Education Approach
- Overview
- Underlying Philosophy
- The OC Process
- Core Resources
- History of Our Approach
- Contact Us
The Open Connections Process:
How We Practice Our Beliefs
At the Open Connections Village—our education center near Newtown Square, Pennsylvania—we engage a wide variety of techniques to ensure that young people have the freedom to learn and create.
- Avoidance of questions with hidden agendas
- Emphasis on Real Work versus make-work
- Reliance on experiential, hands-on learning
- Development of Process Consciousness (how a process impacts on the quality of content/output, for better and for worse)
- Treatment of all people as colleagues (minus the struggles of hierarchies)
- Celebration of each other’s growth
- Offer of developmentally appropriate opportunities for young people to contribute to the growth of Open Connections
- Encouragement of the use of imagination and wishfulness as components of Flexible Thinking
- Emphasis on collaboration and synergy (vs. competition and negativity)
- Treatment of adversity as opportunity
- Finding the resources to achieve goals
For additional information about our process, we invite you review the literature in Core Resources and consider the June workshop. We also have a comprehensive list of resource recommendations to support our parents in activities with their youth.
"OC is very different from traditional schools in many ways…OC focuses not just [primarily] on mathematical/logical and linguistics intelligences, but on all of the nine multiple intelligences. [The staff] encourage us to understand, not to memorize…we have input into what goes on…we can be ourselves without conforming to what anyone else wants/expects of us…OC is a very encouraging and positive environment. We are not separated by “grade levels.” OC encourages flexible thinking and cooperation. Everyone here is open to new ideas and full of suggestions of their own."
- OC Teen