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 to 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.
"Having my ambitions valued and my opinions invited made me behave more maturely because I was finally being recognized as an important human being, not ‘just a kid’...the freedom and control one has over their education at OC, I have not seen elsewhere."
— OC Teen, now taking college courses