Mission Statement: The mission of our
curriculum is to create a community within the walls of the school by
connecting with the community outside of the school; engaging and embracing the
community is the end goal.
Abstract: This curriculum project focuses on fostering a sense of community within the school walls via engagement through service learning in the community. Students, faculty members, and community members are all free to interact and participate in this program that stresses a mutual benefit. The final objective of this curriculum is to show the importance of service to others and create a lasting impact among the students and their community.
Rationale:
The rationale for this project is based on our teaching platform. Fundamentally we believe in relation-centered pedagogy and organic learning experiences.
We believe that learning comes most powerfully and most sincerely in relation to people. With Harvard and Yale and many others releasing so many good resources for learning online and for free, simple access to information is not the goal of education. To simply give students access to knowledge could then be as easy as giving them all iPhones. This is all to say that our current education system is not only a resource for more information, but an environment in which learning is made most effective. The fundamental difference between going to class and just Googling information would then be teachers and peers. That is, relationships give education power.
Relationships allow students to receive personal guidance that is made more and more effective with growing trust. This requires a teacher who can give individual attention to each student. Peers can also learn together and group up in order to achieve growth that would normally be difficult or even impossible when alone (two heads are better than one).
This is directly connected with our curriculum because the Service Learning projects with which each student is involved is heavily influenced by both teacher guidance and peer support. It is certainly valuable to try to give to the community out of one’s own resources and time, but without a community surrounding that giving, it defeats the very purpose. At least part of the intent of education is to teach students how to be vibrant, productive citizens. So no matter whether the project that students pick for this curriculum is a local newspaper, a soup kitchen, a library, an environmental protection project, or anything else, the implicit push of this curriculum is that the content is important, but it is vital to the health of society to work together and that true progress does not come from purely the quality of ideas, but the quality of relationships. This project will be a great source for students to find teammates and mentors to help them pursue diverse goals.
Organic learning is also a crucial element to the community engagement project. With the onset of the Information Age, it is becoming more and more important to boil information into its most fundamental components. The problem with systematizing information so heavily is that students are not computers; while a list of commands with no variation in format may perfect for a computer to function well, it is terrible for humans. No matter how much we want to change that fact, human beings are emotional creatures before they are logical ones. The implication here is that learning is fundamentally a contextualized process.
Further, this means that the community engagement project is a fantastic foundation for organic learning. Students are not memorizing lists of different aspects of their community or just reading about their community as if it is in outer space. The goal of the community engagement project is to send students outside of the school into the world-at-large in order to let them genuinely mesh themselves into the fabric of the world directly in front of them. Rather than making students memorize formulas for persuasive business letters or create a presentation on facts about the endangerment of species, we want students to actually write persuasive letters to businesses and research and test the environment in which they are living. The hope is that instead of filling heads with facts that will be forgotten in less than a semester, the project will give students a growing base of knowledge on how to interact with the world around them that they will use for the rest of their lives.
Description:
Our mission statement, or the purpose of our curriculum, is to create a community within the walls of the school by connecting with the community outside of the school. During the students’ junior year of high school they will be required to create and implement a project in the school's community. The project will last for one full academic year. One semester (two quarters) will be used to prepare for the project and one semester (two quarters) to implement it.
During the fall semester the students will be put into groups and brainstorm ideas about how to create a project that engages students into their school’s community. The students will be a given a quarter to brainstorm their ideas with their group members. By the end of quarter one they will submit their ideas to the teacher. Throughout the first quarter, students will have multiple opportunities to share their initial ideas with the teacher and make revisions or changes.
Once the teacher approves of their ideas then the students will create a professional-looking poster board or tri-fold that explains their idea and how it can be applied to their community. The teacher or district will provide all of the necessary materials to create their presentations. In addition, the students will create their presentations in the classroom. The purpose of having the students complete their group work during class time is to ensure that the teacher, who will facilitate collaboration and peer dialogue, supervises the students. Furthermore, it gives the students the opportunity to work together without trying to find time outside of class to complete the project.
The students will present their ideas at the annual community engagement fair, which will be held during the first week of quarter two. This fair will take place at each high school in the district after school hours to allow the members of the community, who might be working during the day, to attend. Also, it gives them the opportunity to participate in the decision making process of picking the “best” community engagement project. At the fair the students will discuss their presentations and have the chance to view other presentations. At the end of the event, the audience and students will decide together on the best project to be implemented.
