The School #1 Design Team of Community | Learning | Design – made up of five youth in partnership with one adult facilitator – has completed the first round of Participatory School Design. For the past 9 weeks, this incredible group of young people have given up their Sundays and occasional after-school time to dream…… Continue reading First Student-Designed High School: MILESTONE DEMOCRATIC
“Teach the things that students actually want to learn” / Participatory School Design, It. 4 / Sessions 7, 8, and 9
Criteria: defined! Constraints: identified! (With thanks to our authorizer.) Phase 4 of the Participatory School Design curriculum calls for ideation. Brainstorming. “FINALLY talking about what this school will be like” (as one of our designers put it). We started with a “Speculative Ideation” activity (with thanks to Alix Gerber!) to simply encourage wide-open dreaming. “Imagine…… Continue reading “Teach the things that students actually want to learn” / Participatory School Design, It. 4 / Sessions 7, 8, and 9
“Navigate the world as it is, while also building the better world we want” / Participatory School Design, It.4 – sessions 5, 6, and 7
Why create this new school? Because learning needs spaces which are engaging, democratic, and aimed at each of our futures from each of our present moments. How to create this new school? At Session #4 we told stories and asked questions of each other, and got a Design Criteria list of the ground. And we…… Continue reading “Navigate the world as it is, while also building the better world we want” / Participatory School Design, It.4 – sessions 5, 6, and 7
“Students have choice in what they learn and how they learn it” / Participatory School Design, It.4 – session 4
The youth/adult School Design Team has answered the question: why design a new school? Now it’s time to talk: how will our school be this place we’ve envisioned? We tried storytelling (CRT) to draw out some of our experiences and hopes, we shared and organized our thoughts and ideas… …and we did some more writing by Formal…… Continue reading “Students have choice in what they learn and how they learn it” / Participatory School Design, It.4 – session 4
“The most important step is the next one” / Participatory School Design, It.4 – first 3 sessions
The School Design Team for “School #1” (soon to be named…) has been organized, engaged, and trained in Restorative Practices, Formal Consensus, and Design. We are a small group, made up of youth aged 13 to 19, and one adult facilitator. When asked who our people are, we answer: “Immigrants” “Mi gente – hispanics” “The…… Continue reading “The most important step is the next one” / Participatory School Design, It.4 – first 3 sessions
What I learned at PDC2018
From August 20th through the 24th, after a long summer of community organizing towards our first Participatory School Design, and in the week before the regular-old school year started up, Michael and I had the incredible opportunity to attend the Participatory Design Conference in Hasselt and Genk, Belgium. The generosity of friends and family, and…… Continue reading What I learned at PDC2018
What is “school design,” and why should it be democratized?
As we’ve been traveling, presenting at workshops, and talking up our idea with folks, one big glaring question keeps coming up: what do you mean when you say “school design?” Or, rather, it often becomes clear that when we use that phrase, there are common misperceptions that go unsaid until our conversations reach a breaking…… Continue reading What is “school design,” and why should it be democratized?
How to do School Design as Community Organizing
In a previous post, we considered (at length…) the framework of “community organizing,” and how it applies to our developing plan for Participatory School Design. After working through Loretta Pyles’ book on the subject, and finding moment after moment of agreement, overlap, and support, we can now turn with confidence toward an examination of the…… Continue reading How to do School Design as Community Organizing
School Design as an act of Community Organizing
Pyles, L. (2013). Progressive community organizing: A critical approach for a globalizing world. Routledge. As we have developed the curricular praxis we call Participatory School Design we have drawn on many different disciplines and schools of thought (participatory design, democratic education, restorative justice, formal consensus…). These have helped us a great deal to conceptualize the…… Continue reading School Design as an act of Community Organizing
What we learned at the Innovations in Participatory Democracy Conference 2018
Of the three “communities of practice” that we’ve been trying to connect with this year, I’ve been least confident about how our ideas and work would fit in with the world of “democratic innovation.” It’s also the one that may be closest to my heart. There’s a reason that our first blog post bears the…… Continue reading What we learned at the Innovations in Participatory Democracy Conference 2018
Community | Learning | Design 