Exploring the City

Last night, at the elementary school Curriculum Night, I talked briefly about the joys and challenges parents feel when they choose a progressive school with a responsive curriculum for their child, opting for an approach to designing the children's learning journey in which the students have an active and valuable voice in their own learning.

The rewards that potentially come from such an approach are many. Ownership, authentic learning, creativity, motivation - to quote the parent of a recent graduate, describing a triumph her daughter had achieved as she started her high school freshman year, "That creative initiative is exactly what I hoped Summers-Knoll would give her and it worked!" This is often what parents are drawn to as they consider Summers-Knoll.

The challenge is often the difference between what this kind of school looks like, versus the kind of education most of us experienced when we were at school. It can be a scary experience, it can be anxiety-producing, it can be frustrating. A parent can be drawn towards the clear and obvious joy that children here experience at school, and still be profoundly unsettled by the fact that sometimes it just doesn't look like what we have come to expect from a school. 

When the students are active participants in their learning, and have a voice in what and how things are done, the educational journey starts to look like an excursion through a city, where the travelers want to step out of the the traditional tourist circuit and see the "real" city behind the tourist trap. Not: "this is what everyone sees (ignoring everything that everyone does not see):, but "how do people really live here?" So they explore. The city has a structure, it has a flow, and it is also big - too big for everyone to see everything. Everybody will see some things - City Hall, the library, the art museum - and everyone will see other things that possibly no one else sees. One group may head down a side street and find a piece of public art that the guide books don't mention, and finding out about it will bring up threads of history and civic engagement and they will learn how it fits in with the culture of the city as a whole. Another group might come across a little Farmer's Market, and learn those same things through a different lens. They will run into local inhabitants, who will give them insights that they couldn't obtain any other way. Everyone will explore deeply, and the tour guides will start to feel rather irrelevant. 

We are not tour guide educators here. We are explorers of the world. We ask "why?" not just "what?", and that can lead to some unexpected places. It's part of the process, and it's worth it.