11/08/2025
In what now feels like a long time ago, even though it has been only a few years…I remember education twisting itself inside out to make pandemic education possible. In the midst of terrible circumstances, I remember a brief moment of feeling immense hope: that we could let go of all our preconceptions of what learning “should” look like, that we could embrace the opportunity to imagine again learning out in the wild and unbounded by conventional classroom walls and schedules. That flicker of hope was soon extinguished as state agencies released requirements for students to attend minimum amounts of classroom minutes over zoom/conference calls. Students were shackled to the indoors, tethered to synchronous online experiences that did not measure their learning but only their supposed presence. I watched joy, wonder, and community fade from my students, and we were all at a loss for how to reclaim these things for ourselves and each other. Strangely, it was during this same peculiar era that I attended graduate school, entirely online, and forged bonds with my classmates as close as any I have had with in person classes. We found joy, wonder, and community in the same forum which resulted in distance and depression for so many of our students. I think perhaps the biggest difference is that my graduate school cohort all chose to be there, already seeking knowledge and chasing answers to questions burning wide of us, answers that we each had been unable to find alone. For public school students, there was no preexisting internal drive to attend…not for many of them, at least. So many students claimed that they learned nothing during this time, and the narratives around the failures of education - before, during, and after the pandemic - have served to reinforce that self assessment in our youth.
What if it isn’t true? At least, not entirely. It is demonstrably true that the children of the pandemic did not learn the content that we would normally have expected of them during those school years. But what if they were learning, and we failed to notice or validate the learning experiences they encountered along the way? I can speak for my own eldest child, who spent much of that year watching WWII documentaries about naval battles and shipwrecks. It was not part of any curriculum for first or second grade, nor assigned by any teacher. No test has ever asked him about these things, and yet - he was absolutely engaged in academic learning. So I wonder about my students, who claim they learned nothing…and wonder if what they really mean is that they learned nothing that authorities care about measuring.
Now, secular homeschoolers have been following such a vision of the entire world being their classroom for many years, it is not actually a new idea.
At the heart of Ember Commons lie a series of questions: what could learning look like if we considered all places to be places of learning - physical and digital? What would it look like to value a much broader spectrum of content as valid and worthy of learning? How do we provide students the combination of freedom to explore and the structure of community that imparts encouragement, motivation, inspiration, perseverance, and accountability for following through our commitments?
One workshop at a time, we are building that community, and illuminating pathways to wonder.
