Abundant Beginnings' Forest Freedom School
"Our central commitments are to provide an education that centers social and environmental justice, creates constructive engagements across difference, and cultivates connections to the earth and our ancestral ecological practices. Our program aims to act as both a mirror and a window: we want our children to learn about themselves and about others different from them."
Get to Know this Liberatory School
Forest Freedom School, part of Abundant Beginnings, is a collectively run, Black-led community education initiative. This place-based school focuses on Black students, gender expansive and queer students, disabled learners, students holding trauma and all the intersections.
Location: Oakland, CA
Size: <300
Demographics: Unknown
Grade Band: PreK-6
Governance Structure:
Website: http://abundantbeginnings.org/school
Graduate Aims
Abundant Beginning strives for learners to:
Think Critically
Live Responsibly
Create meaningful change
Design Principles
ANCESTRAL PRACTICES
We believe our children are best nurtured in a community rooted in land-based rhythms, rituals and practices that honor the connections to the Earth, our ancestors and each other. We look towards Black Land Liberation movements and Richard Louv’s “Last Child in the Woods” that echo that our program’s outdoor, place-based learning, which allows our children to go beyond schoolhouse walls and connect with their senses, their bodies, and their awareness of our planet.
RADICAL INCLUSION
We create avenues for constructive engagement across difference. Our children and families hold a multitude of identities. We have found that a culture of including, respecting, and celebrating diverse perspectives enriches the learning environment. Children learn best in mixed aged environments. At Abundant Beginnings, we acknowledge and celebrate that children of the same age, may not have the same interests, abilities or learning styles. In order to connect and support the whole child we must be informed by their whole story, including race, family creation and trauma experienced. In addition, children need to see themselves reflected in their places of learning through curriculum, books, and activities. Our program aims to act as both a mirror and a window: we want our children to learn about themselves, and about others different from them.
FREEDOM
We believe in providing an atmosphere and environment that centers support and freedom. Our program structure is child-led and child-created, with an emphasis on children’s enthusiastic consent. We look to Black Panthers’ Freedom School, Akilah Richards and Self-Directed Learning Communities, Democratic Schools, Radical Unschooling, Forest Kindergartens and other alternative education models to inform our praxis. These sources have shown us that, given the chance to create and engage with their own worthwhile intellectual pursuits, children learn more than when forced.
SOCIAL JUSTICE
We engage our children in education that centers social and environmental justice movements. More specifically, we encourage them to notice and challenge oppressive systems in little and big ways. Children experience and see injustices beginning at an early age. We believe it is our responsibility and our opportunity as educators and families to engage in dialogue in an explicit and developmentally-appropriate way with our children, about how our world is unfair and how we can use our power to create a better one.
Featured Student Experiences (Bay Laurel Learning Community)
Self Managed Projects
Students identify those things that spark their joy, interest and curiosity as learners and practice project management skills to get them done. Rather than being gate-keepers to learning, teachers welcome just about all student ideas and then support them as needed in figuring out the steps that would be necessary to accomplish their goals. Within that process, students learn for themselves which projects are feasible and what it takes to break down bigger tasks into achievable steps. Projects may be one-time activities or multi-step projects that require extensive planning. They may center topics that adults may view as play, work, art or academics. Whatever the project, we trust in children’s innate ability to learn.
Offerings
Offerings are group learning experiences. Those who are interested in the given topic or project come together for a shared experience and to learn from one another. Anyone can organize a group learning experience to offer to the community. Students can plan and organize an offering about something they are passionate or knowledgeable about and want to share with their community. The offerings created by teachers are informed by what students are currently curious about as well as the teacher’s own interests. Parents and community members are also invited into the learning space to offer their expertise to our kids.
Skill Appointments
While we know that academic learning can happen within all of the structures of our program, we also set aside time during the week to focus exclusively on developing academic skills. At the beginning of every semester we meet with each student (in communication with their family) to create learning goals in reading, writing and math. Together we document these goals and create intention plans with our youth and their families as a guide towards achieving our goals. Once intentions are set (within a culture of consent), teachers commit to supporting the follow-through of academic skills as set-out in collaboration with the youth and their families.
