New Learning Culture (NLC) provides a model for conscious education that is based on and continuously adaptable to the genuine needs of children and adults. Carmen Gamper and her team of guest teachers support individuals, school communities, and homeschooling groups transition towards child-directed learning.

How we teach is equally if not more important than what we teach: Child-directed learning honors children’s inner learning guidance and personal learning style and rhythms. The NLC model allows teachers to become learning companions and answer children’s needs for genuine connection, free play, movement, and intellectual inspiration.

This model is not Montessori, it’s not Waldorf, it’s not Reggio Emilia, it’s not Rebeca Wild’s model being practiced in Europe. It developed from all of
these, taking their most child-friendly elements, transform them into adaptable tools, and creating a new comprehensive approach: the New Learning Culture model.

The NLC model is different from traditional schooling methods.
NLC works with:

– Student-directed learning instead of teacher-directed learning
– An evolving curriculum instead of standard curriculum
– Learning companions as well as teachers
– Inspiring learning environments for active exploration instead of classrooms for sitting at desks
– Non-invasive teaching instead of compulsory classes
– The children’s natural challenges instead of artificial challenges

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The Ethics of the New Learning Culture can be summed up as follows…

1) Human beings need to be witnessed and lovingly observed. Loving attention is a catalyst for learning.

2) Each of us has an inner child that (consciously or unconsciously) influences the way we perceive children. The way we treat the children around us and the way we treat ourselves is connected.

3) Childhood is the time when we learn how to take care of our personal genuine needs. Children develop empathy over time when their genuine needs are fulfilled.

4) Enjoying freedom within safe boundaries is the foundation of healthy individual development and teamwork.

5) There is supreme, heart-and-body based intelligence in spontaneous activities and in organic development, an “internal learning guidance”.

6) Intentionally created, functional, inspiring environments shape the attitude and the activities of the people using them –and they facilitate and inspire natural learning processes of all kinds, practical and academic.

7) Environments need to be adjusted to the genuine needs and interests of the human beings using them.

8) Every relationship and every place need appropriate boundaries, which guarantee safety and facilitate respectful relationships.

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