After the fair, the students will have the rest of quarter two to concentrate on the project that was selected. During this time the class will adjust the project as necessary and be ready to implement it by the beginning of quarter three. This process of refining the project will involve collaboration on a larger scale, which is vital for students to experience. Quarter three and four will then be used to fully implement their project into their community.
Each student will be graded based on participation, completion, and applying their project to the community. The purpose of this project is to ensure that both parties (students and community) are mutually benefiting and learning from another. This course will be integrated into the curriculum, rather than simply an add-on, and a graduation requirement for all students.
When describing a “best” project, one must take into consideration the practicality and potential effectiveness of such a project. On one hand, the project that tackles the largest communal issue or is on the grandest scale may not very well be feasible. However, a project that may be smaller in terms of impact might be the most sustainable and end up affecting the most people in a positive manner. This is one of the primary reasons the community will play a large role in determining the project of choice.
Example of How Core Ideas of the Curriculum Might Look in Practice:
Shawn is a hardworking, engaged young man who, “Likes going to school, but hates homework.” He does most of his work except for when he forgets to finish a math problem or every now and again “forgets”.
Most evenings or weekends, Shawn will spend time with his friends or family, but he also really enjoys playing piano. His family is very interested in the Arts and often they all go to see the local orchestra or a jazz ensemble at a nearby club. Of course, Shawn regrets that he cannot make piano more involved in his life, but school is focused on subjects like Math and Literature.
However, now that Shawn is a Junior in his high school, in his new Community Engagement class, he is very excited to try to develop a project of his own in order to work on it throughout the year. His first thought is to work with piano in some way, but he is not sure how to work this into his project. He talks with his teacher, Mr. Smith;
“I don’t know what project to suggest for the Community Engagement class.”
“Is there anything you like to do in your free time that you could use to connect with your community on a deeper level?”
“Well I play piano… But I don’t know how to make that into a community project.”
“That’s actually a great idea! Do you ever go to piano performances?”
“Yeah, my family always goes to the orchestra and sometimes the local jazz club! I really like seeing different concerts! Do you think I could do something with the concerts? That’s part of the community, right?”
“That’s wonderful! That would work perfectly for this project; unfortunately I don’t know very much about the local music scene. You should use your research time to find out ways to engage in that further.”
Shawn uses his first quarter to do research and compile information that will help him to find a project to choose.
“Mr. Smith, I found out online that the city concert hall is being turned into a highway within the next five years. A lot of people are really upset about it. Could I use my community engagement project to get involved with the concert hall?”
Shawn is excited to begin developing a plan for getting more people interested in the local concert hall. He plans on using Social Media to promote the concert hall and distribute a petition to as many people as he can in order to convince the city not to tear it down.
“This is pretty good,” says Mr. Smith, “But how can we make it more of a multicultural project? How can we get more people to be able to use the concert hall for more activities?”
Shawn does more research on the city and finds out that while the concert hall is in jeopardy, the local jazz musicians rarely play at the concert hall, let alone many other performances of theatre or music that tend toward higher percentages of minority representation. That is to say, the concert hall for some reason usually only plays the local symphony and the local theatre group, but rarely makes room for more diverse productions.
With the help of Mr. Smith, Shawn refines his petition and his goals so that the push is not only to save Concert Hall, but to improve it and draw more performances to the center.
When the students each submit their ideas for community engagement projects, there are many good ideas. One student proposed expanding the local library and holding more events there, as well as collecting more books. Another proposed adopting a relationship with a foreign school and interacting and engaging between schools and students. So the votes were close, and perhaps next year’s students will get to try out many of these other ideas, but Shawn’s Concert Hall effort ended up being the winner. The students drew together and wrote plans and goals for repurposing the concert hall.
Students began finding other bands and theatre troupes to perform a wide variety of shows and broaden the vision of the concert hall. Others helped to create blogs and connect with members of the community to get an active conversation moving in regard to the city’s plan to tear down the building. Some students spoke with the local jazz musicians and managed to pull together a benefit concert for the city’s local art scene in the concert hall. Even artists who painted or sculpted helped by displaying some of their art in the hall during the concert.
Not everyone in the community supported the effort; a good deal of people genuinely believed a highway would be better for the city.
In the end, the city would not decide to simply keep the concert hall, but allowed it to remain for the next few years until a different highway budget was discussed by the state. Perhaps the hall is safe, but perhaps not.
Shawn was a little discouraged at first because he wanted a more influential project.
