Living the Curriculum: Wissahickon Charter School’s Sustainable Cities Summit

by Alice E. Ginsberg, Ph.D.

By 10:30 a.m. on a rainy Friday morning we were all seated in the school cafeteria, waiting on the arrival of Philadelphia’s Mayor, Michael Nutter.  The occasion was The Wissahickon Charter School’s first Sustainable Cities Summit.  All around me, seventh and eighth grade students, dressed in their best, were exchanging excited whispers curious about the other fifteen invited guests who had yet to introduce themselves.
 

Who were these guests? The school’s co-CEO Kristi Littell, who shares leadership of the school with Jamal Elliott, took the stage and told the students that the people they would meet and talk with today represent the “meaning and applicability” of what they have been doing all year in school.  “These folks are living out your curriculum.”

In a more traditional school context, this might have been a somewhat curious statement.  Living out the curriculum?  Isn't the middle school curriculum about acquiring information, memorizing facts and numbers and vocabulary words, reciting mathematical and scientific theories correctly, and, ultimately, scoring well on standardized tests?

This, however, was not a traditional school context.  The Wissahickon Charter School is a small eight-year young, eco-centered K-8 public school, housed in former radio factory in urban Philadelphia.  Using an inquiry-based, hands-on curriculum and collaborative teaching as the school norm, the school seeks to “provide a community of learning with an environmental focus that stimulates the child’s intellectual, social and character development.”   The school promotes a “critical stance and active engagement in the world.”  According to its website: “Our interest is not just to study what is.  We also ask students to imagine what should be and what could be while actively working on making it so.”

Thus, from the earliest grades onward, students take part in ongoing opportunities to experience the curricula (that is, to learn) in a wide variety of community-based and natural settings -- ranging from the schools’ classrooms and common spaces, to its own working garden, environmental lunch program, and student designed playground, to the neighboring Fern Hill Park where students spent almost every recess period, to overnight camping trips, week-long farm visits, and full-blown Outward Bound expeditions.
 

I still remember the look on a fifth grade student’s face when he told me about going to Vermont and having to milk the cows as a step in the process of making their own cheese. “The milk tasted like melted vanilla ice-cream,” he said with a big smile, remembering an experience so out-of-the ordinary.

At the Wissahickon Charter School, students integrate their study of the disciplines (e.g., math, science, language arts, history) with thematic, project-based learning around central challenges.  One year, for example, students investigated what the school building was like when it was still a radio factory, a multi-staged project which included physically exploring different parts of the building, looking at historical photos, learning about work conditions in the industrial age, interviewing present day workers, designing an exhibit of historical and present day artifacts, writing poems and producing podcasts from the perspective of different historical figures (e.g., women, children, robber barrens, African Americans, etc.) and even building their own working radio with found objects, such as bottles and telephone handles.
 

Today’s challenge was equally innovative and engaging: Students were working in groups to design and build their own environmentally friendly, sustainable cities.  Since last September, seventh and eighth grade students have been studying all aspects of cities, including: issues of clean water and alternative energy, housing, education, health and safety, zoning, taxation and city revenue, and business development.
 

In their studies they have closely compared American cities with those in the Middle East and East Asia, visited different city structures and neighborhoods in Philadelphia, and used the computer “game” Sim City as way of simulating their own city visions and plans.  Now, with their 2D blueprints and plans in hand, they are finally ready to move towards actually building their cities with reused materials on 3 X 3 lots.

With the help of their teachers, the students could easily have gone forward with this objective without much additional preparation, and yet, today represented a very important step in the learning process.  Students were meeting with area professionals whose lives were devoted to making cities more sustainable.  Invited guests included representatives from governmental and non-profit entities such as the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, Awbury Arboretum, Recycle Bank, Energy Coordinating Agency, and Septa (Philadelphia’s primary public transportation system).
 

Also included were entrepreneurs, who founded and directed organizations such as Philly Rooted, an organization that reclaims vacant city land for agricultural youth, employing city youth in the process; Mt Airy USA which provides housing counseling to first time homebuyers; Clean Markets, a market and business development firm; GreenMicrofinance.org, an environmental education organization which includes information on socially responsible investing, savvy consuming, and philanthropy; and the Trolley Car Diner a nearby restaurant that uses green energy and locally grown food, that has contributed over $100,000 to community groups; among many others community visionaries.

To round out the guest list were a variety of urban architects, gardens and landscapers, and, of course, Mayor Nutter himself.  The decision to invite the Mayor to open the day’s events was more than simply a publicity ploy.  Mayor Nutter was active in helping the Wissahickon Charter School get its operating license back when he was still a City Councilperson, and is currently in the process of implementing a comprehensive strategic plan to make Philadelphia the greenest U.S. city by 2015.  [In fact, the Mayor was supposed to be joined by the Director of the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, Katherine Gajewski, but she was unable to attend at the last minute due to a competing invitation -- to talk to President Obama at a White House summit!] 

