and always will. Knowing we will stumble and make mistakes. This call from strategist and writer Toi Smith reminds us that you probably need to be working on your relational skills. And that's ALL of us! Because all of us continue to live under and have been "socialized under hierarchies of domination." None of us lives in this culture and somehow escapes its toxicity; it's in the air we breathe and the patterns we have unconsciously internalized. The world "out there" and all that’s burning is a reflection of the work we're being invited to do "in here," and with one another, in our relationships. It can feel sometimes like trying on clothing that it seems will never fit, or stretching into a version of ourselves that's unfamiliar and roughly edged and perhaps not even yet formed. And, these skilled selves of ours do exist in the future, and can guide us in the now. In the Shadow Schedule we all live. 

Jump in.

Take the relational risk. 

The new world needs us to get practicing.

With gratitude, care, and hope for the future,

Emily, Sarah, and Zoey