“That’s actually a really big deal, Shawn,” Mr. Smith said, “You’ve all learned a lot about how your community functions and what matters to it and how to help make it better. The concert hall never would have hosted (and promise to continue hosting) such a wide variety of musical style concerts without this project. The city isn’t sure yet how they will react to the music scene here until the budget is changed again by the state, but communities are always changing and growing.”
Shawn realizes he has learned a lot more about the structure of the world than he thought; he got so swept away with the project that he did not notice how much new information he had learned and the skills he had developed.
In his blog reflections, he is excited to see how quickly he began to develop; the very first post seemed unsure and nervous about the project, but only a little while later recounts one in which he and several of his classmates met with an important local politician in order to see if it was possible to simply cancel the highway construction. The last post is simple, but profound. “I enjoy playing piano, but I’ll bet a lot of other people play music too. If we can keep music and other art in our community, people will be able to do things with their lives that they really love to do.”
Assessment:
While the goal of the project is not focused around student assessment, there are numerous ways in which we will be evaluating students’ individual work. During the first quarter, there will be checkpoints in which students have to submit initial research, ideas, and plans. For these assignments, there will be small grades basically based on submission and participation; we want to ensure that students are doing work in class so they don’t have to worry about anything outside of class. Also, this gives the teacher the opportunity to give students direct feedback on their actual ideas and nudge them in the right direction, if necessary.
In the second quarter, the main grade will be for the poster project presented at the fair. Students will be evaluated on how professional it looks, if it flows logically, if they are able to answer questions of those passing by their project, etc. We want to students to utilize this opportunity to learn about designing effectively but also about presenting to audiences outside of the school walls. This will also give them the chance to take pride in their hard work and show the community all of their great ideas.
In the third and fourth quarters, when students are actually implementing the chosen project, we intend to make use of reflective writing. As students work in their community implementing their ideas, we want them to deeply reflect on their experiences, both good and bad. To do their reflections, we will use online blogs; we feel that using blogs allows for more creative writing versus formal essays, thus engaging the students much more. Also, they will have the opportunity to comment on each other’s blogs (all positive feedback or useful criticism of course), building a stronger classroom environment in the process. For these reflections, small grades will be given for thoughtful reflection and comments, to ensure that students complete these assignments.
Abstract: This curriculum project focuses on fostering a sense of community within the school walls via engagement through service learning in the community. Students, faculty members, and community members are all free to interact and participate in this program that stresses a mutual benefit. The final objective of this curriculum is to show the importance of service to others and create a lasting impact among the students and their community.
Rationale:
The rationale for this project is based on our teaching platform. Fundamentally we believe in relation-centered pedagogy and organic learning experiences.
We believe that learning comes most powerfully and most sincerely in relation to people. With Harvard and Yale and many others releasing so many good resources for learning online and for free, simple access to information is not the goal of education. To simply give students access to knowledge could then be as easy as giving them all iPhones. This is all to say that our current education system is not only a resource for more information, but an environment in which learning is made most effective. The fundamental difference between going to class and just Googling information would then be teachers and peers. That is, relationships give education power.
Relationships allow students to receive personal guidance that is made more and more effective with growing trust. This requires a teacher who can give individual attention to each student. Peers can also learn together and group up in order to achieve growth that would normally be difficult or even impossible when alone (two heads are better than one).
This is directly connected with our curriculum because the Service Learning projects with which each student is involved is heavily influenced by both teacher guidance and peer support. It is certainly valuable to try to give to the community out of one’s own resources and time, but without a community surrounding that giving, it defeats the very purpose. At least part of the intent of education is to teach students how to be vibrant, productive citizens. So no matter whether the project that students pick for this curriculum is a local newspaper, a soup kitchen, a library, an environmental protection project, or anything else, the implicit push of this curriculum is that the content is important, but it is vital to the health of society to work together and that true progress does not come from purely the quality of ideas, but the quality of relationships. This project will be a great source for students to find teammates and mentors to help them pursue diverse goals.
Organic learning is also a crucial element to the community engagement project. With the onset of the Information Age, it is becoming more and more important to boil information into its most fundamental components. The problem with systematizing information so heavily is that students are not computers; while a list of commands with no variation in format may perfect for a computer to function well, it is terrible for humans. No matter how much we want to change that fact, human beings are emotional creatures before they are logical ones. The implication here is that learning is fundamentally a contextualized process.
