The pandemic has pushed families to rethink and reset their vision for learning. Many are finding the right fit for their children in self directed environments. Enter Mosaic: a learning platform created by Swell to support the stories, community and advancement of self directed education and learning. Built on the values of best parts of self-directed learning with an easy to explore, utilize and connect platform for reimagining learning.
It’s new to many people today but unschooling has been a practice that existed long before the ol brick and mortar school house. That made the challenge harder. We asked two questions. 1) How do we create utility and shine a new light on this approach to learning in 2021, and 2) how do we bring together a community that is spread across the country in a way that supports their individual experiences, collectively? To do this, Swell created a digital experience across sites, social media, video, audio, and written word that didn’t only share perspectives, resources, and stories of unschoolers, but mirrored the experience of self directed education itself. The brand — like the community — should be all those things, too. To achieve this, Swell created an identity that had the flexibility to be soft and strong, new and old, playful and serious, and intimately human. Bright colors and neutral hues playing together with sans serif type along with cinematic photography and video, focused on non-traditional angles and poses—all of these elements working together to create a look and feel that made Mosaic stand out. We crafted a social media presence that dips into several buckets to both celebrate and promote self-directed learning while also being informative about who Mosaic is: sharing stories of other unschoolers in both high-fidelity and low-fidelity settings, providing a spectrum of diverse experiences and perspectives from Mosaic’s council of advisors, and inviting our audience to participate with us in dialogue about topics close to SDE. We show, rather than tell. There’s plenty of data to sort when it comes to the effectiveness of various alternative educational models, but we say, why look at numbers and debate when you can make connections with others that will show you this philosophy in action? Through artful, documentary-style profiles that each carry a unique tone but share in delighting in how self-directed learning has worked for them, Mosaic develops its narrative voice to parallel the unschooling experience: focused on the individual, threaded through community.
Since launching in the fall of 2021, we have grown our social presence to nearly 6,000 followers on Facebook, 2,000 followers on Instagram, and over 1,000 followers on Twitter. As Mosaic continues to grow in this space, its strategic and content development processes are informed by feedback from the community it is built to serve. Mosaic will further develop through thoughtful partnerships to invite its audience to become community validators for Mosaic in their own words as we continue to elevate the awesome stories and experiences of unschoolers everywhere.
