The Wayward School is all about thinking, making, and doing.
It’s a co-operative school that gives people room to think and a chance to act.
Throughout 2011, The Wayward School hosted inter-disciplinary workshops, lectures, seminars, and community gatherings in informal settings throughout Victoria that were widely accessible to all ages and skill levels.
Just what is the motivating force behind this rather ambitious project? And who is “we”?
The founding co-directors of this initiative are Heather Cosidetto and Stefan Morales, partners in life and in love. You can click on our names for our professional biographies if you’d like to see our dubious credentials. The way we see it, people work so much better when working together. We ourselves have each tended to be a part of a number of loosely overlapping communities and have observed how insular each of those communities can be, each in their own way. But some of the most rewarding moments for us have been when those seemingly unrelated groups cross-pollinate and collaborate with one another, or draw support and inspiration from one another.
As of 2012, The Wayward School is taking steps to becoming collectively organized. “We” currently includes an assortment of fourteen creative and academic individuals, each bringing something a little different to the mix. We meet together to scheme, coordinate, conspire, and plot the course of upcoming seasons of programming.
We insist on speaking as “we” because, quite simply, there is already more than one person speaking here, and because that number will keep increasing. “We” has an indeterminate togetherness that can let people in on their own terms. “We” are something more than just “you” or “me” and less than some ambiguous group of others known as “them”. We are in-between amounts and types of people, thinking about in-between things, in and between places.
The Wayward School hosts the following types of lectures, workshops, and community events:
Skillshare Workshops
Informal skill-based workshops led by non-expert instructors, where participants share their knowledge and experience with one another on any number of topics (e.g. sourdough starters, darning, aquaculture, astronomy, web design, woodburning, knot tying, printmaking, spreadsheets, composting–on and on the list goes!).
Working Knowledge Workshops
Advanced level workshops led by expert instructors will provide participants with an in-depth understanding of the given topic, and the skills and know-how to put it to work.
What-They-Taught-You-In-School-Revisited
Ever wish you could go back in time and pay closer attention to what your physics teacher was going on about? Or that you actually knew how to do simple algebra when the occasion arises? This series of lectures takes us back, only this time we’re taking notes.
Curiosity Cabinet Lecture Series
From the whimsical to the mundane to the weirdly fascinating, lectures in this series will feature topics of all shapes and sizes to satisfy our curiosity about the ordinary and the extraordinary.
Town Hall Debates
Should Canada should implement a guaranteed annual income for each and every citizen? Is climate change caused by humans? Can we be certain that 2+2 does in fact equal 4? Let the debates begin! Hearkening back, while looking forward, debates will take a moderately polemical form to put the problems of our time on the table for careful scrutiny.
Moving Pictures
Foreign films, documentary films, short films, animated films–you name it. Screened, digested, discussed. Film nights are curated by theme, followed by a facilitated discussion period.
Swap Meet
Get together and swap your wares! Establishing a barter economy takes exchange-value to a useful level.
Sounding Board
Peer review gets up close and personal. Sounding Board events are an opportunity to flex your rhetorical muscles as you bounce ideas around the room and off of one another.
Cook-a-long
You come, you cook, you learn, you leave (with a bag of perogies/ravioli/empanadas/samosas/burritos/etc to call your own).
