The OC Process

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 to review the literature in Core Resources and register to take a tour. We also have a comprehensive list of resource recommendations to support our parents in activities with their youth.