When the Mayor arrived, he looked proudly upon the student body and proclaimed: “If you’re looking at these issues in 7^th and 8^th grade, you’re going to be able to handle the mess we are making [in the environment]. I believe that someone in this room will be the inventor of sustainable energy in years to come.”

After all of the introductions were finished, the invited guests dispersed into various classrooms, with the intent of meeting personally with small groups of students who would present their city plans, invited critical feedback, answer questions, and, perhaps most importantly, ask questions of their own.   While students were eager to learn more about building cities from the perspective of those who do it every day, at the same time they were excited to think that some of their ideas might actually be “good enough” to be taken back to the guest’s various organizations and presented as viable new directions, projects, solutions, and/or alternatives.

As I traveled from group to group I was impressed by how different each groups’ city plans were.  While all groups were challenged to think about the structures and placement within the city of residential housing, industry, small businesses, and natural resources, their decisions were framed by larger questions about what kind of city they hoped to build.  For example, one group discussed their desire to build mostly communal housing, which would use fewer resources per number of people.  Others discussed storage systems for saving water, how food would be brought into the city (e.g., homegrown vs. imported), and how the city would make public spaces most accessible and inviting to a broad range of residents of different ages, interests and physical abilities.

Students’ questions ranged from issues of overpopulation, waste production, safety, education and equity.  One group of students noted, for example, that they were very concerned about poor people in their city.  This was followed by the thoughtful question, posed by the whole group: “Would it be more cost effective to give poor people free education and housing as they needed it, than to risk increased crime and sky-rocking costs of social services down the road?”

Students were likewise concerned about how to keep their cities from being overpopulated, how closely homes and businesses should be located in relationship, and what kinds of public transportation would be available.  The details ranged from what direction the factory windmills would blow in to keep pollution out of the residential areas, to zoning issues that would forbid someone to build a factory next to a house or school.

One issue that came up in a number of groups concerned whether to have completely separate areas of the city designated for business and for housing.  In each case, invited guests asked students to think about what would happen to the business area after the stores closed. Would it be primarily deserted?  Would this increase crime and a sense that the downtown was not safe?  Would this, in turn, discourage new businesses from opening?  They used concrete examples, of Philadelphia and Baltimore, to tell the stories of how other cities learned from similar mistakes and eventually reorganized to become more socially integrated.

The day was thoughtfully designed so that students would have the opportunity to both present and to listen to their classmates’ presentations.  They also had numerous opportunities to work with the different invited guests so that they could benefit from the broadest range of expertise and insight.  Time was allotted at the end of the event for students and guests to share food and talk informally.

Judging by the engaged level of interaction, combined with the thoughtfulness and depth of the questions that were posed, the day was very successful.  Students were able to take great pride in the planning they had accomplished, while recognizing that a sustainable city needs the input of a broad range of engaged experts and community members working cooperatively, and with an open-mind. 

Like other thematic projects at Wissahickon Charter School, students needed to draw upon and make connections among their content knowledge of math, economics, science, technology, public policy, history, reading, writing, and design, while keeping in mind larger questions about social and environmental justice, cultural diversity and globalism.  This process enabled them to go beyond learning as rote memorization into a new kind of learning in which they gained valuable skills in problem solving, working collaboratively, imagining and creating in a number of different mediums, critical reflect and thoughtful revision and, sustained commitment and empathy.  The value of such learning in an increasingly complex and diverse global environment should not be taken for granted, despite the high-stakes testing environment that has come to define public education in America.

As noted, the next step will be for students to revise their plans and actually build scale models of their cities.  So keep an eye out for: The Wissahickon Charter School Sustainable Cities, coming soon in 3D to the school itself, and to this blog.

Alice E. Ginsberg, Ph.D. 

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Alice's articles on So Educated

Dr. Alice Ginsberg is passionate about urban education, social justice, educational equity, and critical pedagogy. Her work is published broadly in journals such as Teachers College Record, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Journal of Urban Education, Current Issues in Comparative Education, The Journal of Educational Controversy, Inside Higher Education, and many others.


Ginsberg is the co-author of Gender in Urban Education (Heinemann, 2004), co-editor of Gender and Educational Philanthropy (Palgrave, 2007), editor of The Evolution of American Women’s Studies (Palgrave, 2008), editor of And Finally We Meet: Intersections and Intersectionality Among Feminist Activists, Academics and Students (forthcoming, Institute for Teaching and Research on Women, 2011), and author of Embracing Risk in Urban Education (forthcoming, Rowman and Littlefield,
2011). 

For eight years she served as Program Officer at the Pennsylvania Humanities Council (1990-98), and has been a consultant to educational foundations such as the Ms. Foundation for Women and the Caroline and Sigmund Schott Foundation.