A New Field of Learning

Thomas Steele-Maley

Director of Studies: The Bridge Year at Kieve-Wavus

A New Field of Learning “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there” - Rumi A new field of learning is emergent today in light of the social, economic and

environmental landscapes of a century facing rapid change (Boulding, 1990; Zhao 2012). This field sees education and the curricular ecologies that serve as guides to learning starting to bud with new vision around the world.1 Many schools and organizations seek design, research and practice that allow for systemic change in education toward more personalized, potent and useful learning environments which harness experience as a centerpiece of the curriculum.2 This is evident in the attention national and international independent schools are dedicating to growing a new experiential movement.3 For instance, Malcolm McKenzie (2013) writes of the benefits of a new more experiential education in independent schools that allow students the chance to collaborate, take new risks and engage the world around them. He boldly asserts that "without question, experiential learning enhances scholastic learning....this type of learning builds confidence, encourages risk taking, reduces the fear of failure, gives oxygen to collaboration, nurtures imagination, promotes problem solving, allows reverie, and grows a taproot from which scholastic learning flowers". These bold assertions come from a prominent headmaster with global experience in some of the most respected schools in the world and his sentiments are not isolated.

As a growing body of research, writing and design considers the interface between

experiential and scholastic learning, academics, teachers, administrators, parents and students see the possibilities of learning landscapes deeply changed and salient to the future . (Sawyer ed., 2006; Beane, 1997; Springer, 2006; Roberts, 2012; NAIS 2013, Cook-Sather, 2010, Learning and The Brian Conference, Boston, 2013). Situated in these new possibilities, a boarding school called The Bridge Year is taking education and curriculum in directions that serve as a catalyst for what’s possible in a year long school hoping to serve as a guidepost for new research and praxis in a new field of learning that weaves scholastics and experience.

The Bridge Year

What’s possible in a year long scholastic program has been deliberated for more than a

century.4 There has been, and remains, deep thought and incredible program design around intensifying experience and the scholastic experience through new learning ecologies in education.5 As examples emerge, the onus on moving from a Committee of 10 driven, schedule- fragmented institutional view of education must be done with rigor, relevancy, and collaboration.

The Bridge Year offers a rigorous school design that is quite different from the mainstream year round school, but one grounded firmly in various angles of curriculum agreed as foundational in education. As Goodlad (1994, 2010) defined, the design considers three perspectives: the sociopolitical, “acknowledging the various stakeholders in today’s educational landscape”; the technical-professional, ensuring that design methods are “integrated, iterative and based on solid design principles”; and the substantive, answering the question of “what should be learned in education today”.

To be relevant, The Bridge Year design is seen as resilient in the middle grounds of educational research and praxis. Offering a lasting option to students, parents and educators who

are seeking a program that will both afford extensive new learning opportunities while also intensifying the knowledge, understanding and skills necessary to succeed in any educational setting. Lastly, The Bridge Year is designed is steeped in collaboration. The student directed and democratic approach allows for the co-design of learning environments, residential environments and project/field based research along with the incorporation of a national conference and learning lab for educators.

School Overview

The Bridge Year curriculum prioritizes a learner’s personal and educational needs and

interests, the problems and issues relevant in society and the academic and cultural heritage essential for learning and future development. The school is firstly an intentional community. Seen as essential, the seven day boarding environment allows for a seven day advisory system, and flexible schedule for weaving experience and scholastics into everyday life and formal research through project based learning and field studies. The Bridge Year accepts a maximum of 24 students per year, employs four full time faculty members who are also dorm parents, one director of studies, a director of admissions and secondary school placement, a head of school and a full roster of authors, marine scientists, mathematicians, artists, historians as community mentors.

