INVISIBLE | Session 7 | South Africa | Je'anna Clements, Riverstone Village/FHREE

Je’anna Clements (BA Psychology Hons) is co-founder and facilitator at Riverstone Village, a Democratic, Self-Directed Education community in South Africa. Following her degree in Philosophy, Political Science and Psychology, Je’anna trained as an Aware Parenting Instructor, counsellor and educational play facilitator. She is passionate about child participation and co-facilitated child participation discussions for Save The Children Sweden. During this process she became aware of how many young people found their education to be oppressive and limiting rather than empowering. After becoming a mother in 2005 she had to consider which education approach would be most compatible with her family's best interests. She convened a reading group on alternative education, but found that the more she explored alternative approaches such as Waldorf and Montessori, the more she felt dissatisfied with the level of empowerment of the young people concerned.

She registered for her Masters in Philosophy of Education in order to design a progressive school model that empowered young people to optimise their own education. She soon discovered that formal tertiary education suffered from the same disempowering and limiting structures and protocols that she was aiming to remedy for education in the K-12 range. What is becoming known as the 'Gated Institutional Narrative' (GIN) meant that she was simply not 'allowed' to study what it was that she knew she needed to study. Deciding to transcend the limits of formal course requirements, she embarked on a decade-long journey of informal study through reading, discussion, and practical experimentation, co-founding and collaborating with numerous alternative education startups on the way. She eventually settled on Self-Directed Education as the one approach which both optimised childhood experience and the fulfilment of young people's human rights, and was likely to best prepare them for the uncertain future humanity faces.

Both of the young people who call her mother have self-directed their education since birth. Je'anna is also a writer and her articles have been published by various South African and international publications including Save The Children (Sweden), the Children , Youth and Environments journal (Univ. Colorado, USA), and Tipping Points magazine (by the Alliance for Self-Directed Education). She is the author of Help! My Kid Hates School , as well as What If School Creates Dyslexia, and the Helping The Butterfly Hatch series of books for facilitators of Self-Directed Education, on How SDE Works and Why as well as on How To Support Young People In Self-Directed Education . To date some of her writings have been translated into Chinese, French, and Dutch.