La Yurta is an association of families whose main objective is the promotion of respectful upbringing and active education. La Yurta, which inherits its name from nomadic dwellings typically used in Mongolia, was built manually by the families who started this project in 2017. The results are wonderful!
La Yurta is an active learning environment, an open and wide space in contact with nature, in which the participation of students and coachers is promoted.
La Yurta combines several pedagogical trends without being ascribed to any in particular. They organize weekly parliamentary sessions similar to democratic schools, use some Montessori’s materials and present similarities to home schooling. The organization is flexible to better adapt to family needs.
Education is student-centered and based on active learning, respect and emotional accompaniment of the individual. This way, motivation to learn arises from the student, each of which designs its own curriculum. This motivation is encouraged without conditioning or punishment, leaving the student to make their own decisions, which encourages individual responsibility and independent thinking. Questionning and learning by making mistakes are considered part of the learning process.
“What they learn, they learn with passion”
Students propose topics that they would like to discuss in weekly meetings and coachers prepare workshops, activities and guide the child during the learning process.
“Coachers are responsible for nurturing children to allow them to flourish”
The workshops are very varied and the assistance is voluntary. These workshops are real projects contextualized and connected to the needs and interests of the students. There are not defined pedagogical objectives, but covering students needs, which usually achieve different learnings from the same experience.
In La Yurta, the emotional coaching of the child is given a very important place. Every week they work with a different emotion and use different strategies for it, for example, you can use the kamishibai, a Japanese storytelling technique based on storytelling. They also try to identify shared situations to reflect about them and understand how did they feel. These strategies help students to develop skills such as self-awareness, self-control, empathy and emotional intelligence.
La Yurta is an excellent example of a small community committed to education in which the whole family participates actively.
Thank you for letting me share the afternoon with you!
