With all the insights I have today about using Kajabi in curriculum design, I'd love to claim to have discovered Kajabi myself, but I didn't. I was too busy trying to get more linear models of online education software to work more dynamically. Credit must go to my program manager, Jeremy Noble, who watched me fail over and over again in my attempts to show children's author Clare-Rose Trevelyan, our friend and client, that she could have parenting and school-based resources that were as exciting as the stories and activity books she had created.  

The image above is of Clare with her youngest daughter, Campbell, who, together with her older siblings Felix and Amelie, have explored Clare's ideas for educational resources that might accompany her works of fiction for young readers. My work has sat in that context for the past four years as I've attempted to mirror the highly personalised nature of Clare's two series of books for young people, entitled the Young Philosophers Series and the Past Life Library. 

In my beginning is my end.

To explain further, Clare is more than the author. In writing her storybooks, she works with multimedia artists, book illustrators and musicians to bring together an online space she calls Everything World, a theme park of the mind.  Ambition mixes with her genius for storytelling with her life as a mother as she populates the imaginary theme park with attractions that relate to the philosophical themes of her beautiful books. Here’s the map of Everything World I work with to devise her resources. Currently, we are mostly focused on the Mirror Maze Of Oneself, The Bumper Cars Of Everyone, The Ghost Train Of Change, The Wonder Wheel Of Contradiction and The Lake of Meaning.

In Clare’s world, questions are far more important than answers. As such, it's not that she's asking me to devise a formal philosophy course but she is nonetheless truly Socratic in her approach to staging conversations in the learning experiences she wants for parents and children. Her vision:

I have a dream that family life for my children will be a collective of adventures in thinking, so it follows that my vision for a sustainable venture is creating a community of passionate people who empower you, the parent, to crack open conversations between families, on life, on everything .... using our beautiful resources around your kitchen table.

Clare loves how questions throw up even more questions. I work with her to understand that even though parents share needs, their everyday lives are caught up in trying to meet those needs within specific locations and contexts.  Her ‘attractions’ are resources for embracing the challenges of ‘just being a parent’ in self-reflection, understanding conflict and contradiction, as well as taking on the unrelenting changes of a digitally enhanced life with devices.

Within this context, it is Jeremy's job as programme manager to search for a more productive way to operate than my approach of paying for numerous app subscriptions in order to meet Clare's desire to create the intimacy of 'around the kitchen able'. Coming across Kajabi's pitch of illustrating the elimination of a number of apps whose function is included in a Kajabi subscription, he challenged me to use the software. 

I was astounded by what I achieved in just a couple of days. Here’s my first experiment to write parent resources during the 2021 Melbourne lockdowns. We are continuing to refine our offer.