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The Qwisp Map

The Qwisp Map is the learners anchor and guide, providing them with

• a structure to work from

• continuity that creates a roll-over effect from year to year learning

• direction

• context

• content

• stimulation to venture into the internet in search of knowledge and answers to their own questions
  

The goals of the Qwisp Map template

The Qwisp Map template has two specific goals.

The first is to lead learners through a specific thought sequence.

The thought sequence specific to Qwisp is a product of the recurring pattern of questions contained in the map. This sequence is essential to the questions leading the learner through learning in such a way that their instincts and common sense are subtly engaged. The thought sequence could be seen as a representation of our instincts, common sense, and logic.

On a subconscious level they could perceive that these personal elements are resonating with the learning process, so that they begin to realise how much of the learning process comes from within themselves. This is a self-affirming realisation so that they continue to engage their spontaneous energies with their learning and their self confidence grows.

The intellectual impact of the question sequence is that it teaches the learner to

gather information,

evaluate that information in the context of humanity,

evaluate the information in the context of the environment,

and then to consider the unfolding patterns of connection, dependence, and interdependence that call for humanity’s robust and authentic commitment to respect and responsibility towards all forms of life.

The logical roll-out of the questions naturally lead to a deeply meaningful understanding of the connection between knowing, caring, responsibility, and consequences and that disregard for these is self destruction.

The options for the learners personal role in life reveal themselves in slow motion and are plentiful, with an underlying theme of guardianship.

The second goal of the map is to guide the learners journey while simultaneously opening avenues that lead to deeper and wider exploration of the topics of learning and the learners personal interests.

The core of each journey will be the Qwisp syllabus created by the teacher who will present this syllabus through lessons, worksheets, assignments/projects and any teaching aids chosen by the teacher, as has been the approach for many years.

Additional to this, the map will contain a hotspot where faster learners can find suggestions to expand these investigations and research. The hotspot could also contain provocative music and videos - anything that could be appropriately stimulating. If it is not a topic that interests them they could explore their own passions. The point is that no child needs to feel left behind or held back; they are secure in the presence of the Qwisp Map and will not lose their bearings easily. If they do, they will find their way back more and more easily as they get used to the map.

The route itself contains our sense of purpose and is a constant reminder of the value of our journey and our destination in the learning process – survival – ours and the planets. It is also a constant reference point for all users: Teachers for their syllabus and learners to understand the topics within constant context.

The template provides the opportunity to map our entire life journeys, so that we have a clear idea, through our ‘aerial view’, of where we fit into the greater picture. This can assist learners in ascertaining where their strengths can best be used when choosing where to invest their energies, or in making career decisions.

The template is based on our humanity and has no cultural elements in its’ most basic form, so it does not impose anything cultural onto the user. The organic nature of Qwisp allows users to integrate cultural elements of their own choice.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) wrote that education should be shaped to the child and that the child should be allowed to develop naturally.

Learners enter the Qwisp journeys with their own personal Qwisp Map and start each journey with themselves as the centre point.

The map has a syllabus at its core but its organic structure allows for diversions and exploration at the initiative of the learner which means that each individual has a hand in shaping their own education.

Putting the learner at the centre of the learning experience has some advantages:

It anchors them and their learning in the most familiar part of their lives and gives them a constant point of reference.

It enables them to take ownership of their learning and opens the way to independence of thought and learning.

It awakens the awareness that responsibilities in life belong to us all.

Self-centredness can make us better people

Qwisp does not condone selfishness but rather imparts an attitude of taking care of the self in a way that develops an emotionally and intellectually robust character, thus being self-centred, in order to have the emotional and intellectual resources that enable us to play our part in caring for and acting responsibly towards the rest of the ecosystem.

Starting the learning journey at the ‘self’ introduces the perception that I am at the centre of the universe BUT you are at the centre of your universe. I am as important to me as you are to you. This can lead to a better understanding and deeper integration of the concept of equality among all people.

Despite seeing the world from a self-centred position, we learn that we will not survive if we don’t help everything around us to survive. We are drawn into the realisation that we are all part of the same interdependent network and that we are all in the same struggle for survival with the same challenges. This engenders empathy and compassion rather than judgement.

A person who has centred themselves by having found and developed their inner core is of great value to everyone around them. We all have an inner core with great potential.

Here is a great opportunity to learn the difference between selfishness and self-centredness. Where selfish is considered to be ‘void of regard for others’ (Chambers 1983) while self-centredness in our context is ‘centred in self’ (Chambers 1983).

