Schools are one of the last sacred community spaces in our society.

-Lillian Hsu, High Tech High Unboxed Podcast 

Good communities don’t make themselves

-Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Before 2020, you could have been forgiven for thinking that school buildings were an anachronism. After all, students can go online to read texts, watch lectures, answer questions tailored to their ability level, even talk to their teacher—so really, what does in-person education offer other than the distractions of social life?

But the pandemic taught us that the “social life” of school is what makes it, in Lillian Hsu’s words, a “sacred space”: within the school walls, people from across generations and social backgrounds gather together day after day to work towards a shared purpose. 

I thought of this while reading Thrive: The Purpose of Schools in a Changing World, a new book by Valerie Hannon and Amelia Peterson. They cite the findings of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which tracked 724 men from 1938 to 2013, at the end of which the researchers declared, “The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.” Hannon and Peterson point out that cultivating good relationships is not normally framed as a “learning issue,” and demand “If the good life is built with good relationships, is it to be left to chance and intuition?

We didn’t set out to make this an issue about cultivating community and relationships and schools, but it’s clearly on the minds of our writers and editors. In this issue Chris Dolgos shares how his school, Genesee Community Charter School, grounds its curriculum in the history (and prehistory) of the land it sits on, fostering learning that is “place-based” as well as “project-based”; Dana Gaertner explains how teachers can use “project-maps” to foster a sense of shared ownership for the work among students (and even families); three biology teachers describe their shared honors curriculum, which combines student autonomy with responsibility to their peers; Sara Kennedy reveals the myriad ways that a school’s English language learner (ELL) coordinator makes sure that the bonds of school community expand further than the bonds of shared language fluency, and Erin Bower asks teachers to attend not only to the plans they bring to class, but to the “presence” they bring. 

Thanks for joining us!

Alec Patton,
Editor-in-Chief