Lamplight

Learning at Lamplight

The Lamplight program comes out of the long tradition of “popular education,” education by and for the people. While popular education will feel familiar to anyone who has ever been intrigued by a question enough to find their own answer, it looks very different than most formal “learning environments.” Below, we describe some of the elements that make Lamplight unique.

Student-Organizers and Staff

At Lamplight, we want to move beyond the traditional student-teacher relationship. We think that, in everyone’s life, people teach and learn all the time. We also think that the point of learning is never just to learn, but to use what we learn to make the world better. This is why, at Lamplight, we call our students “student-organizers.” They are students, but they are also responsible for making important decisions about the direction of the program and then making sure those decisions are carried out. We hope they will use the skills they develop in the program to organize other students and help them learn to become student-organizers as well.

At Lamplight, the adults are called “staff.” The job of the staff is to support the learning process of the student-organizers. We call them staff because, instead of making all of the decisions for the students, their job is to help the students make their own informed decisions. They are responsible for taking on background work for each cohort so that the student-organizers have more time to dedicate to their own projects and interests. The educational role of staff is to be both coaches and librarians: they guide the students when making important decisions and help them find any information they might need in their projects. This relationship between staff and student-organizers is fluid and will change depending on the needs and desires of each cohort.

Trust and Self-Governance

We want student organizers to have the power to make life at Lamplight their own. Guided by their observations and interests and supported by the staff, student organizers will generate their own research questions, identify milestones, and bring their projects to life.
Beyond their projects, student-organizers will take charge of the daily community at Lamplight itself. Because everyone will be sharing responsibility for maintaining our community, trust is essential to the success of Lamplight. Without trust, it is not possible to tell our story, to ask difficult questions, or to build something together. At the same time, it’s through these things* that trust builds. Trust means sharing all of the little things--cooking together, tending the garden, telling the story of your day--and having each other’s back when things go wrong.

Storytelling as a Path to Story-Making

At Lamplight, we start with storytelling. Student-organizers will spend time together, sharing their lived experiences, their observations and questions, their struggles and successes. Guided by staff, student-organizers will listen for pieces of themselves in each other’s stories, using their personal histories as a starting point to learn about the history of their community. By sharing each other’s stories, we find ways in which the struggles we experience are related, and can trace them to their roots.
People don’t just tell stories about the past. Stories are also a way of imagining the future. When we dig deep into our pasts, we come out with a new way of viewing the world and what the world could look like. We move from telling stories to making them, first with our dreams and then with our actions. At Lamplight, we will envision what we want our lives, our families, and our communities to look like and how we can start making this vision happen.