Jasmine Garden Education · Taipei, Taiwan · since 2010
Jasmine Garden Education is an education organisation in Taipei that has worked with children aged five to twenty-five since 2010 — in classrooms, on city streets, on trails and coastlines, and in long-term partnership with schools across Taiwan. Fifteen years in the field have taught us something we keep seeing: capability is not taught into a child. It grows in the body, in real situations, with real consequences.
Who we are
We are not a school and we are not a camp company. We design the conditions in which learning can leave the classroom and continue in the real world — through tasks, challenges and real action — and we do most of that work alongside schools, building programmes that run for years rather than days. Families join us too, in the same programmes.
Some facts, so you know what kind of organisation you are reading about:
The founder, known to children and parents as Teacher Jasmine, spent more than a decade living and working in education in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and South America. She returned to Taiwan looking for that kind of learning environment for children. When she could not find it in the form she had in mind, she began building one. Jasmine Garden is what fifteen years of building it has become.
How we learn
Children do not become capable before they participate. They become capable through participation — in relationship with other people, in real places, with real materials, and with consequences that are real.
That sentence sounds simple. It changes almost everything about how a day is designed. It means the question we ask is rarely "what will the children be taught?" and almost always "under what conditions will this learning actually happen — and are we building those conditions, or only the content?" The body, the group, the place, and what is genuinely at stake are not the background to learning. They are the conditions of it.
We call this way of paying attention to learning Eco-Corporal Learning. It is not a school of thought. It is a tool for keeping our attention in the right place.
What makes this different
What distinguishes an educational approach is the judgement it makes when a real child is standing in front of it. Here are three of ours. They come from three different places — a campsite, a hillside trail, a classroom — because the judgement does not change with the setting.
What children need is not to avoid failure, but a structure in which failing still leaves the next attempt open. At an overnight camp on the north coast, a team failed a task three times before solving it themselves; the leader beside them did not step in with the answer. That was deliberate. The next attempt was still theirs to make.
Read: Before a Child Can Learn From Failure, Failure Needs a Second Attempt — English adaptation in preparation
For a choice to do its work, it doesn't have to be important. It has to be real. At a fork on a hillside trail, five-year-olds choose their own path — and the next few steps genuinely follow from it. Adults build the boundary, and then do not take every answer away with them.
Read: Children Don't Need More Choices. They Need Choices That Are Real. — English adaptation in preparation
Noise, activity and engagement are three different things; volume alone cannot tell you whether children are engaged. A parent once opened a classroom door on market hour — children selling, buying, making, nobody in a seat — and asked for a refund that evening. She wasn't wrong to ask. We had never told her what to look for.
Read: A Loud Classroom Isn't a Lost One — English adaptation in preparation
Our Practice
We publish what fifteen years of working with children in the real world has taught us — and we publish it in a particular way. Each piece begins with something that happened in the field, sets it against what research can and cannot support, and states the design judgement we drew from it. Each piece also ends with what we still don't know. We think saying what we still don't know matters just as much as saying what we think we have learned.
A first English selection from Jasmine Garden Education Journal is now being prepared. The pieces will be editorial adaptations of articles first published in Chinese, not translations.
Jasmine Garden Education Journal · English adaptations are not updated in step with the Chinese originals.
Where this happens
AXC is a five-day classroom programme in Taipei that runs as a small working society. Children take on jobs, make and sell things, negotiate, and keep the place running. AXC is led in English, while Mandarin remains part of how children work things out with one another. English is used to get things done, and Mandarin to get things understood.
NOLA takes children into the real world, primarily in Mandarin: independent travel across cities, field investigation of a single place over several days, and wilderness living where the group manages its own food, gear and daily life.
For older youth, our practice extends into real-world action and participation.
For overseas families
Many children who grew up overseas do speak some Mandarin. What they rarely have is a place to use it — with other children their own age, solving something, arguing, making up, getting through the day.
A Summer Back in Taiwan is one application of how we work with children: overseas-raised kids join the same AXC and NOLA sessions that local Taiwanese children attend. Not a separate programme for overseas kids. They enter the same learning environment as local Taiwanese children, with English-language support for the family where it matters.