Further, this means that the community engagement project is a fantastic foundation for organic learning. Students are not memorizing lists of different aspects of their community or just reading about their community as if it is in outer space. The goal of the community engagement project is to send students outside of the school into the world-at-large in order to let them genuinely mesh themselves into the fabric of the world directly in front of them. Rather than making students memorize formulas for persuasive business letters or create a presentation on facts about the endangerment of species, we want students to actually write persuasive letters to businesses and research and test the environment in which they are living. The hope is that instead of filling heads with facts that will be forgotten in less than a semester, the project will give students a growing base of knowledge on how to interact with the world around them that they will use for the rest of their lives.
Description:
Our mission statement, or the purpose of our curriculum, is to create a community within the walls of the school by connecting with the community outside of the school. During the students’ junior year of high school they will be required to create and implement a project in the school's community. The project will last for one full academic year. One semester (two quarters) will be used to prepare for the project and one semester (two quarters) to implement it.
During the fall semester the students will be put into groups and brainstorm ideas about how to create a project that engages students into their school’s community. The students will be a given a quarter to brainstorm their ideas with their group members. By the end of quarter one they will submit their ideas to the teacher. Throughout the first quarter, students will have multiple opportunities to share their initial ideas with the teacher and make revisions or changes.
Once the teacher approves of their ideas then the students will create a professional-looking poster board or tri-fold that explains their idea and how it can be applied to their community. The teacher or district will provide all of the necessary materials to create their presentations. In addition, the students will create their presentations in the classroom. The purpose of having the students complete their group work during class time is to ensure that the teacher, who will facilitate collaboration and peer dialogue, supervises the students. Furthermore, it gives the students the opportunity to work together without trying to find time outside of class to complete the project.
The students will present their ideas at the annual community engagement fair, which will be held during the first week of quarter two. This fair will take place at each high school in the district after school hours to allow the members of the community, who might be working during the day, to attend. Also, it gives them the opportunity to participate in the decision making process of picking the “best” community engagement project. At the fair the students will discuss their presentations and have the chance to view other presentations. At the end of the event, the audience and students will decide together on the best project to be implemented.
After the fair, the students will have the rest of quarter two to concentrate on the project that was selected. During this time the class will adjust the project as necessary and be ready to implement it by the beginning of quarter three. This process of refining the project will involve collaboration on a larger scale, which is vital for students to experience. Quarter three and four will then be used to fully implement their project into their community.
Each student will be graded based on participation, completion, and applying their project to the community. The purpose of this project is to ensure that both parties (students and community) are mutually benefiting and learning from another. This course will be integrated into the curriculum, rather than simply an add-on, and a graduation requirement for all students.
When describing a “best” project, one must take into consideration the practicality and potential effectiveness of such a project. On one hand, the project that tackles the largest communal issue or is on the grandest scale may not very well be feasible. However, a project that may be smaller in terms of impact might be the most sustainable and end up affecting the most people in a positive manner. This is one of the primary reasons the community will play a large role in determining the project of choice.
Example of How Core Ideas of the Curriculum Might Look in Practice:
Shawn is a hardworking, engaged young man who, “Likes going to school, but hates homework.” He does most of his work except for when he forgets to finish a math problem or every now and again “forgets”.
Most evenings or weekends, Shawn will spend time with his friends or family, but he also really enjoys playing piano. His family is very interested in the Arts and often they all go to see the local orchestra or a jazz ensemble at a nearby club. Of course, Shawn regrets that he cannot make piano more involved in his life, but school is focused on subjects like Math and Literature.
However, now that Shawn is a Junior in his high school, in his new Community Engagement class, he is very excited to try to develop a project of his own in order to work on it throughout the year. His first thought is to work with piano in some way, but he is not sure how to work this into his project. He talks with his teacher, Mr. Smith;
“I don’t know what project to suggest for the Community Engagement class.”
“Is there anything you like to do in your free time that you could use to connect with your community on a deeper level?”
“Well I play piano… But I don’t know how to make that into a community project.”
“That’s actually a great idea! Do you ever go to piano performances?”
“Yeah, my family always goes to the orchestra and sometimes the local jazz club! I really like seeing different concerts! Do you think I could do something with the concerts? That’s part of the community, right?”
“That’s wonderful! That would work perfectly for this project; unfortunately I don’t know very much about the local music scene. You should use your research time to find out ways to engage in that further.”
