Course Guidelines and Approval Process

Ok, you caught us...we're pretty lax on our course guidelines. Or rather, we trust that individuals who get involved in the free skule hold the same ideals of education as the skule, and they will strive to re-create these democratic, popular ideals in each of their classes. We also trust the learner-teachers to use their voice, and their feet: if your teacher-learner wants to simply lecture at you for 3 hours, 6 weeks straight, use your voice to tell zim that this is not the way you want to learn! If the teacher-learner persists, bring it to the student union and/or go to a different class.

However, we do have suggestions, guidelines, ideals - whatever you want to call them - that we ask are followed:

• Courses may be taught by 1 teacher-learner, co- or rotating teacher-learners, etc. It is ideal that courses be taught by co-teacher-learners, but not required 
• There is no content-restriction - the students will self-govern the courses by either showing up to learn, or not.
• We ask for action based courses: this means, that we are asking learner-teachers, and teacher-learners to take the knowledge they learn together, and bring it into real world settings. This might mean the human rights class sending in documents to the UN, the philosophy class hosting a speakers corner on the street, the gardening class guerilla gardening, etc. 
• In this, we ask that courses contain minimal lecturing - what minimal means is left up to the teacher-learner to decide. For a history class, it may be necessary to have an hour lecture followed by an hour discussion, but for a writing class, there may be no lecturing necessary at all. 
• We also ask that teacher-learners take 5-15 minutes at the beginning and end of their classes to discuss how everyone in the class is doing. This check-in is a free skule ideal, to be implemented at the teacher-learner/learner-teachers' convenience/desire 

Course Approval: Approval by the student union does not mean whether the course is approved or not, but rather, how we can make it work.

What the student union needs from our teacher-learners before a course can begin:

• A Short Description
• Time-requirements (is it 2 or 3 hours, 1 or 8 weeks)
• If you require a student minimum or maximum
• Resource and space requirements
• A loose, basic lesson plan for Day 1.

Remember...our course co-ordinator is here to help! Send occupyfreeskule@gmail.com an email letting us know what kind of support you need