Standards: Core Strands of Knowledge and Skills

Four core strands of knowledge are woven throughout every aspect of the Bridge Year

and guide curricular decisions and praxis. Personal Knowledge (PK) addresses self-concerns and ways of knowing about self while Social Knowledge (SK) addresses social and world issues, from peer to global relationships, and ways of critically examining these. Explanatory Knowledge (EK) includes content that names, describes, explains, and interprets, including that involved in the systems of knowledge (Life Systems – Biology, Ecology, Anatomy, Physiology, Health; Physical Systems – Geological, Chemical, Physical; Numerical Systems – Statistical, Relational (Algebraic), Spacial (Geometric); Social Systems – Cultural, Political, Organizational, Historical, Economic; Thought Systems – Spirituality, Philosophy, Psychology) Visual and Performing Systems — arts, design, media; as well as commonsense or popular knowledge. Technical/Twenty First Century(TK) Knowledge incorporates ways of investigating, communicating, analyzing, and expressing in a technologically rich global environment— Research, critical reading and writing, finding, validating, leveraging, and synthesizing Information, mapping, modeling and representing data, communication, collaboration and problem solving, service and leadership. These core strands of knowledge inform an educational experience providing students with a bridge between the personal and social, intellect and experience, wilderness and culture.

Core Curriculum

There are four core curricular components that scaffold acquisition of the core strands of knowledge at the Bridge Year: learning environments, personal learning plans, personalized and group research through project based learning and field studies, individualized instruction and the creation of a portfolio of experience.

Learning Environments There are no “walled” learning environments at The Bridge Year; rather students learn

everywhere, individually, in groups and with a myriad of mentors. Bridge Year learning environments enable the curricular coherence and the personal freedom necessary to live learning. There are two primary “campus” locations that serve the Bridge Year. One is the Kieve peninsula on Lake Damariscotta, Maine. The other is comprised of field stations across Maine in the Western Mountains, Katahdin Region, and Coast. Regardless of location, students meet in advisories every morning and often in a full community meeting to discuss curricular and community needs, wants and hopes, problems and successes.

The Waterfront Kennedy Learning center is dorm, learning center and kitchen located on the Damariscotta Lake. The walls of the seminar and projects space, kitchen and dorm are writable for design thinking including project planning, artwork and communication. Seminar spaces are built for Harkness style discussion, conviviality, creating and instruction. The campus maintains maker spaces old and new, a pottery studio, dark room, printing press and wood shop along with an indoor climbing wall, trails, and outdoor recreational offerings. Students have a full industrial kitchen to cook the food of menus they plan and dorm rooms that have full baths and space for personal time.

Personal Learning Plans

Bridge Year students work intensively on a personal learning plan (PLP) prior to

admission, throughout the year with Faculty and upon graduation. The PLP starts and maintains a relationship between sending school, parents, students, and receiving schools: PLP’s help each student become a unique part of the learning community, assess and log student health and wellness, passions, learning styles and goals and as a metric for success and reflection.

Seminar and Workshops

Bridge Year seminars are intensive small group courses taught by faculty and community

partners for skills building (i.e.. quantitative reasoning including mathematics, filmmaking, Robotics, Data Analysis, writing and research). There are four seminars that all students take that range from two days to six months. Seminars are also emergent as faculty and students identify gaps in knowledge that need direct instruction. Bridge Year workshops are also intensive small group courses by faculty and community partners for skills building (i.e. wilderness medicine, backcountry travel logistics, orienteering, climbing, yoga). There are four seminars that all students take.

Research: Project Learning

Bridge Year student projects are social, intellectual and physical learning experiences that

involve completing tasks that result in a realistic product, event, or presentation to an audience. Projects at The Bridge Year are central to the curriculum, organized around driving questions that lead students to encounter central concepts or principles of an academic discipline, focused

on investigation that involves inquiry and knowledge building, student-driven, in that students are responsible for designing and managing their work with support from Faculty, and authentic by posing problems that occur in the real world and that people care about. Every project is interdisciplinary, involves a community mentor, and is scaffolded through both a co-designed personal learning environment on iPads and the Project Foundry digital project based learning software.

Research: Field Studies

Field Studies are two week field work experiences that utilize “mobile learning labs”, a

combination of back-country wilderness living stations and highly connected research hubs using iPads as field tools to collect, record and map research experiences for application in a real world setting. Community Partners who are specialists and mentors in numerous professional fields support Bridge Year students as they construct an understanding of core academic subjects in multiple academic fields. Students apply this learning through authentic field research into the society, environment and economy of multiple regions, meanwhile also honing their outdoor travel and living skills through kayaking, canoeing, hiking and camping together in advisories. Every field study is interdisciplinary, involves community mentors, service based citizen science and ethnography and is scaffolded through the use of geospatial data collection and transfer through the Spatial Networks App Fulcrum, regional and place-based map creation with the Mapbox and OSM architectures.