Shawn uses his first quarter to do research and compile information that will help him to find a project to choose.
“Mr. Smith, I found out online that the city concert hall is being turned into a highway within the next five years. A lot of people are really upset about it. Could I use my community engagement project to get involved with the concert hall?”
Shawn is excited to begin developing a plan for getting more people interested in the local concert hall. He plans on using Social Media to promote the concert hall and distribute a petition to as many people as he can in order to convince the city not to tear it down.
“This is pretty good,” says Mr. Smith, “But how can we make it more of a multicultural project? How can we get more people to be able to use the concert hall for more activities?”
Shawn does more research on the city and finds out that while the concert hall is in jeopardy, the local jazz musicians rarely play at the concert hall, let alone many other performances of theatre or music that tend toward higher percentages of minority representation. That is to say, the concert hall for some reason usually only plays the local symphony and the local theatre group, but rarely makes room for more diverse productions.
With the help of Mr. Smith, Shawn refines his petition and his goals so that the push is not only to save Concert Hall, but to improve it and draw more performances to the center.
When the students each submit their ideas for community engagement projects, there are many good ideas. One student proposed expanding the local library and holding more events there, as well as collecting more books. Another proposed adopting a relationship with a foreign school and interacting and engaging between schools and students. So the votes were close, and perhaps next year’s students will get to try out many of these other ideas, but Shawn’s Concert Hall effort ended up being the winner. The students drew together and wrote plans and goals for repurposing the concert hall.
Students began finding other bands and theatre troupes to perform a wide variety of shows and broaden the vision of the concert hall. Others helped to create blogs and connect with members of the community to get an active conversation moving in regard to the city’s plan to tear down the building. Some students spoke with the local jazz musicians and managed to pull together a benefit concert for the city’s local art scene in the concert hall. Even artists who painted or sculpted helped by displaying some of their art in the hall during the concert.
Not everyone in the community supported the effort; a good deal of people genuinely believed a highway would be better for the city.
In the end, the city would not decide to simply keep the concert hall, but allowed it to remain for the next few years until a different highway budget was discussed by the state. Perhaps the hall is safe, but perhaps not.
Shawn was a little discouraged at first because he wanted a more influential project.
“That’s actually a really big deal, Shawn,” Mr. Smith said, “You’ve all learned a lot about how your community functions and what matters to it and how to help make it better. The concert hall never would have hosted (and promise to continue hosting) such a wide variety of musical style concerts without this project. The city isn’t sure yet how they will react to the music scene here until the budget is changed again by the state, but communities are always changing and growing.”
Shawn realizes he has learned a lot more about the structure of the world than he thought; he got so swept away with the project that he did not notice how much new information he had learned and the skills he had developed.
In his blog reflections, he is excited to see how quickly he began to develop; the very first post seemed unsure and nervous about the project, but only a little while later recounts one in which he and several of his classmates met with an important local politician in order to see if it was possible to simply cancel the highway construction. The last post is simple, but profound. “I enjoy playing piano, but I’ll bet a lot of other people play music too. If we can keep music and other art in our community, people will be able to do things with their lives that they really love to do.”
Assessment:
While the goal of the project is not focused around student assessment, there are numerous ways in which we will be evaluating students’ individual work. During the first quarter, there will be checkpoints in which students have to submit initial research, ideas, and plans. For these assignments, there will be small grades basically based on submission and participation; we want to ensure that students are doing work in class so they don’t have to worry about anything outside of class. Also, this gives the teacher the opportunity to give students direct feedback on their actual ideas and nudge them in the right direction, if necessary.
In the second quarter, the main grade will be for the poster project presented at the fair. Students will be evaluated on how professional it looks, if it flows logically, if they are able to answer questions of those passing by their project, etc. We want to students to utilize this opportunity to learn about designing effectively but also about presenting to audiences outside of the school walls. This will also give them the chance to take pride in their hard work and show the community all of their great ideas.
In the third and fourth quarters, when students are actually implementing the chosen project, we intend to make use of reflective writing. As students work in their community implementing their ideas, we want them to deeply reflect on their experiences, both good and bad. To do their reflections, we will use online blogs; we feel that using blogs allows for more creative writing versus formal essays, thus engaging the students much more. Also, they will have the opportunity to comment on each other’s blogs (all positive feedback or useful criticism of course), building a stronger classroom environment in the process. For these reflections, small grades will be given for thoughtful reflection and comments, to ensure that students complete these assignments.