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Professional Development
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Colegio Jorge Washington
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Community Works Journal—Online Magazine for Educators
FEATURED ARTICLE
On The Road to Find Out: Passionate Engagement
and Counter-Cartography By BRAD HOUK “I’m creating counter-maps....” “What-maps? You have to explain this counter-stuff,” said Troy, genuinely curious but noticeably skeptical. “Counter-maps are maps not done by states or powerful institutions." I said. "Not government offices or banks or corporations. Not those guys watching us,” I said gesturing toward the police in the street. “Counter-maps are art-maps or protest-maps made by the people, for the people, as in groups, or communities, or individuals. read more
EVENTS—PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT Summer Opportunities and More!LIMITED SPACE REMAINS Don't miss Community Works Institute's annual series of professional development events for 2013. Limited space exists for CWI's Summer EAST and WEST Institutes on Service-Learning. Join with educators from across the U.S. and around the world for a week of learning, exploration, and practical curriculum design. A perfect way for individual educators and teams to deepen their use of service-learning and sustainability, both in the classroom and program wide. These are best practice based events and appropriate for K-16 and community educators, and administrators. read more
FEATURED ARTICLE
Grow a-Way from Violence: Nurturing Community in the Heart of One of America’s Most Violent Cities By TIM and ELIZABETH COLLARDEY The first year that we moved Heirloom Peace Gardens to Flint, Michigan brought extraordinary results. As the corn grew taller and the whole garden more lush, more and more people stopped by to ask questions. I’d often come home and tell my wife that as much “people gardening” happened as tending of the plants that day. They were very impressed, full of questions, and we often had long conversations about the project. read more
FEATURED ESSAY
The Essence of Social Learning: From Classroom to Community
BY SARAH ANDERSON Middle school students are social animals. Adolescence is a time when we develop a keen sense of self-awareness and an intense interest in other people. Since most 13 and 14-year olds are more passionate about each other than anything else, and since their brains are really geared towards social development, this is the basis of my classroom. Before all else, we practice how to treat each other well and how to share ourselves honestly and openly. read more
FEATURED ARTICLE
Putting Problem Solving at the Core of
Place
Based Service-Learning By JONATHAN E. MARTIN At City High School in Tucson educators gathered recently for deeper conversations. A t the heart was the question, how do we make it real? How do we connect service-learning to genuinely meaningful, rich, situated community problems? How do we structure the experience of service-learning such that students are engaged, empowered, and motivated? How do we advance the possibilities that what they’re doing has an impact that is recognizable and rewarding? read more
LEARNING TO LOVE EDUCATION AGAIN
Gaokao Cowboy: How National Examinations
Impact Student Development
By STUART GRAUER The exams we use to evaluate our school children have the power to shape not only a nation’s future, but the character and development of the children who take them. Who sets this agenda? This narrative essay, set in Southern China, deliberates on the changing landscapes of national testing in the United States and China (in particular, the Gaokao), and the conflicts inherent when student learning, patterns of engagement, evaluation and placement are focused fundamentally on high stakes, standardized exams. Is it conceivable that nearly one billion of the world’s students are educationally headed down and unintended track? read more
THE ECOLOGY OF TEACHING
Hope on a Tightrope: The Miller Street School By HECTOR J. VILA “It’s what I must do,” Shakirah Miller said solemnly, turning towards the Miller Street School, in Newark’s South Ward, just behind us, a gray-brown, government building with cages on the windows and dark green, steel doors. “Someone has to be her. Who else is going to do this?” Shakirah, the principal of this kindergarten through eighth grade oasis, crossed hectic Frelinghuysen Avenue to have some words with the blue uniformed sanitation workers that hang out in front of their facility’s doors, puff on cigarettes and give desirous looks to young mothers walking their kids to the Miller Street School. read more
FEATURED ESSAY