Assessment: Faculty Narrative Assessments The Bridge Year Faculty and Director of Studies will provide extensive narrative

feedback for both daily formative and multi-year formative assessment cycles. There are not letter or number grades at The Bridge Year.

Assessment: Exhibition of Mastery

The Bridge Year exhibition program offers students a chance to defend their work in

front of their school and direct community, as well as with regional and global audiences. Exhibitions are akin to age appropriate Ph.D. defenses during which students get to plan and communicate their work to “raters” who are also presentation committee members reading and editing project materials and hearing the presentation of projects and products completed.

Assessment: Portfolio of Experience

Bridge Year students, in negotiation with their advisors and the Director of Studies

produce a digital Portfolio of Experience (POE). Portfolios will provide receiving schools with an in-depth look at evidence of learning including student abilities, intelligences, growth, and accomplishment through the collection, selection, reflection and projection of their experiences. A student POE will contain written and multimedia created by students, narrative feedback and exhibition rater narratives.

Conclusion “Imagining how events could be otherwise than they are is a hallmark freedom and power of human beings. Making social imagination work for us involves us in new concepts and principles, in new ways of using our minds to grasp complexities we do not yet comprehend. Thinking this way helps us construct new social realities both locally and globally. Social imagination is not merely for the sake of academic knowing; it must include our feelings, and it must include our acting.”- D. Bob Gowin in Boulding (1990) Social imagination is needed in education today. As research, design and praxis transform education into frontiers of possibility, the educational community needs schools that push thinking and provide a clear path to change. Rooted in the reality of today and situated firmly in curricular best practices, The Bridge Year offers both a catalyst and ongoing laboratory for a nexus of experience and scholastics.

References

Boulding, E. (1990). Building a global civic culture: Education for an interdependent world.

New York: Syracuse University P.

Cook-Sather, A. (2010). Learning from the student's perspective: A sourcebook for effective

teaching. Virginia: Paradigm Publishers.

Goodlad, J. in (2006 & 2010). Encyclopedia of curriculum studies. New York: Sage.

(2013). Independent School Magazine, Volume 72(Number 3). Retrieved from

http://www.nais.org/Magazines-Newsletters/ISMagazine/Pages/Issues/The-Rise-of-Experiential-

Education.aspx

(n.d.). Retrieved from Learning and The Brain Conference November 2013 website:

http://www.learningandthebrain.com/blog/171/

MacKenzie, M. (2013). Rescuing education the rise of experiential learning. Independent School

Magazine, Volume 72(Number 3). Retrieved from http://www.nais.org/Magazines-

Newsletters/ISMagazine/Pages/Issues/The-Rise-of-Experiential-Education.aspx

Roberts, J. (2011). Beyond learning by doing: Theoretical currents in experiential education.

New York & Oxen: Routledge.

(2006). The cambridge handbook of the learning sciences (cambridge handbooks in psychology).

In S. Kieth (Ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Springer, M. (2006). Soundings: A democratic student-centered education. Ohio: National

Middle School Association.

Zhao, Y. (2012). World class learners: Educating creative and entrepreneurial students.

California: Sage.

1 See examples such as The Bridge Year: http://www.kieve.org/thebridgeyear; Explorations Academy; http://explorationsacademy.org/ ; Watershed School http://watershedschool.org/ ; SOLE: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/press.office/press.release/item/sugata-s-first-school-in-the-cloud-opens-its-doors 2 See ISEEN member schools. 3 NAIS Conference 2013, Independent School Magazine 2013, Rise of the Unonference Movement 4 See: Dewey, 1938; Tyack 1974; Hayes-Jacobs (2010) 5 See: oxbowschool.org; bigpicture.org; deepsprings.edu; sfbrightworks.org; willowell.org/programs/; purplethistle.ca, northstarteens.org; nuvustudio.com; openschooleast.org; farmhouse.la; tradeschool.ourgoods.org; youmediachicago.org; machineproject.com; brokencitylab.org; ruralandproud.org; thesprouts.org; wk12.com; institutewithoutboundaries.com; factoryschool.org, fabrica.it, floatinglabcollective.com; wideopenschool.com