“May we raise children who love the unloved  things – the dandelion, the worms & spiderlings. Children who sense the rose needs the thorn & run into rainswept days the same way they turn towards sun… ” – Nicolette Sowder 

Everything is different when you’re a child: the trees are higher, the colours are brighter, and every new day is more interesting than the last. Even more importantly, some things happen that stay in our memory for a long time – in fact, sometimes they end up being with us forever and end up shapping who we become.

Being a child has never been as hard as it is now. The overwhelm of information, the lack of a congruent narrative and the lack a deep intimacy with a community, on  a grand scale, have never occurred before. Many challenges await children. They will cary the burden of dealing with issues that have been building up for centuries – climate migrations, technological disruptions, resource exhaustion,… Profound insights will come to them, but so will wicked problems. 

More than ever, children will benefit from having a ready-for-all attitude. Life long learning, an adventurous spirit and a healthy dose of humour go a long way. As well, conveying the notion of service to the greater good will bring positive relationships around them. 

This 2 hour workshop show-cases how much fun it can be to embrace such an attitude by presenting music, slides, and stories from our lives. The adventurous-playful-lifelong-learning attitude took Katrine and Florian to 40 countries, including islands near the south pole, Madagascar, and other exotic places and gave us jobs from running a restaurant, doing research in geology, building with timbers to repairing airplanes and computers. Katrine and Florian use their rich experiences to illustrate with pictures, stories, music, conversations and games what can be achieved by being curious, adventurous and playful. In the age of unreachable super heroes, this workshop brings a realistic and inspirational picture of something anyone can achieve with a good attitude: freedom and success.  

Some of the tools we use are some principles of cognitive behavioural therapy and stoic philosophy to introduce a heathy relationship to effort, failure and suffering that will inevitably come. 

This workshop will give teachers working with the students plenty of material to draw from to give interesting assignments to the students down the road.