The map symbolises a learning journey for learners to explore.

Learners set out equipped with their innate mind energies, such as creativity, curiosity and intuition, in order to explore four crucial questions that are focused on a persons life long quest to survive and thrive.

The Qwisp Map is the learners anchor and guide, providing a structure to work from while giving direction, continuity, context, and content.

4

Utilising our spontaneous energies

5

Giving direction and purpose to our inherent curiosity

The questions put to the learner awaken their innate and unstoppable mind energies, such as curiosity, instinct, creativity, intuition, reason and imagination.

Qwisp calls these our spontaneous energies and harnesses them as assistants and energy for the learning journey.

Qwisp optimises a specific question sequence as a natural extension of an innate human tendency to ask questions from an early age.

“We are by nature question-asking, answer-making, problem solving animals and we are extremely good at it, above all when we are little.”

—John Holt (1982)

Deconstruction into building blocks reveals patterns and cycles that, in turn, will reveal the  interconnection of all life on the planet, unveil the value of patterns to learning and research and pave the way to problem solving.

Exploring patterns and cycles will also highlight the relationship between connection and interdependence and the value of connection to all life, and especially to our well being.

Spiral Learning

The repetition of questions that comprise the Qwisp Map will result in a process of learning that spirals more deeply and broadly each year.

Looping Action

The looping action from year to year will ensure a continuity in learning.

‘Growing up in an unequal and unfair society, feeling constant shame, sadness and anger, stirs your guts like little else can do. Solution? I became a teacher so that I could go out and set the world straight by teaching what I believed were honest ways and honest information. But some systems are overwhelmingly formidable.

Result? Burn out and more anger. I left education to go and get my own mind back, but education never left me. There had to be a way past this failing system!

Ten years after my resignation, when my anger had subsided, the puzzlement started to piece together the myriad of thoughts that teaching had stirred around an alternative and more positive approach to education. I had taught across the racial lines of the Apartheid divides, from primary school to teacher training, from the bushveld to urban and state of the art schools.

Now something was combining all these elements with my determination to unravel the mystery behind failing education systems. 

The system that has emerged from these experiences was purely a response from the gut and as it evolved, I realised I was combining my teaching experience with, and drawing inspiration from, theorists  such as Maslow, Bruner, Piaget, and Vygotsky.

It was further inspired and affirmed by my interest in Fibonacci, patterns in nature, passion for music and architecture, love of the arts in general, and the web of connection that nature has woven, ticking away in mysterious, functional, clockwork precision.

Colette van Niftrik has a BA Degree (Psychology and English) with a Post Graduate Diploma in Senior Primary Education. She experienced teaching amongst a wide variety of cultures in South Africa where there are eleven indigenous languages. She is a second-generation Dutch immigrant and feels deeply enriched by the experience of growing up in the cultural cross-over.  

Qwisp®'s first public introduction was at TECH 2017, Transforming Education Conference for Humanity, organised by UNESCO and The Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace in Visakhapatnam, India.