Searching for the Ideal School Around the World: School Tourism and Performative Autoethnographic-We

Through this book, the author shares the nomadology of Alys-we searching for the Ideal School. Fed up with the System, traditional mainstream education directed by neoliberalism and high-stakes testing, Alys travelled to over 180 places of learning/schools in 23 countries that were educating differently. Through performative autoethnographic-we the author shares these embodied experiences in poems, vignettes, journaling and ethnodrama. Alys realised that the Ideal School is an oxymoron and she argues that schools and schooling, even within innovative education, are not the future for learning.

By developing the edge-ucation and sharing stories from the ’gems’ that currently exist in places of learning/schools, there is the potentiality and hope for a paradigm shift. The book encourages everyone to become School Tourists themselves. Performing School Tourism is a mediation between creativity, arts, learning and teaching, leading to change as it helps shape the identity of those performing School Tourism and allows them to add these new experiences and understandings of the possibilities for education to the Earth-we, the collective consciousness of the world. Read this book to follow Alys’ journey as they share stories and trouble different innovative pedagogies (including Steiner Waldorf, Progressive, Democratic, and Montessori). The reader can choose their own adventure, following the rhizomatic multiple voices of Alys-we.