Needs and Environment

All Qwisp learning is based on the planetary resources that are essential to us as human beings in terms of what we need to survive. Using them as topics of learning raises the learners awareness of the critical role that natural resources play in our survival. They also easily evolve into the conventional school subjects in step with child development on all levels, for example, from concrete to abstract.

Qwisp aims to make it second nature to humanity to live in harmony with the environment because we have come to understand that the resources that we are dependent on are in turn dependent on other resources and so on, through a web of interdependence. Consequently, this web of interdependence requires our respect, our guardianship, and a committed ethical approach to the environment. Qwisp is designed to ensure that this understanding is internalised from a young age for lasting and heartfelt effect so that learners become responsible adults making respectful decisions in their place of occupation, be it at home or at a workplace.

Needs and Humanity

By exploring interdependence at a primary school level, children can learn how taking care of themselves means taking care of others and vice versa. By the time they reach adulthood there is a good possibility that they will have realised that good ethics are synonymous with survival.

Awareness of mutual interdependence is a powerful force in shaping our attitudes to many facets of life and can impact meaningfully on the material, emotional and spiritual make-up of each individual, and in turn, impact on the environment.               

Using essential needs as topics:

• Asserts that nature declared us as equals from the outset

• Can internalise the fundamental sameness of cultures across the world and free learning from cultural bias.

Learning within this mind set awakens compassion, care, equality, and guardianship.

Pedagogically Speaking

Learning that is based on needs makes the starting point of the learning process a familiar and instinctive place, and not an intellectual level, making learning more accessible through ease of connection to the subject matter and also through diminished fear of personal intellectual capacity. The learner is more likely to feel equal and less likely to suffer feelings of inadequacy.

Qwisp creates a strong connection between the learner and the learning process, making it a personal experience that is connected to their everyday lives, their common sense and their spontaneous energies.

Qwisp opens the door to our innate mind energies, embraces them, and prompts them into action. The learners’ curiosity, intuition, instinct, imagination, creativity and more, are stimulated by the questions, and the thought sequence that they create. In this way they are harnessed into a powerful stream of energies that give impetus and value to the learning journey.

Engaging spontaneous energies into the learning process gives these very personal human qualities their rightful place in learning because they create an interactive relationship between the learner and learning; they boost self-esteem and give the learner a really good chance of becoming an independent thinker.

They are also a direct expression of our inner beings and therefore express our individuality, help to show us who we are, and play a strong role in problem-solving and innovation.

Some teaching methods have convinced teachers and learners that these energies are not scientific enough for a rigorous education. Qwisp believes that they are the essence of our beings, our original thoughts and, in combination with knowledge, the starting point of innovative ideas.  

Curiosity

Our natural curiosity provides our intellect with a constant stream of questions, stimulating our spontaneous energies and drawing us into the exploration of our formative environment.

Qwisp provides the curious mind with a guiding and organic structure, a place to record findings and questions to extend their thoughts and research.

Creativity

Creativity is not just the act of creating a painting or a sculpture - it is an innate, personal mind activity that goes into solving day to day hitches. The first time that a toddler finds something to stand on so that they can reach a toy on a shelf is a creative solution. Looking at creativity as a general innate characteristic of of the human being should tell us to acknowledge it in ourselves and others, and believe in it as a personal resource. It cannot be taught, but it can be nurtured. Like learning, it too operates on a sliding scale of simple to complex.

Picking up on this very basic form of creativity, the learning environment, whether ay school or at home, should provide conditions that expand the learners’ thoughts and assist them to probe their resources for knowledge and insight. Creativity happens when a persons’ spontaneous energies are given free rein and allowed to respond to the stimuli of life, whether in the classroom or out and about.

While educationists are trying hard to encourage, or even teach children to be creative, they are overriding the fact that - it will emerge and flourish with the confidence that will come from acknowledging, respecting, and using our spontaneous energies freely.

Perhaps we will discover that much of the problem with current education is that learners are expected to shut out the core of who they are when they come to school, resulting in frustration, diminishment of self-esteem, and rebellion. They have no voice in the learning structure and are forced to shed their identity. They are under the impression that only the knowledge that comes from outside of themselves is real knowledge.

With each successive round of the question/thought pattern, each question in turn, bores down more deeply and broadly into each topic. Slowly but surely, over each years learning, they reveal the invisible parts of the matter that makes up the tangible parts of our everyday lives - the building blocks of life.

