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Understanding the Past, Creating the Present, Imagining the Future
Understanding the Past, Creating the Present, Imagining the Future
Only twenty minutes left before Sophie’s Art Gallery opens. For the next two weeks, the gallery will showcase my students’ projects. At the center of the gallery an entire community of model homes is created out of index cards. This project has been an ongoing Geometry project lasting the entire year.
This project is something I call a “community-building” project. For this project, students were asked to create a model home which incorporated almost everything they learned throughout the year. Each student had a “plot of land” that was two feet by two feet upon which they created their model home. Each square piece of land would then fit together into a ten-foot by ten-foot housing community complete with streets, sidewalks, cars, and even a central park.
A community-building project should not be mistaken for a community service project. The latter focuses on service-type projects such as clean-ups, renovations, or developments. A community-building project is one in which every student in class contributes to a larger final project. In fact, it “requires” that all students must complete their project. Like a jigsaw puzzle, every piece is required to form the larger picture.
In addition, a community-building project requires the involvement of the community. For this project, a local art gallery donated space and time for the exhibition, parents and community members were invited, and help from local business contributed to the cost of the project. This idea also draws from the definition of synergy where the combined effect is greater than the sum of the individual effects.
One of the six pillars of Academy of the Renaissance is community.
Community is one of the foundations on which our curriculum will be developed upon. Projects and student work, like the one mentioned above, will help to develop a community within the class and develop relationships with the surrounding community, state, and even world-wide. With the help of technology, I have seen a few instances where students collaborate worldwide to solve global issues.
Whether these formed communities are local or global, the objective is for students to learn how to forge relationships and network with other communities to help improve our world, regardless of our cultural, religious, or political differences.
To successfully implement this pillar with our students, the staff must first demonstrate an established community within the academy as well as develop relationships within the local community. We hope to achieve this goal by hiring our first team of teachers to work together for an entire year without students. During this year, we will collaborate with one another to develop enriching and meaningful integrated projects that are aligned to our core beliefs and values. Some of these projects will require that teachers develop relationships with local businesses or other entities. When teachers know how to develop successful communities, only then can they teach it to their students and engage our parents and partners.
When this is done successfully, the results are astounding. A year of developing a community within my classroom and within the local community made such an impact with my students. The students felt so bonded as a class that they asked me if they could have a reunion four years later. On June 12th, 2018, we had our reunion. Exactly four years earlier, I had taken them to Balboa Park to visit the Fleet Science Center. A memorable picture was taken that day. When we met again at Balboa Park, they all showed me that same photo they had been keeping on their cellphone! The day of our reunion was one of the most emotionally moving days in my teaching career.
The founding team knows this ambitious pillar cannot be successful without the help of many people within our community. We will develop a network of support from our local community. Already, we have been working hard to reach different businesses, agencies and individuals to ask for their help and support with our project. We also need your help and donations as an important part of our founding community. Whether you would like to support us by joining our community or donate to our cause, please choose your adventure below!