Perspective-Taking as a Tool for Building Democratic Societies By JOSE CALDERON, , Pitzer College The way we connect our classrooms to our communities can truly affect whether our teaching and learning practices advance a more diverse, socially just, and democratic culture. Providing time for students to learn about the professor's life and for the professor to conversely learn about the lives of students is essential to building students' capacity for perspective-taking. To succeed in fostering this capacity, faculty need to create environments where students are comfortable questioning the perspectives of others. read more
OF PLACE AND EDUCATION From High Winterages to Haute Cuisine in the Blink of an Eye By DAVID SOBEL Swooping down the far side toward Slievecarran, we stopped at an abandoned cottage. We shuffled through the broken glass and wall board, imagined a family of 8 or 10 packed into two small bedrooms, huddled around the meager heat from a peat fire, tired after the senseless work of constructing a famine road. This living historical record of recent history and the raft of ancient artifacts of portal tombs, towers, ringforts, abbeys and fire rings is another unique Burren feature. It’s as if all of Irish history was boiled down and concentrated into an historical gumbo-- so near at hand and yet reaching so far back into history. read more
FEATURED ARTICLE
Medicine for an Educator By LORI SUNTREE Eight weeks into my teaching career, I stood in the middle of the faculty lounge wondering “how in the world did I think I could be a teacher?” Although being a teacher was a dream I had had since the first grade, not in my wildest dreams did I imagine the escapades of those first few months. I never anticipated that the first substitute teacher I would have would ask for the numbers of my fourteen year old female students. Nor did I think I would return to my classroom to find my second substitute teacher sleeping in the back of my classroom while my students were chasing each other with scissors and glue guns. read more
TRANSLATING EXPERIENCE Breaking Routine By SVEA ANDERSON After two days of a guest teacher, my students had forgotten all the classroom rules and how to sit still for two minutes. My plan of telling the tales of my wondrous time at the conference was swapped with revisiting what a fourth grader looks like, and trying to figure out what they had done academically and what still needed to be completed to move on with the new weeks’ curriculum. Alas. It is the plight of the classroom teacher. Typically it is easier to go to school sick as a dog that write sub plans and deal with the aftermath of your absence. read more
FEATURED ARTICLE
One School's Journey: Toward a Continuum of Service-Learning By PATRICE BRYAN and MHS FACULTY At Maplewood Richmond Heights High School in St. Louis, every school year starts with innovative professional development work over the summer--for teachers and students. Last summer a MHS’s faculty team attended CWI’s Summer Institute. After conversations with teachers from all over the country, we decided to focus on hunger. We’d design a system for our classes to better collaborate across content areas on a global and local hunger study AND design a new or improved system for the district’s existing food pantry program—two systems that need finessing. read more
FEATURED ARTICLE
Not a Chain Link or a Picket Fence: Social Justice Pedagogy
in an Urban Garden Project By TARA AFFOLTER We hoped that the garden would offer a space for students to act upon the knowledge base they already had, thereby deepening it. But what if our summer program became simply a five-week version of the strawberry compote demonstration, yet another place for the students to be introduced to an experience that someone from outside their world had decided was important for them?" read more
FEATURED ARTICLE
Trust Your Students, They Will Shine By STEVEN COLANGELI One of my students who comes from a tough home life, and has a tough exterior became the sweetest most engaging person when teaching elementary students about the respiratory system or how to plant lettuce seeds. Elementary students would hang on her every word and she had them laughing out loud with their full attention. It was as if she was a different person and so the culture of our program during these projects took on an amazingly positive vibe that is difficult to adequately explain or describe. read more
FEATURED REFLECTION
Education through Restoration: Creating Meaningful
Service-Learning Projects in the Parks By MARIJKE HECHT When she mentioned that her kids need to perform community service and asked if there was anything they could do in the parks my answer was a resounding “Yes!” – but with a twist. I said we had lots of opportunities for youth service projects in the parks, but that we aim to have our programs go beyond service to service-learning. She was clutching her coffee (not a morning person, perhaps) and looked at me with a quizzical what’s the difference? expression.read more
CWI's Acclaimed Professional Development Experiences VERY LIMITED SPACE REMAINS 2013 Summer Institutes for EDUCATORS Place, Service-Learning, and Sustainable Communities Los Angeles and Vermont l learn more l register now
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