The building blocks are sought out in nature, humanity, science, mathematics, music, language and more, revealing the underlying structures and patterns that keep our universe in harmonious action.

It is through this process of deconstruction that learning evolves from the everyday terminology that we use for concepts and for living matter and non-living matter, into the scientific terminology that is used for matter and processes.                                        

This is where a robust foundation for the sciences can be established at an everyday level, and where we see the sciences in our topics before they evolve and are separated out into their specialist paths with specialist vocabularies.                                                                                                               

This process, from simple to complex, is intended to provide a slipway from basic science education into high school science and beyond.

Deconstruction and the discovery of building blocks reveals the beauty and magic of natures patterns. Sometimes the patterns are visual, creating circles and swirls of colour; sometimes they are audible, creating beautiful sounds; or visible moving patterns like dance, and the wave-action of the oceans.

Sometimes we discover that patterns are performing almost magical acts, like mixing water, flour, salt and heat to find you have created bread.

Patterns give meaning to the underlying structure of all life: the movements of the planets give us seasons; different seasons give rhythms to our plants so that they can sprout, grow, give fruit, die, and in death nourish the earth that gives us plants. We find cycles of this kind throughout nature, even in the inanimate, for example, rocks weather to sand that filters down to the core of the earth, melts and is spewed back to the surface. This cycle illustrates time and gives insight to fossils.

Cycles connect different forms of life as if they were cogs in a machine: while plant cycles are turning to the rhythms of the seasons, so are those of the bees. At a particular point the plant has pollen for the bee just when the bee needs it for it to produce honey - and so they meet for brief moments. All of nature is built on cycles that benefit some or other element of the natural world, and so these connections need to be explored as urgently and thoroughly as possible so that we can put and end to the destruction of our planet.

Deconstructing any matter into building blocks will reveal patterns and cycles that, in turn, will reveal how they connect to their environment. As learning proceeds, connections will multiply to reveal the  interconnection and interdependency of all life on the planet.

These insights reinforce humanitarian teachings and our humanitarian instincts of care and respect for all forms of life.

Learning that is sourced in patterns and cycles provides natural leads to learners, so that they can explore from a base and with direction, leading them to independence of research and insight.

Researchers have found that discovering and understanding patterns assists learners on various levels:

1. Patterns help us to understand relationships in nature, mathematics, music, language and more.

2.  Understanding patterns on a basic level equips the advanced learner to find patterns and solutions on a complex level and enables them to rearrange and manipulate patterns for problem solving.

3. They learn the role of patterns in understanding and extending scientific knowledge.

4. They can prepare the learner for insights into the patterns and cycles created by ourselves in business, town planning, engineering, medicine and more.

5. Understanding the structural patterns in mathematics, language, nature, music, and art give order to areas of life that we could find overwhelmingly chaotic.

6. Patterns form the underlying structures in all of the arts, science and mathematics:

Qwisp has many pedagogic advantages

• Learning takes place in three dimensions.

• The context of learning is ever-present.

• Learning has relevance and direction.

• The sequence creates a looping activity that gives continuity to syllabus content.

• As it loops from module to module the loop activity creates a continuum of learning from simple to complex and concrete to abstract, slipping the learner seamlessly through their grades.

• The question sequence creates a spiralling activity that bores ever more deeply and broadly into the topics of learning.

• The repetition of the questions will result in a process of learning that spirals more deeply and broadly each year, boring into the detail, covering more facts and deepening understanding.

• These two activities also add a measure of consolidation of previous learning - perhaps consciously, perhaps unconsciously.

Everything that lives is wired for survival.

Survival is our strongest instinct.

In prehistoric times, when life was about living in caves and hunting to stay alive, human activity was focused on fulfilling daily needs; living in reach of water, hunting and gathering for food, finding or creating shelter from the weather and safety from predators.

People were wholly dependent on their instincts, intuition, common sense, creativity and more (spontaneous energies) to solve the daily challenges of staying alive.

We are still wired for survival and indeed survival remains our strongest instinct, but our spontaneous energies have lost their status in our learning process and our set of survival tools.

If we use survival needs as the starting point for our learning, we could rekindle constructive and enriching values in our lives and bring our spontaneous energies back into play. These would give us a better chance of learning to really survive, thrive and secure the future of our planet. This combination would keep us rooted to the ground , taking care of our existence while stirring up the mind energies to create a safe future alongside technology, 4IR and whatever else the future brings.