I have been circling the same question since I was an engineering student. This is the long version.
After the 1999 earthquake, my friend Bade Küçükoğlu pulled me into working with children who were living in tents. We did movement and dance with them, and eventually they came to Boğaziçi University in Istanbul to perform.
I did not do very much, and I remember less of it than I would like. What stayed was the feeling: how much need there was, how much art could do, and how completely unqualified we were.
Back at university I found a course on movement and music in preschool education. It was a second-year course in a different department with a prerequisite I did not have, and they would not let me in.
So I wrote to the head of my department and to the head of the preschool education department, explaining what I wanted to do and why the course mattered to me. They let me in. I studied as the only man among twelve women in the preschool education programme, with Ani Eryorulmaz teaching.
It was one of the best things I have done. Child development, movement and music in childhood, then the Orff approach, then out into a local preschool to observe and run a project. After four years of electrical engineering it felt like real science.
I still have the letter I wrote to get in.
At the University of Maryland I was co-president of the Net Impact chapter, alongside Helen Payne Watt.
In Richmond, Virginia, I served on the board of Art 180 and coordinated volunteers there, from roughly 2004 until I moved back to Türkiye in 2006. Art 180 gives young people in difficult circumstances a way to make and show their work. An unusual place for a young Turkish guy to end up, and one of the things I am most glad I said yes to. They are closing at the end of this year.
A parent cooperative running an authentic Montessori preschool in Istanbul, accredited by Montessori assessors from the UK, English-speaking, and held together by parents who showed up and did the work.
It ran for about fifteen years and it closes this year. I have a lot I could tell anyone thinking about starting a cooperative school — how the parent commitment actually works, what breaks, what holds.
I started Alternatif Eğitim Derneği with a group of volunteers and teachers. We were never active enough and it eventually closed.
My wife and I also tried to start a primary school for our own children. We travelled to a number of countries and observed schools, worked out what we wanted, and then got stuck on real estate. That is where it stopped.
I mention both because anyone considering something similar should know how these attempts often end.
All of it feeds LearnButWhy — a platform and community for educators and for anyone building a learning environment. Much of what I write is at writing. The movement side of the same story is on the movement page.
If you are starting a school, running a cooperative, or trying to change one from inside, write to me. This is the subject I most like being asked about.