Youth Stories of Other Ways of Learning

I look forward to sharing my experience with Sudbury and Self-directed education. I've been unschooled my whole life up until the age of 16 years old. Then I started going to Riverstone Village, a Sudbury school. I attended there for 5 years and just last year December I graduated. I interned as a staff member for the last year I attended to help out because I liked the model and wanted to learn more about how the system worked. I also joined one of our founder's courses on Self-Directed Education and how to facilitate it as well as taking her course on Horizontal Communication, a mode of beinf that isn't authoritarian or coming from a place of being above someone else in any way. I look forward to being able to help others and show as many people as possible the different ways of learning so more people can find their passions and ultimately live more fulfilling lives!

I'm Mohini Govender (she/they) from Gqeberha, South Africa. My exploration of alternative learning started in 2017 when I officially left traditional school and embarked on my journey of unschooling. Since being unschooled I have actively worked with and for various social justice organizations (Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, The African Climate Alliance, and now YouthxYouth). As a young person who had the privilege of following their passions unapologetically, leading to working in wonderful social justice spaces, mostly intergenerationally, has left me with what feels like a plethora of invaluable experiences that would have never happened if I had attended a traditional school. I have had the rare opportunity to plant seeds of my wildest imaginings at a young age and to nurture them through these years of unschooling - seeds such as; mental health, activism, and Liberatory learning. At the 2023 YxY Learning Festival I will be sharing my journey with unschooling, how I became unschooled, and where unschooling has brought me. I look forward to sharing more of my experience!

Fiston Muganda is a refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) now based in Uganda. In the DRC, he earned a secondary school diploma while studying community development, social work, and organized ethics and legislation. He arrived in Uganda in 2015 and in the Nakivale refugee settlement camp in 2016. Fiston Muganda is a self-directred learner that has continuously sought out educational opportunities, even amidst the challenges of fleeing his country and being a refugee. For instance, he earned a certificate in Entrepreneurship from the Nakivale refugee settlement camp and later received a certificate in data research from 60 Decibels where he currently holds the position of a Lean Data Research Assistant. Fiston is currently a project manager and consultant at Open Portal Network, which is part of the LO*OP Center Inc. He also works as a Community Support Officer for Project Hello World and is a country representative of Full Circle Learning. He is also the former CEO of Unidos' Nakivale refugee settlement project, a community-based organization that seeks to improve the livelihoods of refugees through entrepreneurial and regenerative practices.