Cultivating Community
We believe that a powerful, positive culture that holds space for mindfulness, uplifts every person’s identity, centers the tenants of social justice and cultivates liberated-joy is the most pervasive support structure a learning community can have. We dedicate time every morning and afternoon to intentional culture building and social-emotional learning.
Reflection
The process of self-directed learning as well as intentional community cultivation requires deep and continual reflection. Time for reflection is embedded in all of our learning structures including our morning mindfulness, our intention setting routines, our conflict resolution practices, and our community check-ins. Through reflection we learn from successes and mistakes and move forward as stronger learners and community members.
Key School-Wide Practices
Curriculum, Instruction & Assessment
There are three Learning Communities at FFS and each engage in developmentally appropriate learning:
Maple (3 months - 2.5 years): Learners work on relationship building and exploring the natural world. Even at this young, they learn about social justice. They are also exposed to music and Spanish daily.
Redwood (2.5 - 6 years): Learners are in nature for “story workshops”, inquiry topics, and creating “freedom fighter” plays. Music and drumming is used, the public library for new books and research.
Bay Laurel (6-11.5 years): Learning is self-directed and project-based, with support from teachers. There are some group experiences offered by peers, teachers and community members that dove-tail with what students are curious about. Teachers meet with families and students each semester to learn about their reading, writing, and math goals. These goals drive learning and students are supported in breaking them down (e.g. writing my own graphic novel or reading a chapter book all on my own) into concrete steps. Teachers work to communicate with students how these smaller steps will support them in eventually meeting their larger goal. While students have great agency in identifying their academic goals, once they are set, students are expected (within a culture of consent) to follow-through on their academic skills as set-out by their teacher.
Community & Culture
Children are educated through a black, queer, ecofeminist lens. In the words of Greta Gaard, this lens requires embracing diversity and “building coalitions for creating a democratic, ecological culture based on our shared liberation.” FFS, and their parents organization Abundant Beginnings, strive to create individual, community, and environmental change by fostering intergenerational, land-based learning practices.
FFS is a mixed-age learning community liberating ourselves through self-directed learning, radical consent, deep community building, reflection and joy. Learning is centered in children's curiosity and there learning is not siloed from their identities or the real world. Student agency is fostered daily, as well as profound collaboration and accountability within the community.
Schedule & Use
of Time
Each day, Maple & Redwood Communities begin with a morning meeting, followed by a developmentally appropriate adventure. An afternoon meeting affords an opportunity to reflect and socialize, followed by a rest. Redwood communities have an additional afternoon work period before dismissal.
In the Bay Laurel Community, each week teachers support students in planning out their individual schedules. The majority of the time is for students to plan themselves. Students decide which self-managed projects they will work on within the week and when, and choose which (if any) offerings of group projects they would like to sign-up for. Other aspects of their weekly plan are set and predictable, such as Skills Appointments or time dedicated to Cultivating Community. Time for reflection is embedded in all of our learning structures from daily community check-ins to more in-depth self-assessment tools for the end of an extended projects. Through reflection we learn from our successes and mistakes and move forward as stronger learners and community members.
Adult Roles & Learning
Teachers are responsible for the academic, social-emotional growth and development of all children in their care, in a mixed age environment, who are diverse racially, developmentally, and temperamentally; this job requires responding to them all appropriately, kindly, and holistically. It also includes integrating principles of justice, respect, and liberation into the school environment.
Space &
Facilities
The whole community is our school yard! We do not believe true learning can be contained by the same four walls all day. Our consistent home bases are Dimond Park, and the Redwoods of Joaquin Miller. Our pickup and drop off are between these two locations.
Budget & Operations
The Forest Freedom School is one part of the larger organization Abundant Beginnings. Abundant Beginnings offers camps, activism opportunities, and a vision for the land in Oakland in addition to the school. Learn more about the organization here.
See It. Hear It. Feel It.
Young activists in action!
About the School